UP CLOSE | The administrative tightrope: Inclusion, tradition and discourse at Yale

UP CLOSE | The administrative tightrope: Inclusion, tradition and discourse at Yale

In October 2020, the University launched its belonging initiatives with an aim to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging at Yale. Several months later, Yalies have mixed opinions on their staying power.
Story by Rose Horowitch
Cover photo by Yale Daily News
Published on May 5, 2021

Kahlil Greene ’22 used his only meeting with University President Peter Salovey to deliver “leadership lessons” on how the president could improve his handling of racial issues and avoid campus protests.

At the time of the July 7 meeting, Americans had turned out each day for the past two months to protest the police murder of George Floyd — all told, up to 26 million people participated in the U.S. protests for the Black Lives Matter movement.

In their meeting, Greene, then-president of the Yale College Council, urged Salovey to capitalize on the moment to bring about significant change at the University. He advised Salovey to take student activists seriously in their calls for structural changes and to find ways to meet, rather than deflect, their demands. Greene suggested that Salovey had ended up on the “wrong side of history” in past campus controversies, such as renaming Calhoun College. According to Greene, he mostly lectured Salovey, allowing him minimal time to respond. At the close, Salovey thanked him.

Salovey characterized the meeting differently. The two had a “good” conversation and he was grateful for Greene’s input, Salovey told the News. After the meeting, Greene sent a report with key takeaways: that Salovey often rushed to judgment without understanding issues and that Yale’s administrative structure had become “esoteric” and removed from students.

The meeting demonstrates the demand for Yale’s administrators to make headway on increasing diversity, as well as the perception that Yale has reacted, not led, on issues of equity and inclusion.

Many faculty and students have called on Yale to make faster and more extensive changes around racial justice. But five professors noted that Yale’s strides toward diversity are constrained by a business model that relies on donations from alumni, many of whom want to see traditions preserved. Though some disagreement may be inevitable, University administrators’ dilemma is to secure Yale’s academic mission — which includes “the free exchange of ideas” — while preserving its most important traditions and carrying out a vision of diversity, equity, belonging and racial justice. Six professors and three students noted potential outcomes if the administration cannot do so: progress could stop at administrative statements of support, or Yale could lose donations or some free inquiry.

Salovey said he considers efforts to increase equity and inclusion compatible with preserving traditions, and not a tradeoff. The University has to chart a path between the extremes: people who would never change any aspect of Yale and people who want to tear the institution down, he said in an interview with the News. Advocates of faster change still recognize that Yale needs to be Yale and needs to be a leader, he said.

In October, he unveiled Yale’s most comprehensive effort on the issues — the “Belonging at Yale” initiatives. The President’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging put forth six areas of focus for the next five years: scholarship and teaching, diversity of the community, equitable process and responses, professional and personal development of inclusive practice, acknowledgment and respect and communication and accountability. Within these six branches, priorities include adding courses examining race, reimagining public safety and policing, supporting restorative justice, increasing diversity among staff leaders, investing in faculty mentoring, offering education and training to everyone on campus, investing in New Haven partnerships and using surveys and data to internally assess progress.

Some administrators and faculty called the initiatives comprehensive and substantial. But other faculty and students, including Greene, said they do not go far enough.

A fundamental contradiction

Efforts to make Yale more equitable and inclusive encounter a fundamental contradiction, a “great galloping contradiction,” professor of History John Gaddis said. Yale has a $31.2 billion endowment but says it sincerely values equity, and admits a small percentage of applicants while emphasizing inclusion.

This year, Yale rejected 95 percent of undergraduate applicants, and those who do gain admission frequently come from privileged backgrounds. A 2017 study found that more Yale students come from the top one percent of income than from the bottom 60 percent.

All Ivy League universities have to contend with this tension, Gaddis said. In the past, when Yale was all male and “dominated” by secret societies, it was an elite university that made no apologies for being elite.

“We’re still exclusive, but now we seem ashamed of it,” Gaddis said. “That’s what’s puzzling to me.”

Like other elite universities, Yale has introduced initiatives to attract talented and diverse students, bringing more than 100 low-income students to Yale in the last three classes through the QuestBridge college admission and scholarship process, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan said. The admissions office also partners with Yale’s cultural centers and sends a targeted mail campaign to high-achieving students in low-income census tracts.

The class of 2024, for example, was Yale’s most diverse class ever, and only 8 percent of students had a legacy affiliation, compared to 12 percent the year before. Additionally, the percentage of first-year students who receive Pell grants for high financial need has increased from 12 percent in 2013 to more than 20 percent in the last three years, Quinlan said.

Still, Yale accepts the “least marginalized of marginalized people,” Greene said. He called on Yale to admit more Black students from public schools in major cities. Fifty percent of the low-income Black students at Ivy League universities and their peers attended private schools, and the average percentage of first years who receive Pell grants for high financial need at historically Black colleges or universities is 71 percent, compared to Yale’s approximately 20 percent.

Greene called for a larger public recruitment plan, including putting more resources about writing essays and standardized testing online so they are accessible to students who do not have college counselors and expensive SAT tutors. Due to the pandemic, Yale became test optional in the most recent admissions cycle. It will continue the policy for another year, after which it will reevaluate, Quinlan said.

But one challenge to adding more low-income students to the undergraduate population is that students must have had some kind of privileged education. “They have to in order to meet the requirements Yale sets for admission,” professor of History Carlos Eire said. “It is exclusive, and it has to exclude.”

Diversity and belonging within Yale’s undergraduate body demonstrates the tension between the University’s stated values and business model. And Yale’s undergraduate admissions office has been more successful at promoting inclusion than the faculty or senior administration has, according to Matthew Jacobson, professor of history, American studies and African American studies and member of the subcommittee on faculty diversity.

The Belonging initiatives website. (Amay Tewari, Photo Editor)

Demand for greater change

Salovey said that the impetus for the initiatives stretches to 2012, when he was first announced as Yale’s 23rd president. In his first speech as president, he said that Yale needed to be more accessible, with people coming to Yale who never thought it would be open to them and Yale giving more away to the world. But more recent events galvanized the creation of the belonging initiatives.

In January 2020, Salovey set up the President’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and charged the 18 members with developing a “vision of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging as part of the university’s climate,” as well as a set of high-level goals and strategies to bring people with different backgrounds to the University and make them feel welcome. The committee created a vision statement in which members of the Yale community encounter broad ideas, are respected and feel welcome to speak up.

At the time, the results of the 2019 Staff Workplace survey had just come in, and it showed that most staff felt a profound sense of not belonging at Yale, which was weighing on the administrators’ minds, said Victoria Nolan, former deputy dean of the Drama School and committee member.

Student leaders were calling for significant overhauls, including the elimination of the student income contribution and the abolition of the Yale Police Department. Since YPD officers shot at Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon in April 2019, leaders of Black Students for Disarmament at Yale have ramped up calls on Yale to dismantle the YPD and implement a differential response system. City officials, New Haven residents and Yalies alike have repeatedly called for Yale to contribute millions more to its home city. Law professor James Forman Jr. added that Yale should invite New Haven activists onto campus, instead of walling off campus.

Greene raised these demands to the Yale Corporation, the University’s highest governing body. He said that board members showed skepticism about “radical change,” including dismantling Yale’s Police Department, taking immediate steps to diversify the faculty and paying more in voluntary contributions to New Haven.

Senior Trustee Catharine Bond Hill said that the Corporation has had so many discussions on belonging at Yale that it is difficult to separate out individual ones. But Yale’s work on diversity, equity and inclusion is “ambitious and impressive” and the Corporation is optimistic, she said.

Committee discussions: Forming the initiatives

Salovey told members not to limit themselves in imagining change, and that they would later figure out how to practically bring it about, Nolan said. He met with the committee twice for only 10 minutes each time — Salovey did not want to influence the outcome, Nolan added.

The full committee met about once a month for about half a year, and a smaller steering committee met nearly weekly. The committee identified areas people wanted to discuss — including the tenure process, faculty retention and mentoring, human resources and student life. They then broke into small groups and then shared a summary of their discussions. Subcommittees for faculty, staff, students and alumni each examined past efforts and wrote up lengthy reports with policy recommendations. The faculty subcommittee report had more than 30 findings and recommendations, Larry Gladney, Dean of Diversity and Faculty Development in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a physics professor, said. The subcommittee reports were never made public; they were only shared with Salovey. The resulting full committee report went through eight or 10 different iterations, according to Nolan.

The committee spent hours discussing how to explicitly tie diversity to excellence. Higher education in general presents the two as mutually exclusive, Jacobson said. The committee wanted to present each of the aims as impossible to have without the other, and not as tradeoffs, Frederick said. They also discussed what the incentive is for Yale to change when exclusivity is its business model, Nolan said.

When they finished a draft, Salovey read it and particularly emphasized setting up a working group to examine Yale’s ties to slavery and collaborating with New Haven, Gladney said.

Salovey also emphasized belonging as superseding diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity in numbers is important, but only touches one part of the problem, Salovey said in an interview. People have to feel that Yale is their place, he added.

The committee members were honest and vulnerable, Nolan said. They never disagreed, she said, and Frederick seconded that it was not a committee marked by different opinions on ideas.

But Jacobson and Gladney cited instances where committee members discussed differences in opinion.

Jacobson said he was impressed at the scope of the initiatives. But he said that couching the initiatives as “belonging” uses softer, more corporate language and misses the depth of the problem. Rather, the issue is about power and equity, Jacobson said, and Yale has a history of exclusion and a structure of inequity that cannot be corrected by merely inviting people in. Without placing equity at the forefront of the initiatives and challenging the power structure, it is challenging to truly address the issues. He raised his concerns to the committee, advocating to place equity and challenging the existing power structure at the forefront of the initiatives, but the committee ultimately decided to go with “Belonging” as its namesake.

“There are people in the administration who truly believe that their good intentions, and the good intentions of the University at large, will be enough to solve these problems. The historian in me just thinks that’s a shallow way to think about this because the problems are deep, and they are about power, and they are about vested interest and not everyone on campus is a good actor.”

—Matthew Jacobson, professor of history, American studies and African American studies and member of the subcommittee on faculty diversity

He said that Yale’s anthropologists, sociologists and professors of African American studies, whose scholarship centers on these issues, should be leading the conversations instead of central administrators, and not merely consulted. Gladney said that some suggestions were deemed “too controversial” in the near term, and those suggestions did not make it into the final report. He declined to comment on specifics, saying that administrators must stand behind public decisions.

“There are people in the administration who truly believe that their good intentions, and the good intentions of the University at large, will be enough to solve these problems,” Jacobson said. “The historian in me just thinks that’s a shallow way to think about this because the problems are deep, and they are about power, and they are about vested interest and not everyone on campus is a good actor.”

“Belonging” articulates the hope that everyone at Yale can feel “valued and connected to those around them,” according to Kimberly Goff-Crews ’83 LAW ’86, university secretary and vice president for university life and head of the belonging initiatives. By feeling that they belong, people can be themselves, seek out their full potential and freely participate in and contribute to the community, she said, adding that the initiatives use “equity” to mean fair treatment and accessibility.

Though the co-chairs led drafting, everyone on the committee provided feedback and approved the final recommendations, Goff-Crews said. She and co-chair Gary Desir also spoke individually with everyone on the committee.

Since the report’s release in October, the University has introduced some measures to make Yale a more inclusive campus. In April, Yale provided an update on progress on the initiatives nearly a full academic year since their launch.

Yale is fundraising to support financial aid for students at professional schools that often do not lead to lucrative careers. Additionally, Yale is joining other universities in a pilot program to engage with talented students nominated by nine community colleges. After students pushed for a peer liaison program for students with disabilities, Yale College began a pilot.

Conversations about other structural issues remain ongoing. Salovey and Mayor Justin Elicker are actively discussing Yale’s voluntary contribution to the Elm City, which New Haven residents have long decried as insufficient. Though Salovey has committed to reforming public safety at Yale, he will not abolish the police force in response to students’ and community members’ demands.

And at a February 2021 meeting of the President’s Cabinet — made up of Yale’s provost, deans and vice presidents — Goff-Crews asked the leaders to make individual plans for their departments. Academic units report to Desir and other units report to Goff-Crews. The departments were told to conduct a self study and then form a committee to craft plans specific to their school. The five-year plans are due in September 2021.

The committee wants to embed change in Yale’s existing practices instead of creating dozens of new initiatives that sap time and energy and end up forgotten, said Jennifer Frederick, director of the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning and a belonging committee member. The University has an immediate focus on anti-racism, Goff-Crews added.

“Marathons require commitment and endurance across a long duration, with successes marked and plans adjusted along the way,” she wrote in an email to the News.

Differing viewpoints among the Yale community

But efforts to stray from tradition and fundamentally change Yale’s structure often meet resistance. When people hear “change,” it is difficult for them to not also hear “loss,” professor of Divinity Willie Jennings said.

Jacobson said that current students and faculty generally have one view of equity and justice at the University, while the Yale Corporation, alumni and donors likely have a different idea. In general, the donor class is whiter, older, richer and likely more politically conservative, and they wield an influence over Yale’s administrators, Jacobson said. Students, on the other hand, frequently call on the administration to make faster and more radical changes.

“[Administrators are] going to have to figure that out. Because you are changing and you are going to require us to change. … You finance the University, you’re a paying customer. You can hold the shop of Yale accountable. At the end of the day, if Yale doesn’t change, I think it’s going to become irrelevant.”

—Victoria Nolan, former deputy dean of the Drama School and committee member

Sean O’Brien, head of the Privacy Lab at Yale Law School, agreed, saying that satisfying alumni can mean a “close clinging” to traditions that he said are not beneficial to Yale’s current students. O’Brien cited secret societies, which are not equitable or inclusive but exist as part of longstanding University tradition, as an example. Yale alumni have gone on to powerful roles in the government and corporate world, and the University is rewarded by placating them, he said.

The University also relies on its alumni for donations to support current students. Yale is trying to raise $6 billion over the coming years to keep up with demands for increased student financial aid, science infrastructure and a new theater for the drama school.

By contrast, others have called for modernizing Yale to better serve the current cohort of students and faculty. Many people at Yale do not see a problem, said Enrique De La Cruz, professor and chair of molecular biophysics and biochemistry. But the data on the number of faculty of color is “horrific, terrifying and shameful,” he said. In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, only 69 out of 683 ladder faculty are from an underrepresented minority. Underrepresented minority refers specifically to African American or Black, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander or Indigenous people, per federal categorizations.

“The very first thing we have to do is admit that we have a problem,” De La Cruz added. “Then, diversity needs to be woven into the fabric of admissions, hiring searches, course curriculums and how people educate. The initiatives offer an opportunity to improve, but the follow through will demand more than the gesture of enacting the initiatives did.”

Salovey expressed that the University can chart a course between the opposing viewpoints, and that even “traditionalists” tell him they would love to attend the University today.

“We can enjoy our traditions … [but we] can have a far broader group of people enjoying them,” Salovey said. “We can be a socially responsible university that interacts with our host city in an enlightened way, that creates a pathway for historically discriminated groups to transcend that discrimination.”

Where things stand

In balancing the opposing views, the initiatives have so far have meant little more than administrative pronouncements and anti-racism training, Eire said.

Jaelen King ’22, who has led calls to dismantle Yale’s police force, said he sees potential for good to come from the initiatives, but that the administration’s track record leaves him concerned that efforts will fizzle out over the next few years.

Gladney noted that initiatives with admirable aims can have unintended consequences and need continued monitoring and revision to ensure they are working as they are supposed to. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences recently surveyed faculty members about whether they supported including a diversity statement on graduate student applications across all departments. For many departments, it is already mandatory. But there is some question as to whether the statements do what they are supposed to. People argue that applicants are savvy and know how to sound committed even if they truly are not, Jacobson said.

Realizing this and seeking to avoid the unintended consequences, Gladney said applicants could include what is important to them. If that is diversity, equity and inclusion, the student will talk about it and the admissions readers can note that.

According to Jeffrey Brock, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the administrators receive central resources to recruit diverse faculty from the Faculty Excellence and Diversity Initiative. He has not yet been told whether he will receive additional central resources to aggressively recruit diverse faculty. With centrally-supported schools, such as Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, people higher up in the hierarchy can veto initiatives that cost money, Brock said. Goff-Crews said that diversity and belonging are top priorities for the University, but schools are strongly encouraged to fund related initiatives within their existing budgets.

Some changes would be relatively inexpensive, Brock said. For instance, chairs of the science and engineering departments have proposed a postdoctoral fellows program to increase diversity, and the central administration could contribute some funds for postdoctoral appointments.

As of now, Brock is working with the Provost’s Office to support diversity with existing postdoctoral resources.

“There’s sort of a tone of frustration around it,” Brock said, as the science chairs cannot take initiative without administrative approval. “And yet I do think we are making progress.”

This year, the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Department enacted reforms in its search for an assistant professor on the tenure track that aimed to bring in a more diverse applicant pool. The search committee, with the support of the department chair, asked candidates to submit application materials without the names of schools they’ve attended or journals they’ve published in. Initial screenings were also conducted anonymously.

Jack Callahan, senior vice president of Operations, said that the administration is currently debating what resources each unit will get, but that he is sure there will be extra money put towards the initiatives. Still, the initiatives should largely be funded by reallocating existing resources, he added. He wants to embed the changes in Yale’s normal operations and fit them into the yearly budget, to make a lasting change to how Yale operates.

Though many people think Yale has been too slow to change, it takes time for people to on their own decide to act, Gladney said. He used the example of hiring more diverse faculty. Yale must account for upwards of $20 million when it decides to guarantee a professor tenure, Gladney said. Though Yale’s resources might seem infinite, there is not enough money to immediately hire a number of diverse faculty, he added. Additionally, faculty searches take significant effort and time for interviews and reading resumes, and Yale needs to commit time to supporting the faculty it does recruit.

Changing the search and tenure processes would likely recruit more talented and diverse faculty than immediately trying to make astronomical offers, he said.

Nolan, who helped draft the initiatives, said people need to “experience” injustice themselves through training and roleplay scenarios, which she said have been helpful for her as she comes from a theater background. Yale should require training on this topic, she said. She recalled a speech the anti-racism scholar Ibram X. Kendi delivered at Yale, in which he recounted experiencing three microaggressions within 15 minutes, including a police officer stopping him on the street and asking for identification.

“To hear something like that and know that in my life that doesn’t happen to me, that helps me to understand,” Nolan said. “It doesn’t necessarily get me to the place where I can do something about it, but to at least viscerally understand it or believe it or, as I think about, have seen it, that is when I start to realize that I too am a racist and I have been complicit.”

Frederick said that mandating antiracism training conveys a strong signal that it is important to the University and gives people a common vocabulary and understanding of the meaning of equity and inclusion.

Gladney said he does not personally support anti-bias training, as people can resist mandatory meetings or think they are “cured” of prejudice by attending.

The committee ultimately required unit plans to have professional anti-racism training and development, but left the form that such training would take to the leaders’ discretion. For example, Frederick’s unit — the global division — has people choosing from a litany of options including independently reading books on justice or attending expert-led workshops.

Another of the belonging initiatives is to diversify Yale’s academic offerings, including adding more courses on race.

Gladney said that a statement on the principles of increasing curriculum diversity gained near-perfect consensus. But people can be hesitant to make those changes themselves, Gladney said. Often, faculty want evidence as to why they, in departments that do not teach about diversity, should be changing their teaching style or content. People particularly fear the term “curricular change,” Gladney said, and he understands the hesitation.

According to Frederick, it will be up to the faculty to decide whether they change their courses. Gaddis, for one, said he has not felt pressure to change his syllabi. But Frederick said that many, including the English Department, have been leaders on spearheading increasingly diverse course offerings.

“Increasing diversity is an admirable objective, but not if the means chosen to do so fragment the University or constrain freedom of inquiry.”

—John Gaddis, professor of history

The potential cost of the middle path

“Increasing diversity is an admirable objective,” Gaddis said, “but not if the means chosen to do so fragment the University or constrain freedom of inquiry.”

The University leadership should release a statement on the fundamental values of free speech and inquiry, of diverse identities without constraints, Gaddis added.

David Blight, Sterling Professor of African American studies, American studies and history, said that at a great university, all of America’s “rich pluralism” must come together and study each other. Yale has to expose students to every kind of experience, he said, and people must be concerned with understanding people and places that they do not identify with.

“You don’t have equity and inclusion by just saying it, you don’t have that by moralizing about it, you have it by doing it,” Blight said. “And by teaching about all the experiences of planet Earth… Diversity, equity and inclusion is to make all people feel welcome, that’s for sure. But it’s also to trouble the edges of this, to trouble the waters, to not just teach people what they expect to learn, but what they utterly do not expect to learn.”

Concerns over what constitutes appropriate campus speech are not new. After 2015 racial justice protests that focused in part on a faculty email about Halloween costumes, administrators instructed faculty on what constitutes a microaggression. Eire said that this is a “slippery slope,” as individuals can decide what offends them, and the trigger for the administration to “jump into action” is if students say they feel unsafe, Eire said.

“You don’t have to sign a statement here saying I will never say anything that criticizes diversity, but if you do say something the community itself censors you, shuns you, perhaps even punishes you,” Eire said. “We’ve entered a whole new realm of discourse where it’s so easy to offend in all directions. It’s not just a person who’s easily offended. It’s a whole culture.”

At least three times a week as the committee is continuing work on the Belonging at Yale Initiatives’ unit plans, professors come to Gladney and ask what to do if they disagree with an initiative but fear being perceived as against diversity, he said. Professors worry about seeing their name in newsprint or on social media, but if people are talking about “the issues of the day, some of which have to be controversial, and there isn’t occasionally some blowup somewhere on campus, I would question whether we’re really engaging in things that people are legitimately emotional about,” Gladney said. He would rather have engagement with the issues and occasional mistakes and blowups, than have people think the initiatives do not apply to them.

But in the current culture centered on social media, where any statement can be reported or misreported, “any disagreement starts to seem an impoliteness,” Sterling Professor of English David Bromwich added.

Yale and Slavery Working Group

As Yale tries to move into the future on questions of diversity, a working group is delving into its past. One of the initiatives, the Yale and Slavery Working Group, is examining Yale’s historical ties to slavery and abolition and plans to generate a report next fall. Already, people differ as to how to respond to the findings, which will test the administration’s ability to navigate opposing views.

As the University navigates the endeavor, Salovey said, Yale can learn from the 2017 controversy over renaming Calhoun College. John C. Calhoun was a staunch defender of slavery, yet in 2015, Salovey announced he would ignore student activists’ calls and not rename Calhoun College. Many Yale alumni applauded Salovey for standing ground against encroaching “political correctness,” as two-thirds of 350 respondents to an informal poll in the alumni magazine claimed. But among faculty and students at the time, the decision was condemned with opinion essays, a well-attended renaming ceremony and open letters.

In response, Salovey appointed a committee, chaired by Law professor John Witt, to establish general principles of renaming. The Witt Committee worked from a presumption that renaming on account of values should be an “exceptional event,” but that sometimes it is warranted. Each decision to retain a name or rename demands non-erasure, contextualization and process, according to the Witt report. Based on the committee’s work, Yale renamed the college.

In an interview late last month, Salovey said the single biggest lesson from the Calhoun debate is to articulate core principles in advance of potential controversies. Ahead of the working group’s report, the principles are truth and reconciliation, he said. Yale needs to confront its history accurately, then make it well known to people through conferences, reports and discussion. Only after can the community discuss whether to celebrate, make amends or memorialize it, Salovey said.

The deeper the knowledge one has of a place, the more one can come to understand and even admire it, said Blight, the working group’s chair. The working group is not trying to “find all the pockets of evil in Yale’s past,” he said. “That’s not the goal.”
Its charge is to understand the University’s evolution over nearly 20 generations of students and to write a story about facts, remembered and forgotten people and how the institution conceived of itself, Blight said.

Numerous other universities, including the University of Virginia and Georgetown University, have undertaken studies of their history. In 2019, Georgetown announced that it would raise $400,000 in reparations to benefit the descendants of the 272 enslaved people the school sold to keep the institution solvent. In 2020, Princeton University renamed its school of international affairs to get rid of Woodrow Wilson’s namesake.

Jennings, a member of the working group, added that knowing a complete history — even the painful parts — can inform Yale’s academic mission and leadership. Law professor James Forman Jr., a member of the working group, seconded that the inquiry is fundamental to Yale’s academic mission. Slavery is often taught as a unit in school, but its effects underlie the structure, development and economics of institutions. To talk about the present, particularly about Yale’s relationship with the Black community in New Haven, Yale has to investigate its past.

“It’s one thing to say as a general matter: slavery built America,” Forman Jr. said. “It’s another thing to say this building was built with a donation that came from this person and they made their money selling human beings as chattel.”

The working group is investigating the role settlers played in New Haven’s Black community, whether ministers enrolled at Yale were preaching slavery and the situation of southern families who enrolled their sons at Yale — there were certainly others like Calhoun, said Edward Rugemer, professor of African American Studies and a working group member.

Already, the working group has confirmed that there were slaves on Yale’s campus at different times and performing different functions, Blight said. Nine of Yale’s residential college namesakes owned slaves, and slave labor helped construct Connecticut Hall. Slave terminology stayed on far longer at Yale: The Pierson College newspaper was called the “Weekly Slave” until at least the 1940s, according to Rebecca Amonor ’21. The Pierson mascot was a slave until 1980.

“There are things that we look back on in the past and we’re like how could that have endured for so long?” Amonor said. She encouraged people to “look at our present and think, what are some things that we may be overlooking now that people 30 or 50 years down the line are going to look back on and say how could that have lasted so long.”

The Pierson College Newspaper in 1939. (Courtesy of Rebecca Amonor, with thanks to Yale Manuscripts and Archives for allowing her to reproduce the image)

Though the investigation is ongoing, people have already formed opinions on how administrators should respond to the findings. O’Brien has called on Yale to change its name, as Elihu Yale had ties to the slave trade. Salovey has said that renaming Yale is not on the table. Greene said he would like to see reparations paid to any descendants of slaves that were on Yale’s campus.

The community will be divided on what to do with the findings, Gladney said. The way to respond is to have discussions on what Yale wants to look like in the coming years, he added.

Jennings said the study is a chance to pause and assess who Yale memorializes as an example for the future. It should not be people without flaws, but people whose flaws can be articulated in ways that make sense for the future, he said.

Blight said that the working group is not trying to predict an outcome to its report. It will be an institutional decision as to whether there are reparations.

“I don’t think you can predict reconciliation,” Blight said. “You expose it, teach and learn about it, memorialize it, and see what new kinds of social memory or collective memory come out of it.”

Taken together, Gladney said the Belonging initiatives are set up so Yale has to assess whether it has made progress each year. They are public, so people know the goals that Yale has set and whether it has reached them. The challenge, Nolan said, is to reconcile the different visions students, professors and alumni hold of Yale.

“[Administrators are] going to have to figure that out,” Nolan said about balancing conflicting interests as the student and alumni bodies change. “Because you are changing and you are going to require us to change. … You finance the University, you’re a paying customer. You can hold the shop of Yale accountable. At the end of the day, if Yale doesn’t change, I think it’s going to become irrelevant.”

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Story by Rose Horowitch
Cover photo by Yale Daily News

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UP CLOSE | A look inside Yale’s community college transfer process

As Yale emphasizes its commitment to accepting community college transfers, student interviews reveal an often difficult transition period — especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Story by Amelia Davidson
Cover photo by Logan Howard
Published on May 3, 2021

As one admissions cycle characterized by record-high applicant pools and record-low acceptance rates comes to an end, another one is underway — this time, for transfer students.

While some transfer students enroll at Yale after spending part of their undergraduate studies at another four-year institution, a significant portion of Yale’s transfer students come from community colleges. In reporting its admissions statistics, Yale does not differentiate between transfer students and those admitted via the Eli Whitney Students Program, which is meant for non-traditional students who are attending college later in life. In 2019, Yale reported that of the 34 transfer and Eli Whitney students admitted, 14 came from community colleges. In 2020, 29 transfer and Eli Whitney students were admitted, and again, 14 came from community colleges. In 2017 and 2018, 10 and nine students came from community colleges, respectively.

Community college transfers typically arrive at Yale after earning an associate’s degree following two years of community college. According to Risa Sodi, assistant dean of academic affairs at Yale College and the director of the transfer student program, transfer students are admitted to Yale with anywhere between eight and 18 credits, based on an evaluation of their transcript. The school from which one transferred — whether it was a community college or a four-year institution — has no bearing on the number of credits and the class standing with which a transfer student is admitted, Sodi said. Students at Yale College need to have completed a total of 36 credits upon graduation.

“I’ve been delighted by my work with transfer students at Yale and it’s been a privilege to rub shoulders — figuratively, this year — with such a determined and high-achieving group,” Sodi wrote in an email to the News. “Deans and heads of college express the same sentiments, and Undergraduate Admissions does an amazing job of steering qualified students our way. Yale is affirmative for transfer admissions, and our university will continue to work on improving their transition to New Haven and their experience during their two or three years at Yale.”

The News spoke to nine community college transfers, seven of whom are current students and two of whom have graduated, about their experiences adapting to Yale. Most spoke positively about their Yale experience overall, but many also expressed concerns about the process of integrating into the Yale community — especially those who transferred in fall 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are interested in admitting students from community colleges in particular because there, the academic argument for why you should move from your community college that you are completing to a private four-year research university — that argument is clear and apparent.”

—Jeremiah Quinlan, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid

Behind the transfer admissions process

Yale’s transfer application process takes place in the spring of each year, with students submitting applications by March 1 and receiving their decisions in mid-May. The transfer application is similar to a typical first-year application, with emphasis on factors such as grades, personal statements and letters of recommendation from professors.

Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan told the News that because so few students are admitted to Yale as transfers, the transfer application process is more competitive than standard first-year admissions, with acceptance rates of 2.2 percent and 1.7 percent in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Yale chooses to admit under 30 transfer students each year, which differs significantly from Yale’s peer institutions. Quinlan pointed to Brown University as an example of a school that admits significantly more transfers; according to the Brown admissions website, they admit “between 100 and 200” transfer students each year.

“A lot of Yale students don’t like to leave Yale College during the academic year, so we don’t have the availability or the opportunity to take a large number of transfer students because there just frankly isn’t the space,” Quinlan said. “But [the low number of admits] is also an acknowledgement of, while admitting transfer students and bringing them to Yale is an important part of our educational mission, there is something valuable to the sort of very residential experience that we can offer at Yale, and the way that we lay out our education and majors over four years.”

Mark Dunn, the director of outreach and communications at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, told the News that when reading transfer applications, admissions officers look for applicants who have a clear-cut reason for wanting to attend Yale. Because transfer students have such a limited amount of time at Yale, Dunn said, it is important for them to be able to explain what they want to study at Yale and why it is that they feel that Yale will give them opportunities that differ from their previous institution.

Quinlan added that this emphasis on the “Why Yale?” question is an advantage for community college students, who are applying to Yale while in the process of completing their associate’s degree.

“We are interested in admitting students from community colleges in particular because there, the academic argument for why you should move from your community college that you are completing to a private four-year research university — that argument is clear and apparent,” Quinlan said.

Because the transfer process is already so competitive, and Yale is looking to attract transfers who can specifically point to reasons why Yale will fulfill their academic needs, there is far less outreach to prospective transfer students than there is to prospective first-year applicants, Quinlan said. Patricia Wei, the director of admissions for the Eli Whitney Students Program and the coordinator for in-person transfer outreach, told the News that outreach is limited to an annual trip to California to speak to community college students and veterans in group events with peer institutions such as Princeton, Amherst and Pomona. This year, all of these joint events took place virtually, which allowed Yale to connect with more community college students than in a typical year, Dunn said.

On the community college side, the News spoke to Virginia Fuillerat, the director of one of the four campuses of The Honors College at Miami Dade College. The Honors College is a program within the Miami Dade Community College system that emphasizes helping its students transfer to out-of-state schools. Yale has accepted transfer students from The Honors College in each of the last three admissions cycles.

Fuillerat told the News that the Honors College focuses on helping its students transfer from the moment they step on campus. Students develop “two-year plans” in consultation with advisers, based on their transfer goals and their major. The Honors College focuses on making its students “marketable” through classes and extracurricular opportunities and supports students throughout the transfer application process.

But Fuillerat added that it would be helpful for four-year institutions like Yale to interact more with the Honors College, so that their students can have more of an idea of what to expect from the application process, which could help prepare them to eventually transfer.

“I think having a Yale representative come down and speak to our students, whether it’s fertile or not, would be really helpful, because it gives them a little reality check,” Fuillerat said. “It could help students see if Yale is the place where they belong.”

Of the Yale community college transfers who spoke to the News, four attended The Honors College. Of those who did not attend The Honors College, many still participated in honors programs that eventually helped them transfer. Les Welker ’22 and Dante Petruzziello ’23, both of whom attended community colleges in Connecticut, credited honors programs and advisers within those programs for pushing them to apply to four-year colleges outside of the University of Connecticut system.

The highs and lows of transferring to Yale

All of the community college transfers who spoke with the News spoke positively about their experiences at community college. Some, like Mariam Alaverdian ’23, held leadership positions in clubs and were able to travel and do research while at community college. Others appreciated the diversity in backgrounds they were able to encounter while at college.

“I really appreciated community college for letting me meet a variety of people from different backgrounds,” Welker said. “You get a lot of people from different ages coming and seeking a new educational path. You get people who have worked in trades, you get older people, you get people who just took a few years off after high school. There’s a lot of diversity there that you don’t really get at a proper four-year institution like Yale.”

The transition from attending community college — in which most students live at home and commute to classes — to living on Yale’s campus can be stark. Sodi told the News that Yale offers “robust” programming for transfers when they arrive on campus to help them adjust to on-campus life. There is a designated transfer orientation that includes academic and social events. Transfer students are also able to attend pre-orientation programs and first-year orientation events hosted by their residential colleges.

Upon arriving at Yale, transfer students are assigned an academic adviser from the Yale College Dean’s Office who is familiar with the transfer process. Transfers are also assigned a peer transfer counselor, or TroCo, who is meant to serve a similar role as FroCos do for first-year students. Unlike large FroCo groups, TroCos advise only one or two transfer students each year, and they are meant to serve as peer support as students begin their time at Yale.

Gabriel Conte Cortez Martins ’20, who transferred to Yale in 2018 from The Honors College at Miami Dade College and served as a head TroCo during the 2019-20 school year, told the News that the TroCo program varies from year to year based on the students in charge. During his year, he prioritized matching community college transfers with TroCos who had originally attended community college. In other years, students and TroCos have been matched based on academic interest.

Cortez Martins also said that as head TroCo, he tried to host events specific to community college students, as he felt that the experience of transferring from community college to a four-year institution is very unique.

“During my time at Yale, I watched the community college transfer population grow, and being a community college transfer, I just had this motivation to create specific events for this community and try to facilitate relationships within it,” Cortez Martins said.

Simone Koch Costa ’22, who transferred in fall 2019 from The Honors College, told the News that the TroCo program worked well for her because she was paired with a TroCo who had also come to Yale from The Honors College and was able to walk her through the experience.

“The transition resources for transfer students are not as readily available as they are for first years. And because we have less time here — for some of us, our time is literally cut in half — we have fewer opportunities to explore all that Yale has to offer.”

—Brooke Alviar ’21, who transferred from Foothill College in fall 2019

But Brooke Alviar ’21, who transferred from Foothill College in fall 2019, said that she felt the TroCo program did not provide the same level of support as it seemed a FroCo would. She attributed much of this to the fact that unlike FroCos, TroCos are not paid aside from a stipend to cover meals during the orientation period. Without payment, Alviar said, there is less incentive to have large amounts of programming.

Alviar said that in general, the institutional resources to help transfer students transition to Yale could be improved. Even at the surface level, she said, there is a lot of Yale culture that does not get conveyed to new transfers. As an example, she shared that she did not learn that Bass Library and Sterling Library connect underground until a year into her time at Yale — something she imagines she would have learned on a FroCo tour if she had arrived as a first-year student.

“The transition resources for transfer students are not as readily available as they are for first years,” Alviar said. “And because we have less time here — for some of us, our time is literally cut in half — we have fewer opportunities to explore all that Yale has to offer.”

Beyond the logistical challenges of the transition to Yale, the social transition can prove daunting. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing housing shifts, transfer students were housed within their residential colleges. Colleges then assign housing accordingly, with some colleges housing transfer students together and other colleges assigning transfer students to preexisting suites or standalone single bedrooms.

Petruzziello, who is in Pierson College, said he “really appreciated” the way in which he was integrated into the Yale community through housing. He was assigned to live with another transfer student and two visiting international students, which Petruzziello said allowed him to balance making friends with other transfers while still feeling integrated into the general Yale community.

On the other hand, Welker, who is in Pauli Murray College, was assigned a standalone single room, which he said made it difficult to transition to Yale socially.

“It wasn’t great, because I didn’t really have anybody or any social group to fall back on,” Welker said. “And I was just really far away from everyone, so I didn’t get super involved in the transfer community or any type of transfer friend group. I sometimes see other transfer students around and I will say ‘hi,’ but there never felt like much of a community.”

All of the community college transfers who spoke to the News said that they had never encountered any type of stigma about community college from non-transfer students at Yale.

Alviar said that at most, some people were surprised to hear that she originally attended community college because they did not know that Yale accepted transfer students.

“Overall, everyone’s been very warm and accepting, and I think that really just attests to what an amazing student body we have in general.”

—Brooke Alviar ’21

Transferring during COVID-19

Transfer students who began at Yale during fall 2020 have only known Yale in a time of pandemic. Upon arriving on campus in the fall, transfer students took part in virtual orientation programming, and like all other Yale students, new transfers have conducted nearly all of their classes and extracurricular activities virtually.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yale gave all admitted students the option to defer admission until the next year. According to Sodi, “nearly all” incoming transfers chose to enroll in fall 2020 rather than take a gap year. Additionally, Yale allowed all incoming transfer students to live on campus in the fall and spring semester, regardless of their class year. Nearly all new transfer students were housed together on Old Campus this academic year, rather than in their residential colleges.

Alaverdian, who transferred from Los Angeles City College to Yale in fall 2020, told the News that Yale’s decision to house all incoming transfer students together was a “really good thing” and allowed her to connect with people in her first few days at Yale. Still, Alaverdian found it difficult to acclimate socially with all of the COVID-19 restrictions in place.

“The start of the semester was definitely rough because of COVID,” Alaverdian said. “It was difficult to meet up with friends or meet new people because of social distancing. I was able to make some connections, meet some people and make some friends, but not as many as I expected.”

Alaverdian said that having a TroCo was helpful, and she connected with academic advisers in order to help her acclimate to Yale’s curriculum. And even in virtual space, she was able to join extracurricular activities such as TAMID, Scholars of Finance and the Yale Armenian Network.

Still, Alaverdian decided to take a gap semester in the spring in the hope of extending her time at “normal” Yale, once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.

“I feel like I only have a limited amount of time to spend at Yale,” Alaverdian said. “For me, it’s three more semesters as of today, unless I change my major or something else happens. So I really just wanted to spend that time at Yale with the full Yale experience.”

Daniela Gonzalez Mulet ’23 transferred from The Honors College at Miami Dade College in fall 2020 and spent her first semester at Yale studying remotely from home. She originally chose to study remotely because she felt it would be a good way to ease into Yale, but she told the News that looking back, she feels that the decision might have held her back from acclimating to Yale. At home in Miami, she said, she felt “distant” from the Yale community and had a low level of engagement with Yale.

Upon arriving on campus for the spring semester, Gonzalez Mulet said she had a difficult adjustment period. Although she loved her classes, she said the first month was “harsh,” between dealing with the isolation of quarantine and adjusting to the cold weather.

Gonzalez Mulet said that socially, she has grown close with a few transfer students and a few people in her residential college, but it has been difficult to feel part of a “transfer community” because many transfer students took leaves of absence in the spring.

“Honestly, I expected that once you would come to Yale, you would have this very close community with whom you could go out often,” Gonzalez Mulet said. “But that is not the case. I don’t really know many people from my transfer year, which is really sad, because I only have one year left.”

Heidi Makhlouf ’21, who also transferred from The Honors College and is one of the head TroCos this year, said that she “feels so bad” for the transfers who came in this year, because it seemed very difficult to acclimate to Yale with COVID-19 restrictions in place.

As head TroCo, Makhlouf made adjustments to the TroCo program to engage students with weekly virtual check-ins and virtual academic panels. But she said that the attendance rate fell dramatically quite quickly, as people felt “Zoom fatigue” and did not show up for events.

“It was definitely hard on [new transfers],” Makhlouf said. “Some people just made up their minds after fall, and they took either a gap semester, or they decided to take a gap year and work on other projects. And some people stayed. People just found it really difficult — not just on the transfer community level, but also because if all your classes are online, how can you be expected to meet new people?”

But as restrictions begin to lessen slightly, Makhlouf said she can see the new transfers start to “bounce back,” and she is optimistic that next year, transfer students will have an easier time adjusting to life at Yale.

I feel like I only have a limited amount of time to spend at Yale,” Alaverdian said. “For me, it’s three more semesters as of today, unless I change my major or something else happens. So I really just wanted to spend that time at Yale with the full Yale experience.

Steps moving forward

In October 2020, University President Peter Salovey announced the Belonging at Yale initiative, which is meant to “increase diversity, ensure equity, and enhance a sense of inclusion and belonging for everyone,” according to the Belonging at Yale website. In his announcement, Salovey said that he had called on the Yale College Dean’s Office to consider an expansion in the “approaches to transfer applicants from community colleges who would like to study in Yale College.”

Quinlan told the News that, as of now, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions is looking to expand the applicant pool of community college students, rather than expand the number of community college transfers admitted each year. But he added that should efforts be successful to expand and strengthen the community college applicant pool, it is possible that an expansion in community college transfers could come naturally.

“[Community college students] might not always have advisers or information about the transfer process. If we can find a way to step in as a point of contact, it allows students to know that we are transfer-friendly; we are a university that has the resources, both financially and also socially, to help support this group.”

—Marisa Kogan, Director of Transfer Admission

In a step to expand that pool, Yale joined the Transfer Scholars Network, an initiative pioneered by the Aspen Institute that looks to connect “high-achieving community college students” with selective four-year colleges. Yale is one of 12 initial member schools of the TSN, which launched its pilot phase in January 2021.

Quinlan likened the TSN to the QuestBridge program, which matches low-income students with over 40 selective colleges and universities, in that both the TSN and QuestBridge serve as third parties that bridge the gap between Yale and a population that might not always know about what Yale has to offer. But unlike QuestBridge, which focuses primarily on matching students with selective colleges, the TSN in this stage is focused on giving community college students the information to learn about and apply to selective colleges, rather than guaranteeing their admission.

“The network is really designed at the pre-application stage currently, with an emphasis on early connections with community college students,” Adam Rabinowitz, communications manager at the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, told the News. “The idea is that if we can build these connections, create that incentive to transfer, provide the resources, provide the support, then the barriers that naturally stand in the way for the students fall away and that impetus to apply is really present. So our role is to urge and ensure that that student has the connections they need to send in the application. We feel that’s half the battle.”

Because the Yale admissions office does little outreach to transfer applicants, Quinlan said that the TSN has the potential to step in to provide outreach to applicants and build and strengthen the community college applicant pool in Yale’s place. Because of lack of outreach, many applicants from community colleges may not know about Yale’s commitment to financial aid or about Yale’s desire to admit community college students at all, Quinlan said, and the TSN can fill in that information gap.

Director of Transfer Admission Marisa Kogan told the News that even though the TSN only launched in January, Yale received seven applications this cycle from transfer students who were nominated and connected to Yale through the TSN.

“[Community college students] might not always have advisers or information about the transfer process,” Kogan said. “If we can find a way to step in as a point of contact, it allows students to know that we are transfer-friendly; we are a university that has the resources, both financially and also socially, to help support this group.”

Although applying as a TSN nominee does not guarantee admission, Kogan said that receiving applicants through the TSN even in its pilot year is indicative of the ways in which the program could prove a success and expand the community college applicant pool in years to come.

Quinlan added that by consciously expanding the community college transfer applicant pool by joining the TSN, the admissions office is demonstrating a commitment to admitting community college transfer applicants.

“We are putting a thumb on the scale in our transfer review process for students from community colleges,” Quinlan said. “That much is clear.”

UP CLOSE | ‘It’s hard to sustain your love for Yale when you feel like Yale doesn’t love you back’: Yale’s ‘second-class citizens’

Interviews with instructional faculty at Yale revealed a position that fares better than the national picture — but with much that can be improved.
Story by Madison Hahamy
Cover photo by Jessie Cheung
Published on April 29, 2021

On Oct. 23, 2020, Faculty of Arts and Sciences administrators sent an email to faculty in preparation for the spring semester that, among other resources offered, noted that faculty could request audio-visual kits, tablets, cameras, microphones, external monitors and more in order to complement their remote teaching. But not all faculty were eligible. Rather, the ability to obtain these materials was initially only extended to just ladder faculty and full-time, multi-year instructional faculty and not to single-year instructional faculty.

Instructional faculty, or faculty who are not eligible for tenure, comprise approximately 30 percent of professors in Yale’s FAS and are known by the titles lecturer, senior lecturer and senior lecturer II or, for language faculty, lector and senior lector I/II. Instructional faculty often teach introductory courses, such as English 114, and comprise a large portion of language departments. To students, the title might be the extent of the difference. But, like the October email demonstrates, the discrepancies can run much deeper.

“[People would] say, ‘You made it, you teach at Yale.’ Well, even though I teach at Yale, I haven’t made it. I’m still working semester to semester, with no benefits, no health insurance, no job security. They pay you much better than they do at other universities, but teaching a course at Yale is still not a living. In my position, I very rarely got to teach more than one course at a time. I was scrounging for other opportunities at other places.”

—An anonymous former humanities lecturer who was hired on a semester contract and paid per course.

Beyond the number of instructional faculty — which, according to Yale’s Office of Institutional Research, totals 352 for 2020-21 if excluding visiting faculty — Yale does not publicly break down that number to differentiate between instructional faculty on multi-year versus single-year contracts. Kathryn Lofton, FAS dean of humanities, estimates that, of the approximately 200 instructional faculty members in the humanities according to OIR, around half of them are on yearly contracts — making them initially ineligible for the additional technological assistance.

On October 28, a revised version of the email was sent out, this time with a specific section dedicated to instructional faculty with single-year appointments. But their initial exclusion was never addressed, which, faculty told the News, points to a pattern of larger neglect by the University. In this case, instructional faculty on multi-year contracts were placed on the same level as ladder faculty. But when it comes to benefits, department support, job security, salaries and more, that is often not the case, faculty also said.

Interviews with 61 instructional faculty members, administrators and ladder faculty — ranging from lecturers working part time to senior lecturers and lectors II on five-year contracts — demonstrated an almost unanimous recognition that, when it comes to its treatment of instructional faculty, Yale is better than most other universities.

But instructional faculty members still described their position in comparison to tenured faculty as “second-class” — with four faculty using that specific phrasing — and raised concerns regarding arbitrary and opaque renewal processes, lack of a true promotion path, pervasive job insecurity, salary inequities across departments and against tenured counterparts, lack of respect from tenured faculty, lack of universal standard of inclusion across departments and lack of support from both departments and the larger university. Faculty also noted that, when progress in relation to instructional faculty is made, it is often uneven, benefitting multi-year instructional faculty much more than those on single-year or part-time contracts. Sixteen instructional faculty members requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation. Some are currently undergoing appointment renewals at the moment and others have previously felt as though their job security was threatened for speaking out.

“[People would] say, ‘You made it, you teach at Yale.’ Well, even though I teach at Yale, I haven’t made it,” said one anonymous former humanities lecturer who was hired on a semester contract and paid per course. “I’m still working semester to semester, with no benefits, no health insurance, no job security. They pay you much better than they do at other universities, but teaching a course at Yale is still not a living. In my position, I very rarely got to teach more than one course at a time. I was scrounging for other opportunities at other places.”

‘Nationally, it’s bleak.’

According to the American Association of University Professors 2020 report, the percentage of contingent faculty at universities increased by 25 percent from 1975 to the 2008 recession, ultimately comprising over two-thirds of total faculty.

Contingent faculty members — who are generally not eligible for tenure — allow universities to respond to shifting enrollment demands without making long-term commitments to the same faculty member for 40-plus years of their academic career, as tenure often requires.

Now, full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty make up less than one-third of the national academic labor force — the rest are part-time and full-time non-tenure track faculty.

But while this arrangement can be appealing to universities, allowing them to save money and resources while still delivering a quality education to students, it takes a toll on the instructors hired for the work — a toll that can also affect the students they teach, as some faculty noted.

“Nationally, it’s bleak,” one anonymous lector said.

Yale is, in many ways, better than its peers.

At Yale, according to statistics from the OIR, non-ladder faculty, which consists of both instructional and research faculty, comprise approximately 40 percent of the faculty in the FAS, much lower than the approximately 70 percent estimated nationally.

According to the AAUP report, the average per course salary for part-time instructors at private and independent schools is $4,217 — at Yale, part-time is considered less than three courses a semester — and, for full-time lecturers the average salary is around $77,000.

During the 2019-20 year, full-time lecturers at Yale received on average a salary of $89,043 according to OIR statistics across all Yale schools, which is tens of thousands of dollars better than the national average, but well below the tenure-track Yale average of $120,310 or tenured professor salary of, on average, $242,198. Gendler told the News that the minimum per course salary was recently raised to $11,000 from $9,000.

“Instructional faculty salaries are not publicly shared through the same sorts of formal systems that ladder faculty salaries are,” Tamar Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told the News. “So it’s difficult to ascertain specifically, but I do know that when we look at the per course, instructional salaries at many of our peer institutions in Connecticut, ours are double or triple those per course fees.”

Yale’s per-course salary is almost triple the national private school average, according to Gendler.

“You can do okay with two courses [a semester],” an anonymous lector told the News. “Barely okay.”

Adjunct, non-ladder, instructional, contingent, oh my!

The term “instructional faculty” itself is the product of a 2017 FAS Senate report on “the Status, Pay and Conditions of Non-Ladder Faculty in FAS.” Previously, instructional faculty were called “non-ladder faculty,” a term that the report called “inimical to inclusion” due to its identification of instructional faculty by what they are not. Although the specific term “instructional faculty” was not proposed — they instead recommended that all Yale faculty be referred to as “faculty” — the committee did advise against the usage of the terms “non-ladder faculty,” “contingent faculty” and “adjunct faculty” to refer to faculty who are not eligible for tenure and therefore on contracts with a set expiration date.

Beyond a nomenclature change, the report also recommended better record-keeping on information related to instructional faculty, review of instructional faculty compensation, parental leave, better connections to Yale after retirement, teaching prizes for instructional faculty, conference funding, clear standards for voting in departmental faculty meetings, lunch privileges for all instructional faculty in the residential colleges, involvement in university governance and more.

In the past four or so years, some of those changes have been implemented. Additional teaching prizes for instructional faculty were added and, just this year, full-time instructional faculty became eligible for parental leave. Review of compensation and salary scales is also happening — though “not as fast as many would hope,” according to Shiri Goren, senior lector II and director of the Modern Hebrew Program.

Other changes have been implemented, but not for all instructional faculty.

Multi-year instructional faculty across departments are, for example, able to eat without paying out of pocket in the residential dining halls, allowing for another avenue of meeting with students and building community. Before the 2017 report was released, multi-year instructional faculty in the sciences were not eligible for the lunches like their humanities counterparts, a disparity that was rectified following the report’s release. Currently, though, the same privilege is not extended to those on a single-year or semester contracts.

“In the grand scheme of things, maybe it’s not so important, but it does sort of remind you who you are,” Terence Renaud, lecturer in history and the humanities program on a single-year renewable contract, told the News. “Especially back in in-person days when you would plan to have lunch with one of your tenured colleagues. And they would walk into the dining hall and they’d swipe through for their free lunch. And then they’re asking why you’ve got your credit card.”

Ruth Koizim, senior lector in French, has been a long-time advocate for the rights of instructional faculty since she began teaching at Yale over 35 years ago. Lunchtime benefits was just one of many issues that she personally fought for on behalf of instructional faculty; others include parental leave, membership on University committees and voting privileges at Yale College faculty meetings.

On the issue of lunches in the residential college, she said that she’s “looking forward” to being able to partake in dining hall interactions again, a victory that she called “fairly new.” But she also noted her frustration with how long it took for multi-year instructional faculty to become eligible.

“Now when you’re earning close to $150,000 a year, I’m going to go out on a limb and say maybe you don’t need the free lunch quite as much as somebody who’s making 50,” Koizim said.

“In the grand scheme of things, maybe it’s not so important, but it does sort of remind you who you are. Especially back in in-person days when you would plan to have lunch with one of your tenured colleagues. And they would walk into the dining hall and they’d swipe through for their free lunch. And then they’re asking why you’ve got your credit card.”

—Terence Renaud, lecturer in history and the humanities program on a single-year renewable contract

Varying levels of departmental inclusion

Other recommended changes have not been implemented at all. For one, faculty gave wildly differing accounts of departmental inclusion.

In Goren’s department, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, for example, there is a large number of instructional faculty. Since joining Yale in 2006, she has been invited and able to participate in departmental meetings.

“I wasn’t aware that there was any other option,” she said. “I was amazed to find out that other departments are not as inclusive.”

Benjamin Foster, professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature, told the News that, in his department, language faculty are considered on the same level as those who are ladder faculty and, though they were not required to attend faculty meetings, “NELC department chairs, like me, welcomed their attendance, input and friendship.”

According to computer science lecturer Scott Petersen, his department recently began holding all-faculty meetings. Though the English Department does not have all-faculty meetings, there are now regular meetings with instructional faculty and the department chair and, according to Jessica Brantley, department chair of English, instructional faculty are able to vote on appointments at their own rank or below.

But Renaud said that he has never been invited to a Humanities Department faculty meeting and, though he is sometimes invited to history meetings, he is not allowed to vote. Math instructional faculty are “mostly” not able to attend and vote, according to an anonymous lecturer, unless the topic explicitly pertains to issues regarding them.

And, because departments still have wide latitude in how they choose to include instructional faculty and integrate them into the larger academic community, responses to the question of whether or not instructional faculty felt supported by their department varied wildly.

And some faculty, like an anonymous senior lecturer, told the News that inclusion of instructional faculty can only go so far.

Their inclusion in faculty meetings, while appearing “open or democratic,” cannot actually foster a healthy debate culture, she said.

“If a whole bunch of people are afraid to speak up, that’s a disservice,” she added. “Self-governance only works if everyone has the same voice.”

Road to nowhere

Beyond varying departmental levels of inclusion, instructional faculty also told the News that the lack of job security is a constant source of stress, particularly for those on single-year contracts. Some suggested that, although they are not on the tenure track, the University should still implement a method of permanent employment.

Instructional faculty can be hired on a number of contracts, ranging from one semester to five years — the latter one is “less common,” according to John Mangan, dean of faculty affairs. Unlike Harvard University, where most instructional faculty can only be hired for a maximum of eight years, Yale has no cap on the renewal of contracts. Timothy Robinson, lecturer in English, for example, has had a combination of semester and single-year contracts that have been continually renewed since he began teaching at Yale over 25 years ago.

Mangan wrote to the News in an email that “the duration of an instructional faculty appointment is typically determined by the FAS Dean’s Office in consultation with the relevant department chair, with curricular need being the main point of consideration.”

Instructional faculty are not on the “ladder,” and therefore not afforded the job security given to their tenured and tenure-track colleagues. While their contracts are, for the most part, renewable — though this is not always the case, as evidenced by the three-year, nonrenewable position in math as a Gibbs assistant professor — Yale is under no obligation to renew.

“The single greatest detractor to being a lecturer at Yale is the uncertainty of not knowing if you’d have a contract in however many years,” computer science lecturer Petersen told the News.

Petersen was one of a few instructional faculty who was up for contract renewal when Yale instituted their initial hiring freeze at the beginning of the pandemic and, as a result, ended up receiving a one-year contract when his department voted for him to receive a multi-year one. Petersen did, however, fare better than some instructional faculty, whose contracts were not renewed at all.

“The single greatest detractor to being a lecturer at Yale is the uncertainty of not knowing if you’d have a contract in however many years. ”

—Scott Petersen, computer science lecturer

But even so, the initial hiring at the single-year level left Petersen ineligible for some benefits that he was expecting to receive with a multi-year contract, such as the ability to apply for a professional development leave, which is a semester-long leave for instructional faculty unavailable to those on a single-year contract.

Ultimately, Petersen received both the one-year contract and an additional contract renewal for three years. But he still found it “upsetting” that he was initially considered expendable.

“Flexibility shouldn’t come at the expense of teaching faculty, who make up an infinitesimal proportion of the overall budget,” Petersen said.

Gendler told the News that the FAS offered a position to everyone whose contract would have been renewed “under ordinary circumstances.” In some cases, she said, those contracts were originally renewed only for a single year.

However, Gendler added that those faculty were ultimately provided with the multi-year renewal contract that they had expected.

“We were in a situation of uncertainty, and we operated on that basis,” Gendler said.

“It’s hard to sustain your love for Yale when you feel like Yale doesn’t love you back, and you cannot count on the institution for having the same level of commitment to you that you bring to your work.”

—An anonymous senior lecturer

Petersen was not alone in expressing frustration with a general feeling of devaluement by the University — more than three-fourths of the faculty interviewed for this story also indicated that job insecurity was a large concern for them.

While there are some faculty such as Walter Shapiro, lecturer in political science, who is a full-time journalist outside of his teaching at Yale, there are others for whom teaching is their main job and are especially vulnerable to the lack of a stable position. While this is to an extent relevant to all instructional faculty, it is especially “precarious” for those on single-year contracts, an anonymous senior lecturer told the News.

“A lot of teaching rests on their shoulders,” she said. “Instructional faculty are no less committed to their students or their craft than ladder faculty. But feeling like a casual employee chronically vulnerable to microaggressions from tenured colleagues and the fear of not being reappointed wears you out, gets in the way of how you feel about the institution. It’s hard to sustain your love for Yale when you feel like Yale doesn’t love you back, and you cannot count on the institution for having the same level of commitment to you that you bring to your work.”

To combat that precariousness, she suggested increased resources for career and professional development for instructional faculty, such as pathways for promotion and support for research and publication. For instructional faculty who have taught at Yale for decades, she added that there should be a pathway to permanent employment and options for continuing intellectual work after retirement.

There are some faculty who, by nature of their work — such as playwrights or creative writers — will never be eligible for tenure, which focuses on research output.

Deborah Margolin, a professor in the practice of theater and performance studies, told the News that “it’s disappointing that the kind of work we do in teaching artistic practice is not valued in the same way that criticism is. That those who critique art are valued above those who make it.” Professors in the practice such as Margolin, are “distinguished practitioners” in their field, according to the Yale Faculty Handbook.

An anonymous lecturer in English echoed those sentiments, saying that “there has been an ongoing conversation” regarding the employment of creative writers at Yale which, she added, was not currently “commensurate with the way writers of stature are employed elsewhere.”

“I published five books, but without a Ph.D., I’m not eligible to even be an associate or assistant professor,” she said. “And it’s the same for my colleagues who are extremely well-known creative writers.”

Brantley, chair of the English Department, told the News that she is aware of concerns from artist-faculty regarding a lack of recognition and value of their “extraordinary work.”

Instructional faculty without the artist designation felt similarly.

“Anyone with a Ph.D. should be hired into a minimum two-year position with some kind of possibility for longer-term employment,” Renaud told the News. He added that, because of the state of the job market — at the same time that the amount of tenure track positions is decreasing, the number of doctoral students searching for jobs often dwarfs the positions available — there is “no guarantee” that instructional faculty whose contracts are not renewed would be able to find another job.

“Some universities tried a teaching assistant professor rank on a tenure track,” Renaud said. “I would love to have something like that.”

Gendler told the News that the category of instructional faculty is separate from those of tenure-track faculty. While instructional faculty are often “extraordinary instructors who teach extraordinary courses,” Gendler noted that hiring people as instructional faculty lets the University hire teachers even if they have not published research that “significantly extends the horizons of their discipline,” which is the requirement for being hired as a member of the FAS tenure-track faculty.

A path to promotion — in name only

There are currently three ranks within the lecturer and lector category of instructional faculty. Lecturer, senior lecturer, and senior lecturer II — the same exists for lectors. The third one was added recently to address concerns regarding a lack of a true path to promotion, but faculty told the News that, unlike any of the promotions that happen to those on the tenure-track, there is not a substantial difference from one title to another.

“There is a promotion to senior lecturer, but it has very few practical consequences,” one anonymous lecturer in STEM told the News. “There is a standard raise that is pretty small. Your contract might go from three to five years, or not. As far as what actually happens, I would say it’s not much.”

Karen von Kunes, added that, as a senior lector in Slavic languages and literatures, she has “no possibility of promotion, despite having published books and articles in linguistic and literary criticism.”

And, even though the promotion process and metrics are outlined online — the committees responsible for the process expect teaching experience, work in committees, high academic degrees and more — faculty still found the process to be “veiled,” as described by one anonymous lecturer, and highly variable by department.

The lecturer who called the promotion process “veiled” added that it was also a “labyrinth” that every individual instructor is left to their own devices to figure out, “in the face of real sort of institutional resistance to being transparent.”

“I was never told why or how these decisions were made,” she said. “Like I felt that there was a system in place that was only ever being revealed on a very, very limited need to know basis.”

Renaud echoed these sentiments, similarly telling the News that the evaluation process is “opaque” and that he cannot tell if his peers are evaluated in the same way as he is.

“There’s just that general feeling of really not knowing the situation of my peers and not knowing what I can do to get hired again,” Renaud said. “It’s kind of just completely up to the arbitrary personal whims of who your chair is and … the teaching needs of various academic units. And that’s frustrating. It makes it difficult to plan for the future.”

Gendler told the News that the senior lecturer position was intended to act as a path for promotion in response to the concern that instructional faculty “excellence wasn’t being fully recognized by the existing titles.” The senior lecturer II position, she said, is “for our most distinguished instructional faculty.”

She also reiterated that the appointment and promotion procedures for each rank can be found in the Faculty Handbook.

“I’m a fairly late career writer with a national profile. Not to like blow my own horn, but I’ve often thought, ‘Wow, if I feel this way, how does the instructional faculty member just starting out who maybe hasn’t had their first major publication feel?’”

—An anonymous lecturer

A pervasive lack of respect

Even those who reach the top of Yale’s instructional faculty promotion path told the News that they can be treated as inferior to their tenured and tenure-track counterparts.

Due to her title and rank, von Kunes was deprived of some professional opportunities, such as being hired as a tenure-track professor at another university. She also told the News that, at Yale, it is rare that the faculty and graduate students would seek her advice because, “like all other lectors,” she is viewed as a language instructor without having higher qualifications and accomplishments.

“Everyone in our rank has experienced humiliating situations,” she said.

In feeling undervalued by academic colleagues due to her rank, von Kunes is not alone. Faculty told the News that they feel a pervasive lack of respect from either the ladder faculty around them or the University as a whole — sometimes both.

One anonymous lector told the News that this lack of value often manifests itself quantitatively, through the lack of support to do research, lack of funding to travel for conferences, inability to sit on various committees and salary inequities between them and ladder faculty.

“To be quite honest, as instructional faculty you are often made to feel like less valuable, worth less,” she added.

Another anonymous lecturer agreed, saying in an interview with the News that Yale fails to convey to instructional faculty that they are valued.

She added, “I’m a fairly late career writer with a national profile. Not to like blow my own horn, but I’ve often thought, ‘Wow, if I feel this way, how does the instructional faculty member just starting out who maybe hasn’t had their first major publication feel?’”

Yale to the rescue (kind of)

These issues are not new, as the FAS Senate report and long-time instructional faculty advocates such as Koizim demonstrate. Although substantial progress has been made, other solutions have been slow to arrive.

An instructional faculty working group founded in October 2020, co-chaired by Lofton and Mangan, seeks to rectify some of these longstanding issues and “make Yale a place where the quality and circumstances of instructional faculty are a model for other universities to follow,” said Lofton and Mangan in an email to the group announcing its mission.

The committee is working to issue a report, ideally by the end of the 2021 fall semester, with actions and recommendations. One goal, Lofton said, was to reduce the number of one-year contracts, so that the majority of instructional faculty held multi-year appointments.

Because Yale does not publicly document the breakdown of types of contracts for instructional faculty, either by division or FAS-wide, the committee is also working to compile those statistics, as well as information on the race and ethnicity and gender of instructional faculty. There is currently no public data related to the genders and races and ethnicities of solely instructional faculty — the only available data combines all non-ladder faculty, which includes research faculty.

“Because there are so many different kinds of instructional faculty, organizing data about them is much harder than it is for ladder faculty or Yale College students,” Lofton wrote in an email to the News. “My hope is our report will give an update on these precise data questions … so that we can begin to establish more public benchmarking about instructional faculty.”

Goren, who is also on the committee, added that, while they will ultimately produce a set of recommendations to encourage Yale to carry out, what is more important is “the articulation of values and principles on how our institution should understand and work with instructional faculty” which would “hopefully” provide a more long-term set of ethics and a road map to serve the University for “years to come.”

And, although the committee will not release its report until around half a year in the future, some changes regarding contractual concerns have already been made.

Brantley, chair of the English Department, told the News that the English Department — which houses the largest FAS concentration of instructional faculty, in part due to the instructional English courses — has converted “a number” of short-term contracts into multi-year contracts and is also making a concerted effort to involve instructional faculty in department governance so that they can be more involved with the department’s community.

“While we are trying to find some common ground to set benchmarks for best practices, I think it’s important also to recognize how valuably different their appointments can be, and to respect the differences in the work they do,” she added of her membership in the working group.

“And if there’s not a strong foundation … things crumble.”

—Sybil Alexandrov, senior lector II of Spanish

Better than most … but not good enough

Though most instructional faculty expressed concern or frustration with their position, it was almost universally acknowledged that, in comparison to other universities, their conditions are much better.

“In spite of all the disadvantages within the lector rank, Yale provides an exciting and intellectually stimulating academic environment with excellent students and a variety of opportunities of contributing to Yale and its residential colleges, and that fact alone is important to me,” von Kunes wrote in a follow-up email to the News.

But faculty also told the News that Yale should — and, as Kim Shirkhani, lecturer in English, said, “can afford to” — do more.

An anonymous English lecturer added that Yale tends to “cherry pick” when they choose to be innovative. For tenured faculty, he said, Yale wants to be the best. But when it comes to how they treat instructional faculty, Yale is often content being part of the pack.

“I feel like Yale does better than most institutions but … the bar is pretty low and Yale almost never compares itself to every other university. Except in this kind of situation.”

And Sybil Alexandrov, senior lector II of Spanish, told the News that this lack of attention towards instructional faculty can have major consequences.

Instructional faculty, she said, often teach the courses that lay the foundation for ladder faculty’s classes, which people can forget.

“And if there’s not a strong foundation,” she added, “things crumble.”

UP CLOSE | Formerly incarcerated individuals reenter society in a pandemic

For formerly incarcerated individuals who have left correctional institutions in the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated many of the difficulties releasees face in attaining jobs, education and secure housing.
Story by Talat Aman
Cover photo by Daniel Zhao
Published on April 27, 2021

In 2016, Orlando native Imani Pennant was living the typical college life. He was studying civil engineering at the University of Connecticut with a minor in architectural design, had a good group of friends, was studying for his classes and said he was just being “productive.”

But in January 2018, Pennant’s life was flipped upside down. He was charged with second-degree forgery of court documents and for the next year, his life was defined by constant visits to court about his case.

Imani Pennant speaking on behalf of the PROTECT Act. (Courtesy of Imani Pennant)

When the state of Connecticut prosecuted and a judge then sentenced Pennant to prison in May 2019, he could not have predicted the changes in the prison system and broader society that were to come in the coming months after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States last spring. Upon his release from MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution on March 20, 2020, Pennant said he felt like a “Martian.”

“I went in into a perfectly normal world and came out to realize that no one is being outside at all, everything is closed and there wasn’t anything given to me — any tools or anything like that — to reenter society,” Pennant told the News in an interview.

The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated many of the existing difficulties formerly incarcerated individuals face when reentering society. Often because of their criminal records and a lack of resources granted to them upon release, they face substantial barriers to find employment, housing and access to treatment centers.

In recent months, legislators and organizing groups have pushed for reforms to help those who have left Connecticut Department of Correction institutions. Policy proposals have included increased investment in reentry centers and placing more incarcerated persons near their end of sentence into parole.

However, many activists and formerly incarcerated individuals say that more has to be done and are pushing for change to the structure and aims of the Connecticut DOC itself.

The Connecticut DOC did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the News for this story.

Who is being released?

According to former state of Connecticut Undersecretary for Criminal Justice Policy and University of New Haven criminal justice professor Mike Lawlor, a common misconception is that most individuals being released from incarceration have been in a correctional institution for years. The reality is that individuals with many different statuses are being released at any one time.

“As a matter of fact, a very big proportion, if not the majority, of the people who are being released on any given day by the DOC have been locked up for a matter of days and months,” Lawlor said.

Lawlor says that before the pandemic, around 33 percent of releasees generally fell under the category of “did not return from court.” Those are people who were held pre-trial but were released directly from the courthouse after the trial — for example, if the charges against them were dropped.

The second-largest group of releasees consists of those who are released from incarceration but not placed on parole, according to Lawlor. Only about 10 percent of releasees in Connecticut are released on parole under surveillance of a parole officer employed by the DOC. A larger portion are left in a “transitional” state, such as going to a halfway house — an institution that supervises formerly incarcerated individuals under the purported goal of giving them the skills to reenter society.

Pennant had been sentenced for just one year, a term so short that he was not eligible for parole.

“I went in into a perfectly normal world and came out to realize that no one is being outside at all, everything is closed and there wasn’t anything given to me — any tools or anything like that — to reenter society.”

—Imani Pennant

But Jason Gulino, who was sentenced to 23 years in prison for a series of criminal offenses that he says resulted from his drug addiction, was released on parole after serving 19 years in various Connecticut correctional institutions. His sentence was only modified after a habeas trial, when he learned that the prosecutor of his case had engaged in sexual relations with his ex-girlfriend.

Gulino first entered the Connecticut DOC in 1995, when he was sentenced to five years for a burglary, a decision he says he took to support his cocaine addiction. In his last 90 days at the Carl Robinson Correctional Institution, he said in an interview with the News, a fellow incarcerated individual had been “shooting up” with heroin and Gulino started using as well. As a result, he was released to the streets of Hartford with a $1.25 bus fare — but this time, he had a heroin addiction.

About 14 months later, Gulino said he tried to treat his addiction by entering a detox clinic. Gulino said he sincerely regrets the crimes he subsequently committed — including the theft of a police cruiser and a civilian car, and an assault on a 76-year-old woman.

Gulino pointed to his initial introduction to heroin in prison as one reason that he had reentered prison. According to a 2012 Connecticut DOC study, the recidivism rate — when a formerly incarcerated individual is incarcerated again after being released — was about 80 percent.

“I know that my recidivation was based on my exposure within the correctional facilities,” Gulino said. “Had I not been sitting in a dorm 23 hours a day with 116 other offenders that are all trying to scam, connive, live and get high all day long — I would’ve never left with an addiction.”

“I was belly-chained and shackled at 5:00 in the morning, I sat in a bullpen until 8:00 in the morning, then I was transferred upstairs by a correctional officer to a computer room — [but] I have never touched a computer before”

—Jason Gulino

Skills taught in prison

Though some correctional institutions claim to prepare individuals for life after their incarceration, formerly incarcerated individuals like Gulino said that correctional facilities have not given them the appropriate skills to reenter society.

Miriam Gohara, a professor of law at Yale Law School who has worked at the NAACP, said that a “common denominator” for many in the criminal justice system is that they come from under-resourced schools. Many of these formerly incarcerated people are either facing trauma or do not have the resources to pay for good schooling and end up incarcerated. As such, those with low education levels are overly represented in Connecticut prisons.

To get ahead, Gulino attempted to attain an education while in prison but described the process as difficult. He mentioned that he sent multiple letters to the DOC asking for GED courses, but he said that many of his requests were rejected. Gulino stressed that the vast majority of prison residents he knew did not have beyond a fourth-grade reading level. Gulino added that part of the reason why many others did not seek an education in prisons is that there was no well-funded system that encouraged prisoners to attain a GED.

When Gulino was finally able to take the GED test, he said, he failed by just two points.

“I was belly-chained and shackled at 5:00 in the morning, I sat in a bullpen until 8:00 in the morning, then I was transferred upstairs by a correctional officer to a computer room — [but] I have never touched a computer before,” Gulino said.

Gulino doing woodwork. (Courtesy of Jason Gulino)

Zelda Roland, director of the Yale Prison Education Initiative, spoke to the News about YPEI’s work in correctional institutions. YPEI offers incarcerated students access to higher education resources similar to what a university would provide.

Roland stressed that YPEI students are treated no differently than students on a college campus such as Yale’s, and that instructors interact with incarcerated students with the same dignity and respect as they would with their campus college students.

Still, much of YPEI’s educational programming is limited by funding and classroom space. Roland said that limits to YPEI’s activities have especially been exacerbated by the pandemic.

“[Incarcerated persons] have been tremendously isolated, they have gone through great emotional trauma in prisons, they have been disconnected from their support systems and their loved ones,” Roland said. “Unlike students on a college campus, many of our students are not in a place where they want to feel that they must be productive.”

Matt Post, direct service coordinator and former president of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, now serves as the Manson Prison coordinator. YUPP mentors male prison residents close to being released about taking the GED.

But because of the pandemic, the group’s work has been halted, as they are not allowed to enter the prisons.

“A lot of the folks we worked with said that [the program] was their favorite part of the week,” Post said. “It was a place where, in an environment where you are constantly silenced and told what to do, we tried to create a space where folks could speak their mind and argue and be creative.”

(Yale News)

Release during the pandemic

Both Pennant and Gulino shared what they called “traumatic experiences” in the days leading up to their release from prison.

In his short time at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, Pennant penned a letter to the warden with signatures from 115 other prison residents complaining about black mold. He claims that in response, he was placed in solitary confinement.

“I was quote-unquote ‘inciting a riot,’” Pennant said.

Gulino’s wife, Lisa, expressed fear over her husband’s susceptibility to COVID-19 in prisons toward the end of his sentence. Upon hearing stories of the impediments to social distancing in prisons, she penned a letter to the CT Mirror, calling on Lamont to release many prison residents — including her husband — early.

Additionally, Gulino said that though he knew he would be released soon, the date was continuously delayed and unclear. His wife did not know about his release date until the morning of May 18, when Gulino’s lawyer contacted her.

“I didn’t see him from March 12 to May 18,” Ms. Gulino told the News. “The people that are in there haven’t seen their families since March 12. Now they’re offering video visits, but it’s very limited and it’s $20 a visit.”

Parole reform

Under the leadership of former DOC commissioner Scott Semple, the Connecticut DOC has increasingly released more incarcerated people before their end of sentence onto parole. The goal of this initiative is to integrate individuals into society and prevent recidivism.

Semple told the News that he looked beyond simply keeping people incarcerated as a punitive measure. Instead, he focused on sentence reform as a “smart approach” to apply justice and help incarcerated people reconnect with their communities.

“I truly believe that society has to reevaluate its perception of incarcerated people and that people who enter the justice system and end up incarcerated get tagged with this stigma that impacts their ability to move forward in their lives,” Semple said. “Sometimes in order to survive they go back to what got them incarcerated in the first place.”

Not enough time has yet passed since Connecticut began releasing more formerly incarcerated people early to see if changes in recidivism rates indicate the policy’s success.

Semple explained that, though he has not seen concrete numbers, the need for social distancing in the age of COVID-19 has led the DOC to release many prison residents early in what are called discretionary releases. Many of these releases began occurring after #FreeThemAll campaign work done by activist groups like the Connecticut Bail Fund, as well as demands from the ACLU of Connecticut to release individuals.

Today, there are about 3,500 fewer residents in Connecticut DOC institutions than in March 2020. But the decline in the incarcerated population is not necessarily due to an increase in discretionary releases. Much of the decrease is due to the courts being closed because of the pandemic.

“They’re going to have to be competing with a lot of people who also have lost jobs that may have been of that nature and may now be looking for these jobs just to get a paycheck. Also, you can’t do as much work to apply to jobs in person because a lot of times people want everything done online.”

—Miriam Gohara, a professor of law at Yale Law School who has worked at the NAACP

Resources for people once they are released onto the street

For releasees who have reached their end of sentence, many are released onto the street with nothing more than the belongings they had while in prison.

Community organizations that support formerly incarcerated people and prison reform activists said that the lack of resources given to releasees results in many facing homelessness, a lack of access to treatment for mental and drug issues and, ultimately, recidivism.

Gohara told the News that a challenge that has been exacerbated by the pandemic is finding jobs. She explained that many formerly incarcerated people try to find jobs in the service industry — at establishments like restaurants, construction companies, delivery services and retail stores. These happen to be many of the industries severely hurt by the pandemic.

“They’re going to have to be competing with a lot of people who also have lost jobs that may have been of that nature and may now be looking for these jobs just to get a paycheck,” Gohara said. “Also, you can’t do as much work to apply to jobs in person because a lot of times people want everything done online.”

Additionally, the criminal records of formerly incarcerated people impact their employment options. Some groups, like the ACLU of Connecticut, have fought for a “clean slate” policy that would erase the records for certain individuals with criminal records.

“[The clean slate policy] would erase the records of people that have paid their debts to their society, people that have completed their sentences and have had no interaction with the system for some period of time,” Gus Marks-Hamilton, campaign manager for the ACLU of Connecticut Smart Justice Campaign, said in an interview with the News.

One solution that has been pioneered in various Connecticut cities is “reentry centers,” which provide employment resources and social support for individuals reentering society. Importantly, workers at reentry centers sign up individuals for public benefits and help them access identification and social security cards.

Virginia Lewis, program manager of the Hartford Reentry Welcome Center, spoke to the News about the Hartford reentry program. She said that since the center’s founding in 2018, it has seen over 700 people, of which half were eligible for the center’s services.

Lewis said that those who have been released at the end of their sentences are most vulnerable. Unlike those who are on probation and parole, end of sentence releasees are given no resources and are not put under supervision.

But there is one resource that Lewis ranked in importance above all: housing.

“Without housing, you cannot do anything,” Lewis said. “In the pandemic, we know that shelters are closed out. We’ve seen the difference in the hope that people have.”

New Haven Interim Director of Special Projects Carlos Sosa-Lombardo similarly spoke on the work of the newly formed New Haven Reentry Center — a joint project between the city government’s Fresh Start program and local nonprofit Project M.O.R.E.

According to Sosa-Lombardo, during the pandemic the Elm City’s reentry center has been running virtual pardon workshops. He also said they have supported 50 formerly incarcerated people in finding jobs, in addition to signing up individuals for identification cards, ensuring that those with medical conditions get access to medicine and using CARES Act money to provide housing.

For those who have been suffering from trauma and drug addiction, the reentry center has also been able to match individuals with counselors and peer specialists.

Sosa-Lombardo, in addition to individuals from Community Partners in Action and the ACLU of Connecticut, has been advocating for S.B. 572, a state bill that would provide funds for the creation of reentry centers across the state.

“I think that this will result in savings for the state, we’ll be able to provide more social services for the people and they’ll be recidivating at a lower rate,” Sosa-Lombardo said.

What lies ahead

Both Pennant and Gulino have indicated that their stories are atypical in comparison to most prison residents who have been released, in that they have been able to find stability with regard to housing and employment after release. As Gohara explained, many are released without even knowing how to operate a smartphone.

Post described what he sees is a lack of consideration for incarcerated people from the state in the midst of an economic crisis for millions of Americans. He said that stimulus checks from the CARES Act were not initially available for incarcerated people, even though many were about to be released.

“The systems that we have set up do not make it easy for folks,” Post said. “They are intentionally cruel, or unintentional and careless.”

Other policy solutions are also on the table. Pennant spoke about the prospective state PROTECT Act, which would prohibit isolated confinement, end abusive restraints and increase correctional officer oversight and accountability. The bill currently sits in the Connecticut General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee.

“For me, the PROTECT Act is important because it changes the etiquette and fabric of how prisons operate,” Pennant said. “Things like the subpar nature of how they treat inmates, solitary confinement, etc.”

Still, both Gulino and Pennant are optimistic about the future. Though they said they did not feel that the DOC had equipped them for life on the outside, they both are happy with their current jobs.

Gulino, who comes from a union family, relies on his skills in manual labor and carpentry in his program All Deserve a Place to Start, or A.D.A.P.T.S. The project aims to address recidivism and homelessness by teaching currently incarcerated people framing, electrical and plumbing skills.

Pennant runs his own LLC called House of Wraith, which stands for We Rise All In Through Heaven. It is a product management company that advertises clothing and finds the best fabrics and models for different types of clothing. He relies on much of the knowledge he has learned while at UConn for this work.

“The sky is the limit. A year ago today I was in solitary confinement looking at a wall,” Pennant said. “Now, I have acquired financial freedom and I can help my family out and other people. There’s definitely a lot more work and giving back to my community.”

Talat Aman | talat.aman@yale.edu

UP CLOSE | Stranded, stuck and sensitive: Upheaval in the world of art loans

The pandemic saw artworks from Yale's collections stranded across the globe. To retrieve the loaned works, art institutions have developed creative strategies that will likely outlive the pandemic.
Story by Annie Radillo
Cover photo: Starry Night by Jean-François Millet, courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery
Published on April 25, 2021

Instead of traveling to St. Louis, Missouri to examine Jean-François Millet’s “Starry Night” in person, Yale University Art Gallery registrar L.Lynne Addison inspected portions of the painting in as much detail as was possible on an iPad. Addison zoomed in to look at Millet’s depiction of the earth, trees and the night sky, appearing on the small screen as expanses of cracked oil paint and vague shadows. Typically, Addison would have conducted this routine condition check — intended to verify that the artwork was being returned to the YUAG in the same condition in which it had been loaned out — in person at the Saint Louis Museum of Art. But due to the pandemic, she conducted the check remotely, from New Haven.

“Starry Night” is one of many loaned art objects whose trajectories were thrown off course due to the pandemic. Addison’s condition check came months after schedule, and “Starry Night” returned home to the YUAG similarly late.

Art institutions typically rely on object loans from their peer institutions to build their exhibitions and, in turn, loan items from their collections to other museums. At the start of the pandemic, building closures and lockdowns halted loans that had been organized years in advance. Now, though institutions have begun to reopen, social distancing measures and travel restrictions continue to complicate the process, at Yale-affiliated institutions and across the country.

For the YUAG and the Beinecke Library — which lend more artworks than they borrow — the cancellation and postponement of scheduled loans resulting from the pandemic have created a logistical nightmare for registrars. At the YCBA, an institution that borrows more frequently than the YUAG or Beinecke, these delays have interfered with loans and, as a result, the planned exhibitions. 

“What people don’t realize when they visit an art museum is how many people it takes to make it work,” said Laurence Kanter, chief curator and the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art at the YUAG. “It just seems like an open-and-shut experience. But when you get to the point of an exhibition where you’re having phenomenally fragile and valuable things moving all around the globe all the time, it’s amazing the machinery that’s involved in keeping it afloat. And when something like a pandemic hits and stops it all cold, the effects can be really quite remarkable.”

“What people don’t realize when they visit an art museum is how many people it takes to make it work. It just seems like an open-and-shut experience. But when you get to the point of an exhibition where you’re having phenomenally fragile and valuable things moving all around the globe all the time, it’s amazing the machinery that’s involved in keeping it afloat. And when something like a pandemic hits and stops it all cold, the effects can be really quite remarkable.”

—Laurence Kanter, chief curator and the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art at the YUAG

Immediate effects of the pandemic: Stranded artworks, suspended loans

In March 2020, when the pandemic first hit, objects belonging to the Beinecke, YUAG and YCBA were scattered across the world. This is typical, since museums in the United States and Europe frequently request objects from these collections. However, none of these institutions anticipated navigating the retrieval or return of borrowed objects amid museum closures.

“We have a very very robust loans program at the museum because the collection is so incredible,” Addison said. “Almost immediately, we had loans that were postponed, cancelled, rescheduled. Anything and everything that changed did. And it has pretty much continued to change since then.”

Museums typically request loans years in advance — often as far as four years ahead of time. According to Kanter, this is due to both the scholarship needed to organize an exhibition and the time it takes to prepare loan requests. Many of these artworks are in high demand, so museums must reach out in advance to ensure works’ availability during a given period.

“If I’m going to plan an exhibition on a major European artist — for the sake of argument — or on a topic with Asian art, and I know that I want to schedule it for the year 2025, I need to start thinking now about what my exhibition object list is going to look like so I can contact the owners of objects to see if their thing might be available in 2025,” Kanter said.

Once an object’s availability is established, the borrowing institution then has to convince the lender that it is a good idea to let a fragile object travel. The prospective borrower must also provide cost estimates of preparing and transporting these objects. These arrangements are often expensive and logistically complicated — Kanter said they typically involve packaging an object, conservation work, glazing and framing. Additionally, couriers are designated to accompany objects and ensure nothing goes awry, he said.

At the onset of the pandemic last year, most of these processes were halted. Of the Beinecke’s collection, a diary of military officer, aviator and writer Charles Lindbergh was at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., while a collection of papers about Victorian Era art critic John Ruskin was at the Watts Gallery near London. The Beinecke also had a variety of materials loaned out to the YUAG, as part of an exhibition called “Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art.”

A John Ruskin sketch of the Aiguilles Ranges. (Courtesy of the Yale University Library)

A number of works belonging to the YCBA were left at other institutions, including prints and illustrated books that were at the Toledo Museum of Art when the pandemic began.

Due to the pandemic, the YUAG’s “Starry Night” was left stranded in St. Louis. 

Due to the YUAG’s closure, the museum’s staff was not allowed into the gallery for months. As a result, the gallery canceled a number of scheduled loans. Even now, with travel restrictions still in place, gallery staff is unsure about whether it can send couriers along with fragile objects that cannot be transported without accompaniment.

Kanter said, though small on their own, many of these logistical problems can “become insurmountable” when taken together.

Prior to the pandemic, the YUAG had scheduled to loan out 15 paintings by Josef Albers, works from its American Decorative Arts Collection and from its Société Anonyme Collection, which features work by prominent American and European modernist artists, according to Kanter and Addison.

The YUAG was initially happy to comply with an art museum in Paris’ request for Albers’ paintings, but the loan became complicated due to the pandemic, according to Addison and Kanter.

In order to safely transport these works, Kanter said the gallery would have to first reframe them with glass. But since a borrowing institution might cancel its upcoming exhibition, the YUAG risks facing a financial loss by reframing the pieces. On the other hand, Kanter said that if the gallery waits too long to see whether the exhibition will take place, it may run out of time to complete the reframing process before the works need to be transported.

According to Addison, the loan with works from the American Decorative Arts Collection has been difficult to reschedule, as it is meant for an exhibition that was planned to travel to four different locations. As a result of the pandemic, all four borrowing institutions had to change their exhibition dates as well as the order of venues.

“Every time you change the date of one venue, you have to shuffle all the other dates of the other institutions,” Addison said.

Unlike the YUAG, the Beinecke did not have to cancel any loan requests. However, the library has declined loan requests made after the onset of the pandemic due to understaffing and continues to turn away requests even now, according to Hatcher and Mulroney.

“We just don’t want to commit to doing something that we don’t have time to do or which would keep us from supporting the on campus programs,” said Rebecca Hatcher, preservation coordination librarian at the Beinecke. “That’s our highest priority, and we don’t want to have that suffer for a loan.”

According to Lucy Mulroney, the Beinecke’s associate director for collections, the pandemic also came at a time when the library was already preparing to halt its regular loaning program in order to discuss an expansion of their current loan program. This meant the pandemic interrupted less loans than it otherwise would have, Mulroney said.

Martina Droth, the YCBA’s deputy director and chief curator, said the YCBA has faced similar challenges. “We have continued to receive loan requests, but we have found that many museums have moved their exhibitions, and in some cases canceled them because of museum closures and the difficulty of traveling art objects during a pandemic,” Droth said.

Droth added that the YCBA has shown other institutions as much flexibility as possible, and in turn has benefitted from the flexibility of other museums as their own exhibitions were postponed.

“We have a very very robust loans program at the museum because the collection is so incredible. Almost immediately, we had loans that were postponed, canceled, rescheduled. Anything and everything that changed did. And it has pretty much continued to change since then.”

—L.Lynne Addison, Yale University Art Gallery registrar

Museums since the pandemic: Safety and security for artworks

For institutions like the Beinecke and YUAG — whose objects out on loan were stranded across different locations — it was necessary to negotiate the secure storage of objects as well as their eventual transportation.

The Beinecke elected to leave several materials in place rather than transport them. For instance, it allowed its materials from the exhibition “Place, Nations, Generations, Beings” to remain on display at the YUAG due to the museum’s location in New Haven for an extended period of time due to its closure. The exhibit was originally scheduled to close in June 2020 but remained on view until February 2021 despite the fact that the gallery was closed during most of that period.

The Beinecke also chose to leave the Ruskin materials — which included pages from Ruskin’s sketchbooks, drafts of books, photographs and a mailbag he once carried — at the Watts Gallery in England for longer than planned. 

Ruskin's mailbag. (Courtesy of Yale University Library)

The Watts Gallery, which plans to reopen in May, received permission to keep the materials longer than originally scheduled to give the public an opportunity to view them.

When it was time for the materials to be installed, rather than ask a conservator to travel during the pandemic, the Beinecke instead arranged for a YCBA courier, who had just landed in the area, to oversee the installation process.

When the Watts Gallery shut to the public, Hatcher said they emailed Beinecke staff members about precautions they were taking to ensure the safety of the borrowed materials. These precautions included covering display cases, shutting books and switching off the lights.

“It’s not good for materials to be exposed to light,” Hatcher said. “You don’t want to waste that exposure on time when no one can see them because no one is there.”

On the other hand, the YUAG used technology to aid in the retrieval of their items. After conducting her condition check for “Starry Night,” Addison supervised the piece’s deinstallation over Microsoft Teams. The YUAG then arranged for a security car to follow the piece back to New Haven and placed a tracking device on the crate containing the painting, she said.

Other materials, including Lindburgh’s diary, remain stranded across the world. Lindbergh’s diary is secured in a vault in the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Beinecke has also held onto an object it was borrowing from The Elizabethan Club and is storing it in a secure space, Mulroney said.

The future of art loans

Building on the last year of experience, art institutions have adapted to managing loans during a pandemic in various ways, including enlisting virtual couriers’ like Addison for “Starry Night” and using digital tracking devices. Addison and other conservators think some of these strategies might persist.

“It’s a new world, and it will be really interesting to see what patterns and what new techniques we’ve developed creatively to make all this work might just stick,” said director of preservation and conservation services for the Yale University Library System Christine McCarthy. The library system loans to museums all over the world from its collections, in addition to curating exhibits at the Beinecke and other campus libraries.

McCarthy described new alternatives to the Library system’s operations. The library is considering implementing a new database and collection management system that would allow loan condition checks — typically conducted on paper — to be monitored on tablets or smartphones instead. Modules on the system would allow conservators to enter information about an object’s loan history, and even produce an estimate of the object’s cumulative light exposure.

McCarthy said that having this information at hand might reveal overestimations in an object’s cumulative light exposure, and thus allow the library to loan it more frequently than previously thought possible. McCarthy’s department keeps “medical histories” for art objects, and technology can make a “patient’s” record much easier to access, according to McCarthy.

Virtual couriering has had mixed results. Addison, for example, was amazed by the clarity of “Starry Night” on her iPad screen. Yet in other cases, conservators have reported trouble viewing paintings and found it difficult to fill out a condition report, Hatcher said.

“It’s a new world, and it will be really interesting to see what patterns and what new techniques we’ve developed creatively to make all this work might just stick.”

—Christine McCarthy, director of preservation and conservation services for the Yale University Library System

Addison thinks virtual couriers, as well as “book-ending couriers” — an alternative form of couriering in which one courier sees an object until it gets on a plane, while a second courier oversees the object upon the plane’s arrival at its destination — will become a permanent institution in the museum world.

The YCBA’s registrar staff — Chief Registrar Corey Myers and associate registrar Nancy MacGregor — agreed, saying that though in-person couriers are the ideal, virtual couriering will likely remain as “an additional tool in certain circumstances by many museums and institutions going forward.”

The transition to virtual couriers has been hastened by museums’ financial struggles due to canceled exhibitions during the pandemic. According to Addison, museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, are announcing that they will no longer pay for in-person couriers. 

Addison called these measures “black and white statements in a very gray world,” adding that she thinks institutions should determine what kind of courier to send on a case-by-case basis. For example, some objects might be fragile or valuable enough to warrant an in-person courier. 

Further, Addison is unsure if virtual couriers will actually save institutions money in the long run, as the required security measures used in lieu of couriers — such as escorts and contract registrars — are also expensive.

McCarthy, who is more optimistic about virtual couriering’s ability to cut costs, said this alternative approach might make loans more accessible.

“Couriers are actually a pretty big expense to the loan, and we ask those institutions to carry that burden for us a lot of the time,” McCarthy said. “So it could be that with these kinds of techniques, maybe smaller institutions who can’t afford to pay for one of us to go with an object might have an option — something we could do to even the playing field a little bit.”

Still, despite art institutions’ adaptations to the pandemic, the staff members at the YUAG, YCBA and Beinecke remain unsure how and when the institutions will be able to retrieve certain works — some of which are too fragile to travel without a person to accompany them — that remain scattered across the globe or reschedule canceled loans. 

“Some of these arrangements are still in the air, even at the 23rd hour,” Kanter said.

 

Annie Radillo | annie.radillo@yale.edu

UP CLOSE | Let’s talk about it: The triumphs and failures of public health messaging during COVID-19

Epidemiologists at the Yale School of Public Health, Yale faculty and a community leader comment on how the U.S. government fell short when communicating health guidance to the public during the pandemic and what lessons can be learned from the year in review.
Story by Sydney Gray
Cover photo by Karen Lin
Published on April 21, 2021

What is the most effective method to communicate health guidance so that it prompts substantive behavioral change among the population? 

This question has vexed researchers in the field of public health for decades and became increasingly relevant in March 2020, as SARS-CoV-2 began proliferating across the United States, transforming epidemiological maps of the nation from monochromatic diagrams to multicolor mosaics with emerging hotspots. As the pandemic’s spread intensified, epidemiologists at the Yale School of Public Health grappled with how to effectively communicate health messages to combat COVID-19 and keep people healthy.

For associate professor of public health Marney White — who has taught courses in epidemiology and the science of behavior change — this question became personal when she was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder in December 2019 and began treatments in February 2020, causing her to be at high risk for severe COVID-19 infection when the pandemic started soon after.

“There was a member of our local board of health who posted a public Facebook post saying that she was tired of all of these people trying to control everyone else and if people are sick or immunocompromised they should just stay home, let the rest of us live our lives,” White said. White wrote in an article published by the American Journal of Public Health in October of last year that it was messages like these that made her feel like “one of the vulnerable few that some seem willing to sacrifice.”

White disagreed with the approach outlined by other academics such as David Katz SPH ’93 that came early on in the pandemic. The approach espoused by Katz called for a risk stratified plan that later became known as “focused protection.” This approach placed an emphasis on “preferentially protecting the medically frail” through methods such as building “firewalls” of protection around facilities housing the elderly or those especially vulnerable to infection while reopening the economy and permitting healthy, low-risk individuals to go back to school, work and gatherings. 

White’s experience underscores the critical importance of consistent, clear and convincing health messaging to save lives and slow viral spread during a pandemic. The News spoke to five scientists at the School of Public Health, as well as other leaders and epidemiology experts, about how they crafted effective public health narratives during the pandemic and how such communication fell short — including through conflicting messaging, such as the coexisting narratives of focused protection and broad containment early on in the pandemic.

At that point, there was not yet a consensus among public health experts on how best to communicate to the public about the pandemic.

In addition to White, Dean of the Yale School of Public Health Sten Vermund, assistant professor of epidemiology Gregg Gonsalves and Director of the Yale Institute for Global Health Saad Omer, took issue with the strategies outlined in Katz’s article. White said that articles like Katz’s sent hurtful messages to people with chronic illnesses.

“It basically said, you know we’re going to slow down the economy, just to save some people who are already sick and so we shouldn’t do that,” White said. “We should just wall those people off and not have them in society. The message is basically … if you’re already weak or have an illness, to hell with you, we can’t slow down the rest of the world.”

In a response letter to Katz’s New York Times op-ed signed by Yale epidemiologists including Vermund, Gonsalves and Omer, University faculty expressed their disagreement with the “focused protection” approach outlined in Katz’s piece, titularly claiming Katz’s plan was “The Wrong Way to Fight Coronavirus.”

In an email to the News, Vermund clarified that he agreed with Katz that nursing homes were poorly managed, serving as one of the primary sources of early COVID-19 mortality when the pandemic hit the United States. Still, Vermund stated that in his view, the epidemiological flaw of the “focused protection” approach was its assumption that herd immunity could be achieved by allowing SARS-CoV-2 to infect “less vulnerable members of society.”

Katz wrote in an email to the News that regardless of how he and Vermund may differ in opinion about strategies to curb the spread of COVID-19, he agrees on the importance of protecting those most vulnerable to infection.

“We needed more [protection], not less,” Katz wrote. In an article about the “focused protection” approach, Katz stated that this plan was “not intended to discount the significance of mortality from coronavirus at any age” and aimed instead to “shelter and serve the vulnerable.”  

Despite conflicting views among academics in early 2020 about how to best protect the population from COVID-19, Vermund described that public health messages about healthy behaviors, especially those coming from the government, should be consistently reinforced to promote the best pandemic response.

“When you go on safari you want to see the rhino, elephant, giraffe, hippo, lion. Those are the big five. So, I had my big five for COVID: masks, physical distancing, small groups … air quality … [and] hand hygiene.”

—Sten Vermund, Dean of the School of Public Health

Simple, honest and clear: Strategies for effective health messaging 

Vermund emphasized that there are effective strategies for public health messaging that the government should continue to employ. Scientists and public officials should use tactics from the broader marketing and behavioral sciences fields that balance comprehensibility and detail while placing a focus on transparency.

He explained that principles of health communication are merely a subset of principles for communication in general. Thus, strategies like “social marketing” — using techniques like slogans or advertisements to design and implement programs promoting socially beneficial behavior change — are particularly important when attempting to “sell” an idea or behavior to an audience.  

“Inherently you may not care about potato chips,” Vermund explained. “But if you have a slogan, ‘I bet you can’t just eat one’ or something catchy, a jingle that you can’t get out of your head, [you might start to care]. So, we like to borrow from the broader field of marketing.” 

Vermund described that the most effective messages are those that are logical, easy to remember, use mnemonics and are consistently reinforced. He said that there is a fine line between overly simplistic messages that can insult the public’s intelligence versus complex jargon incapable of captivating or motivating an audience to adopt healthy behaviors.

As a result, Vermund decided at the beginning of the pandemic that to encourage people to make healthy decisions regarding COVID-19, he would use a play on words of the “big five” animals that tourists often hope to see on safari. 

“When you go on safari you want to see the rhino, elephant, giraffe, hippo, lion. Those are the big five,” Vermund said, high-fiving the Zoom screen. “So, I had my big five for COVID: masks, physical distancing, small groups … air quality … [and] hand hygiene.” 

Gonsalves agreed with using similar approaches to social marketing as a means to motivate behavioral change. He said that those in the field of public health could pull from lessons in the world of advertising, entertainment and pop culture.  

“When we [use] messaging, our messages need to be fact-based, tailored to specific audiences and widely disseminated,” Gonsalves wrote in an email to the News. “Think of the world of advertising … how we influence each other in the broader world, we could learn a thing from those industries.” 

President of the Greater New Haven NAACP Dori Dumas also championed the use of simple, memorable messages as a way to inspire people to continue to abide by public health guidelines, even if they are growing tired of following restrictive physical distancing and mask-wearing measures.

She additionally brought up the concepts of transparency from the government and open forums where community members can ask epidemiologists and virologists questions about the pandemic, vaccines or related information. She said these are invaluable methods that can bridge trust among communities that might be skeptical of vaccines.

“Speak facts. Keep it simple. But be very honest and clear.” Dumas said. “Of course … have information available for people who want to research more.” 

“Speak facts. Keep it simple. But be very honest and clear.”

—Dori Dumas, President of the Greater New Haven NAACP

White explained that the science of behavior change may also afford important insights into strategies for health messaging. 

She described that humans and animals tend to engage in behaviors when there is a perceived benefit to themselves. Thus, when behavioral incentives are tied immediately to the desired action, which in the context of COVID-19 might include a reward for hand washing, physical distancing or receiving the vaccine, behavior change will be more likely.

“When it comes to … trying to extend [the science of behavior change] to health messaging, instead of just saying ‘hey you should wash your hands,’ you want to frame it into some perceived benefit for the individual.” White explained. For example, “if you wash your hands, you will spare yourself the undesirable consequence of getting sick.”

Professor of marketing at the School of Management and professor of psychology Nathan Novemsky studies behavioral economics — specifically the best methods to nudge people to change their behaviors despite irrational beliefs or suboptimal habits.

Novemsky described that messages appealing to people’s altruistic or “pro-social” tendencies as well as a desire to conform to social norms can have a large impact on behavior, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I don’t have hard data, but what strikes me as effective are some things like pointing to the social good,” Novemsky said. “You’re … for example wearing masks … not just to protect yourself. It’s about protecting those around you or it’s about being considerate to people and it’s rude not to wear a mask.”

When health messaging falls short  

Despite the potential of health messaging to inspire behavioral change, there are examples of where the United States faltered in this effort over the course of the past year, explained Vermund. According to Vermund and Gonsalves, the inconsistent messaging and lack of a clear focus on what needed to be done to keep people healthy undermined the United States’ response to the coronavirus. 

Vermund pointed specifically to inconsistencies in public health messaging from the Trump administration last year.

“Consistency of public health messaging we didn’t do well at all,” Vermund said. “If Donald Trump says, well, ‘maybe we can swallow bleach and kill the virus from the inside,’ and Debbie Birx doesn’t say anything to the contrary, I mean, that’s not consistent messaging.”

Vermund was referring to a White House coronavirus task force briefing on April 23 of last year, where the former White House Coronavirus Coordinator Deborah Birx, journalists and other members of the Trump administration were in attendance. During the press conference, former President Donald Trump suggested that further research should examine whether COVID-19 could be treated by injecting disinfectant into the body, an idea immediately debunked and lambasted by medical experts.

Vermund explained that distracting public health messages that focus on largely irrelevant details can also undermine successful public health campaigns and draw attention away from the issues that matter.

 “It’s really not important if the virus jumped out of a lab or the virus jumped out of an animal,” Vermund said. “[The virus’ origin] is not a public health interest because it doesn’t matter … If you then focus attention on something like that, you’re distracting people from what’s really important. The pandemic has swept across the world.” 

Gonsalves added that “deliberate misinformation” disseminated by the Trump administration contributed to the ineffectiveness of the government’s pandemic response in 2020.

“We need an autopsy, a thorough investigation of how facts were twisted in 2020. How did our nation’s prized health agencies get silenced, how did officials get driven to repeat falsehoods they knew to be untrue, how did data get suppressed and manipulated? We need to know in detail how this all went wrong, how it happened, who was involved and when.”

—Gregg Gonsalves, assistant professor of epidemiology

Gonsalves contrasted this to the current administration, saying that the Biden Administration has “re-centered public health messaging around science, expertise and evidence,” although there remain “missteps here and there.”

Still, Gonsalves emphasized that historically, promoting healthy behavioral changes has been challenging in nearly all realms of public health, including campaigns focused on healthy eating, smoking cessation or limiting substance use. 

He said that relying on health communications alone is not sufficient to promote significant behavioral change and that the government should focus on providing people with tools — such as masks and universal paid sick leave — to make healthy decisions.

“We need to incentivize better choices, by making it easier for people to do the right thing … so that people don’t have to choose between their livelihoods and safety,” Gonsalves said.

Lessons from a past health crisis

“We don’t have to always reinvent the wheel in public health messaging,” Vermund said, citing the “tried-and-true” strategies of consistent messaging driven by science, interpretable by the general public and tailored for select sub-audiences. To develop public health messaging for the coronavirus pandemic and other future pandemics, scientists drew on lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s: the needs for clarity, depolarization and removal of stigma around a sickness, as well as the role of popular spokespeople in promoting behavioral change.

During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Vermund remembered observing “abysmal” and ineffective communications coming from the CDC as well as other administrative agencies of the United States government.

“The messaging that came out of CDC and other government sources for HIV was embarrassing,” Vermund said. “It was hard to understand, they bent over backwards never to talk about sex, never to talk about injecting a needle in your arm. It was so constrained by the political points of view of the government at the time, the Reagan administration, that it was just awful.”

Vermund related the examples of the politicization of health messages during the Reagan administration to similar politicization surrounding COVID-19 public health messaging that he observed during 2020.

An August 2020 study published in the SAGE Public Health Emergency Collection suggested “that the high degree of politicization and polarization in initial COVID-19 coverage may have contributed to polarization in U.S. COVID-19 attitudes.”

Specifically, Vermund pointed to how Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, told Fox News in March of last year that senior citizens should “take a chance on your survival” to reopen the economy. Vermund classified this as a troubling example of how talk of letting the virus run rampant, as well as politicization of health messages, could be damaging to public health campaigns.

Vermund explained that a similar approach of “letting the virus run its course” was adopted in Sweden, a nation that never implemented a full lockdown, allowed restaurants and bars to remain open in 2020, refused to institute legal sanctions or mask mandates and instead appealed to its citizens’ sense of civic duty to practice healthy behaviors. Sweden had more fatalities from COVID-19 than all of the other Nordic countries combined by the end of 2020.

“The point is that you can lead people astray with false promises that may look convenient, because, conveniently we are not going to shut schools, conveniently we are going to keep businesses open, conveniently we’re going to just thrive in our society,” Vermund said. “[The United States] would have had over a million deaths from COVID if that point of view had been embraced.”

The United States should also reflect on the forms of stigma and discrimination displayed during the HIV/AIDS epidemic when working to craft better public health campaigns going forward, Gonsalves said. He is one of the co-founders of Treatment Action Group, an organization established in 1992 to advocate for better treatment and a cure for AIDS.

“Last year, we saw a rise in violence and harassment of Asian-Americans due to President Trump’s insistence on calling SARS-CoV-2, not by its proper name, but as the ‘China virus,” Gonsalves wrote. “This was a deliberate attempt to scapegoat a set of Americans for the pandemic. It is reminiscent of the scapegoating of gay men, people who use drugs, Haitians and others in the early years of the AIDS epidemic.” 

Vermund added that one of the most poignant lessons for public health messaging to be learned from the HIV/AIDS epidemic is the role that celebrity and popular spokespeople can play in influencing the public to adopt healthy behaviors.

Vermund explained that when Magic Johnson — an NBA superstar who led the Los Angeles Lakers to five championships over the course of his career — tested positive for HIV, it had a huge impact on the general public’s perception of HIV/AIDS testing and alleviating the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS.

 “When I was working in HIV, back years ago when Magic Johnson got an HIV test, he tested positive, turned out he had HIV, and he told everybody,” Vermund said. “We saw an uptick in testing in minority communities after his testing and his going public which was very dramatic. Everybody knows it’s the ‘Magic Johnson’ effect.”

Vermund added that more research should be conducted on the effectiveness of using popular spokespersons to pivot perspectives, but he remains optimistic that continued celebrity endorsement of COVID-19 vaccines will help to improve vaccine uptake in the months to come. Vermund cited Dolly Parton’s twitter video of herself receiving the first dose of the Moderna vaccine as an example of powerful messaging.

Vermund is currently working with the Creative Coalition — a Hollywood nonprofit that has collaborated with celebrities including Morgan Freeman — to transmit messages of COVID-19 health and hygiene to the greater public.

Novemsky added that spokesperson endorsements, particularly when these figures are some sort of expert, doctor or celebrity, are often quite powerful, particularly in the context of changing health behaviors and countering false or misinformed beliefs.

Courtesy of the KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor

Data from the KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor (Zully Arias, Production and Design Editor)

‘Four phenotypes’ of attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines

Vermund explained that academics and public health officials engaging in health communications are contending with “four phenotypes” of people when it comes to vaccine uptake, ranging from those who closely follow public health guidelines to those who will not take the vaccine under any condition. 

The first group of individuals consists of doctors, nurses and members of the general public who largely heed the advice of public health experts to get the COVID-19 vaccine.  

(Zully Arias, Production and Design Editor)

The second group, Vermund described, is composed of people who may be skeptical of the government or of the medical establishment, but do not have a fundamental distrust of vaccines in general — a group that the Kaiser Family Foundation, or KFF, has termed as the “wait and see” cohort.

“Since September until now, [the KFF] surveys of such individuals have shown a halving of the number,” Vermund said. “60 percent were ‘wait and see’ back in September. Now it’s only 30 percent. So there’s been an absolutely consistent shift from the ‘wait and see’ to the ‘I want to get vaccinated group.’ So that’s wonderful. There are many people in communities of color that are in that category.” 

The KFF reported that the two groups with the highest proportion of survey respondents in the “wait and see” category are currently Black people and individuals the ages of 18 to 25.

(Zully Arias, Production and Design Editor)

The third group includes individuals who will only consider getting vaccinated if it is necessary to participate in activities like flying on airplanes, or going to work or school, Vermund said. The fourth and final category includes people who will not get the vaccine, “end of subject,” he explained. 

‘Start with the evidence’: Messaging around vaccine hesitancy 

As the president of the Greater New Haven NAACP, Dumas has been working over the past year to encourage communities of color to get the COVID-19 vaccine. 

(Zully Arias, Production and Design Editor)

Dumas explained that through collaboration with local clergy members and the use of churches as vaccine pop-up centers, the NAACP has made strides in promoting vaccine uptake in New Haven. Federal Emergency Management Agency mobile clinics as well as Fair Haven Community Health Care have aimed to do the same. 

“There’s still far too many people who have not been vaccinated but more and more are talking about it and more people in their own circle are starting to say you know, it’s not that bad, here’s the facts, here’s some straight information,” Dumas said. “I think those kinds of things have been helpful. I’m hoping that more and more people in the Black and brown communities will get the vaccine and more and more people will share why it’s so important. In order for us to get herd immunity, we need more people to advocate.”

Vermund said that consistent messaging will continue to be the key to counter vaccine hesitancy, bridge trust among skeptical communities and build confidence in what have been “among the safest and most efficacious vaccines ever developed in the history of vaccinology.”   

Dumas said that she is continuing to encourage the city of New Haven, Hamden and other localities, as well as hospitals, to supply communities with basic information on vaccines by spending money on marketing and information campaigns that will provide people with links or phone numbers to call if they have questions about vaccines. 

In an attempt to promote vaccine uptake around the world, Omer has also been collaborating with Facebook on a social media campaign to convey evidence-based messages on the vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. 

“We have learned again and again, start with the evidence,” Omer said. “You start with the evidence and you start with the reassurance that these vaccines are safe.”

Despite efforts to increase vaccine uptake on local, national and international scales, on April 13, 2021, the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration called for a pause in the use of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine in response to six reports of cerebral sinus vein thrombosis — blood clotting in the brain — among women aged 18 to 48, out of more than seven million doses administered. Symptoms were reported by these patients six to 13 days after receiving the shot, and one of the cases was fatal. Following this announcement, Yale New Haven Health System suspended use of the J&J vaccine on April 13. 

When asked about how this pause on the J&J vaccine will impact the public’s trust in vaccines, Novemsky pointed to a principle in psychology called the “availability heuristic.” This idea says that when it is easy to bring examples of a tragedy to mind, people have a tendency to overestimate the actual probability of the threat.

For example, even though more than 7.2 million doses of the J&J vaccine had been administered in the United States, and only six cases of severe blood clotting were reported — constituting less than approximately 0.0009 percent of the population that received the J&J vaccine — Novemsky explained that these few cases might have a “disproportionate impact” on levels of vaccine hesitancy. 

“You know, death by omission, by not getting the vaccine and dying of COVID is something people worry about a lot less than errors of commission, ‘I take the vaccine and that kills me,” Novemsky explained. “Getting people to make a rational calculus is really very hard in these situations because of availability [heuristics] and the omission, commission bias that keep people from doing the right thing.”

Omer said that the argument that the pause on the J&J vaccine may impact vaccine acceptance negatively is a reasonable one. Still, Omer considered an alternative view.

“In the short run, [the pause on the J&J vaccine] may actually increase the confidence of people in vaccine safety” he said. “It’s not guaranteed. But if you have good messaging saying, look the CDC are being prudent about safety, that sends the message that they are not kidding around.”

A year of health messaging in review

When asked to reflect on the successes and failures of public health messaging from the past year of the pandemic, Vermund said that many policies from the last year have been suboptimal and that it is up to the public health community to fix these mistakes.  

“I do feel like all of us in the public health community need to learn how to better communicate to lay audiences and how to better communicate to policy makers,” Vermund said. 

Department chair of epidemiology Albert Ko added that inconsistent information from the CDC in the early days of the pandemic exacerbated already poor public health messaging. 

Gonsalves similarly described that last year’s events caught many public health leaders off-guard.  

“2020 in the U.S. was a lesson, a master class, in how to confuse, mislead the public, pit public health experts and scientists against ordinary Americans,” Gonsalves wrote. “Those of us working in public health need to up our game.” 

Omer noted that public health officials should work harder at communicating information about vaccine safety, especially as the rollout in the United States and abroad hastens. 

He described that the best way to convey messages moving forward is in a manner that is clear cut and rooted in science. He emphasized that the most important point when it comes to vaccines is that nothing is 100 percent safe, but that the vaccines are “incredibly safe” and the benefits on both an individual and collective scale far outweigh the risks. 

Ko acknowledged that unlike nations like Brazil — which has a universal healthcare system — the United States’ fragmented public health system merely compounded failures in public health messaging in the past year.

“We need an autopsy, a thorough investigation of how facts were twisted in 2020,” Gonsalves wrote. “How did our nation’s prized health agencies get silenced, how did officials get driven to repeat falsehoods they knew to be untrue, how did data get suppressed and manipulated? We need to know in detail how this all went wrong, how it happened, who was involved and when.”

The CDC reports 3,484,148 total cases of COVID-19 in the United States, while the World Health Organization reports over 141,057,106 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally.

Sydney Gray | sydney.gray@yale.edu

Correction, Apr. 21: An earlier version misstated that White “supports the implementation of broad containment policies on the entire population that do not consider the relative risks of severe infection.” That sentence has been removed. The story has been updated.

UP CLOSE | ‘Building the plane while we fly it’: Making student policy in a time of pandemic

After more than a year living in a world disrupted by COVID-19, administrators and student leaders reflect on how they have made student policy amid the uncertainty and challenges of the pandemic.

Story by Julia Bialek
Cover photo by Karen Lin
Published on April 16, 2021

Almost every aspect of students’ lives this year have been disrupted, made uncertain and radically changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. And Yale — an institution more than three centuries old that has weathered the test of time — was not immune to those changes.

Over the past year, Yale has been faced with unique challenges as it reimagines what it means to operate a university in a time of pandemic. And nowhere do those efforts to adapt to this particular moment in time stand out more than in student policy. While much of the student policy made over this past year has been explicitly in response to the pandemic — such as twice-weekly student testing and contact tracing protocols, the switch to nearly all remote courses and the decision to only invite three classes back to campus for each semester as a means of de-densifying campus — the University has also continued to make policy that is not explicitly pandemic-related but responds to the unique circumstances brought on by COVID-19.

Although all students experience the implications of policy decisions, not many students have the opportunity to reflect on what goes into making decisions, who makes them and why. The News spoke with five administrators and five students to get a better understanding of what it has been like to craft student policy in a time of pandemic. While the purpose of making student policy — making students’ time at Yale as meaningful as possible — has not changed, the process, practices and considerations that go into crafting policy have been upended. In some decisions, students are a part of the process. In others, Yale administrators do not gather student feedback prior to announcing the decision.

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

—Marvin Chun, Dean of Yale College

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

How student policy is made and who is involved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navigating new academic, student life concerns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(David Zheng, Senior Photographer)

The values guiding decision making

When issuing recommendations for policies that impact students, Spangler told the News that her first priority as COVID-19 coordinator is “the safety of our campus and our Yale and New Haven communities.”

Chun cited the example of Yale College’s choice to eliminate spring break. He explained how he understands that few students would have preferred the current break day schedule under normal circumstances, but it was the best way to give students a break without endangering students or public health. 

Chun explained that while student feedback is useful when there are a range of options being considered, because a decision like eliminating spring break truly did not have a safe alternative, that was one of the decisions for which students were not consulted.

Despite its intentions, some students criticized the decision to designate five break days dispersed throughout the semester in lieu of a traditional spring break, citing concerns about professors continuing to schedule classes and work.

“Whatever we do, we prioritize health and safety, and when tradeoffs need to be made, we favor what is safe for the community, students, faculty and staff,” Chun told the News. 

Another value guiding decision-making has been sustaining Yale’s academic mission. Chun explained that in all the decisions he makes concerning students, he tries to keep Yale’s academic mission upfront to make sure that students can continue their studies in the least disruptive and most meaningful way possible.

Both Chun and Boyd explained how supporting students is another guiding value that informs decision-making. Boyd explained that in the present circumstances, despite the fact that meeting individual student needs has become even more complex, it has become even more important for administrators to do so. 

“And then of course we are guided by trying to support our students in as many ways as we can and in a way that is as equitable and transparent as possible,” Chun said. “We never try to lose sight of doing what is fair for students and making sure that no one is uniquely disadvantaged by this situation or our decisions.”

Boyd explained that the challenge is often not determining the right policy, but rather working through the logistics of making it a reality.

Senior Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives and Communications Paul McKinley DRA ’96 — who served as the head of Saybrook College for 13 years and then became Yale College’s director of strategic communications before assuming his current role — explained that, from his vantage point, the purpose of making student policy has not changed during the pandemic, but the process and practices of doing so have.

“Protecting the health and wellbeing of our university and surrounding communities is the biggest factor that drives our decision-making. The cost of a decision is certainly a consideration, but we are grateful that it has not constrained our decisions to incur additional costs to safeguard our community.”

—Scott Strobel, University Provost

The cost of pandemic-time policy decisions

Meeting those needs, health or otherwise, costs money, though. According to Strobel, operating the University during a time of pandemic required a robust public health infrastructure that allowed the campus to reopen as safely as possible.

“Protecting the health and wellbeing of our university and surrounding communities is the biggest factor that drives our decision-making,” Strobel wrote to the News. “The cost of a decision is certainly a consideration, but we are grateful that it has not constrained our decisions to incur additional costs to safeguard our community.”

Spangler noted that she has never encountered any budgetary restraints from the administration in creating public health infrastructure.

According to Strobel, the University estimates that the pandemic has cost Yale more than $325 million in lost revenue and COVID-19-related expenses so far, noting that “these costs continue to accumulate.”

Strobel explained how the cost of building a public health infrastructure that would allow the University to reopen included purchasing COVID-19 tests, setting up testing infrastructure and vaccine clinics, conducting contact tracing, purchasing personal protective equipment and enhancing cleaning of campus buildings. He noted that these outlays have cost the University over $25 million and are projected to exceed $35 million.

Strobel noted that Yale has lost over $200 million in lost revenue due to the pandemic, the largest segment of which came from lower clinical revenues due to canceled surgical procedures and other medical appointments through the School of Medicine, and a lower enrollment in Yale College this year.

Twenty-three percent of Yale College students took a leave of absence in the fall 2020 semester, as compared to the 1.4 percent of students who took a leave of absence in the fall 2019 semester. According to Chun, a little over 20 percent of students took leaves of absence in both semesters of the 2020-21 academic year, and the number was higher for students who were not allowed back on campus for parts of the year — the class of 2023 in the fall and the class of 2024 in the spring.

Although many of these costs reflect the University’s attempts to directly address the public health challenges created by the pandemic, some of them are merely a byproduct of the University’s decision to operate in a time of pandemic.

Strobel cited the continued pay of employees who are unable to work remotely but still are not coming into work, the University’s plans to buy out a number of accrued vacation days for managerial and professional staff, suspending fees for on-campus parking and expanding health care and child care benefits as examples. Policies like these comprise much of the remaining $100 million in pandemic-related expenses and lost revenue to total the $325 million. 

Strobel noted that the University “managed to mitigate the impact of these COVID-related costs thanks to cost-saving efforts by Yale’s units and thanks to revenue generated by the endowment.”

In the most recent fiscal year — the year ending June 30, 2020 — the Yale Investments Office reported that the endowment earned a 6.8 percent return, reaching a total of $31.2 billion despite the pandemic’s economic effects.

After a year upended by online classes, the University has also increased tuition by nearly four percent for the 2021-22 academic year.

Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration

In talking about how his role as Dean of Yale College has changed since the onset of the pandemic, Chun initially joked about getting less sleep. But after a pause of reflection, he told the News that the greatest difference is in the extent to which collaboration occurs. 

“The job [of dean] is always busy, but it has become even more intense than ever,” Chun told the News. “But also, it has been a lot more collaborative than ever. Our ability to manage through this crisis is so heavily dependent on everyone’s diverse expertise and creative thinking in terms of coming up with solutions for which this expertise has been useful. If I had to characterize the year, it has been deeply collaborative.”

Other administrators interviewed by the News expressed similar sentiments about how the pandemic has brought out a collaborative spirit.

Spangler emphasized that although her name goes on the weekly emails that get sent out to the community, she does not work alone. Rather, she collaborates with many others to realize the University’s goal of allowing students and faculty to pursue their academic and work-related aspirations given the risks of the pandemic. 

Boyd also noted how the challenges created by the pandemic have illuminated the degree to which different entities on campus interact in order to pass policy that is responsive to both student desires and public health requirements. 

She cited how Yale Dining and Yale Conferences and Events worked together on making sure that students in quarantine had access to meals and laundry, how her office is currently working with the Yale College Council on policies for getting exercise equipment in the residential college courtyards and how the administration is currently working with seniors to realize their primary request of walking across the stage and hearing their names read aloud at Commencement. 

“The complexities of the pandemic have highlighted the degree to which so many systems interact, and the need for collaborative decision-making,” Boyd wrote to the News.

The student role in crafting policy during a pandemic 

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

—Joaquín Lara Midkiff ’24, Disability Empowerment for Yale vice president and YCC accessibility chair and senator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A year of hindsight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia Bialek | julia.bialek@yale.edu

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

UP CLOSE | ‘Why bother?’: A look at University resources for addressing discrimination and harassment

Faculty members, students and former employees discuss the progress — and ways to go — for systems responding to and addressing discrimination and harassment.

Story by Zaporah Price
Cover photo by Yale Daily News
Published on April 13, 2021

Yale School of Nursing student Leonne Tanis NUR ’21 told the News that she went to the Office of Institutional Equity and Access looking for “concrete actions” after an incident with a now former YSN professor. Instead, Tanis said it was “an absolute waste of my time.”

From late January 2019 to October 2019, Tanis was involved in an OIEA investigation headed by Senior Director Valarie Stanley. In an interview with the News, Tanis said that she filed a complaint with the office after being “publicly mocked” by a former YSN professor during a Graduate Entry Prespecialty in Nursing Program town hall. While YSN Dean Ann Kurth publicly apologized for “all the times YSN did not effectively address racism” in a June 2020 anti-racism statement and cited the 2019 town hall as a recent example, Tanis recalled the monthslong investigation as lacking in “transparency,” and said she would have used another resource if she knew she had the option.

Currently, there are two University systems solely dedicated to addressing and responding to harassment or discrimination at Yale: the OIEA and the Deans’ Designees. The News interviewed 16 Deans’ Designees, undergraduate students, graduate students, former employees and University administrators about the process to report racial discrimination or harassment. While administrators described a comprehensive system for addressing individual needs and experiences, those the system aims to serve criticized its opacity and inefficiency — if they had engaged with it at all.

In interviews with the News, four students did not have full understandings of available reporting processes. Two former employees and one graduate student expressed criticisms of the OIEA and its investigations process. Four of the students looked to other outlets — like the creation of an ombuds office and a broader focus on microaggressions at the University administrative level — as potential solutions.

The OIEA, formerly the Office for Equal Opportunity Programs, was created in 1980 to maintain compliance with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and, later on, other discrimination laws — such as the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Now, any student or employee can contact the OIEA with concerns of harassment and the office can assist with “dispute resolution” as well as investigations into incidents.

In 2017, Deans’ Designees were announced as an additional resource for students across the University to “offer advice and guidance related to diversity and inclusion, discrimination and harassment, and equal opportunity,” according to their website. Currently, there are 19 Deans’ Designees, one or more for each school and appointed by the deans of Yale’s constituent schools, designed to help “facilitate informal resolution” in regards to discrimination or harassment other than gender discrimination or sexual misconduct. They all perform this role in addition to a separate full-time role at the University. Most are administrators, and many hold positions related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

In 2019, Benjamin D. Reese — former vice president of the Office for Institutional Equity at Duke University and Duke University Health System — conducted a review of and submitted a report on Yale’s institutional responses and resources pertaining to racial discrimination and harassment. While he found that the University had taken steps in recent years to “create a more inclusive campus,” Reese concluded that for many students, it was “unclear” where they could go to register concerns or complaints related to race. His recommendations focused on seven areas, including Deans’ Designees, the OIEA and response and advice during or after incidents.

“Each summer the central administration reviews communications about discrimination and harassment procedures to make sure they are as clear as possible,” Elizabeth Conklin, the associate vice president for institutional equity, access and belonging, wrote to the News in an email. “We are continuing our ongoing work to review and where appropriate update policy, procedures, resources, and training opportunities related to preventing and responding to discrimination and harassment in connection with both the Reese report and our larger efforts around Belonging at Yale.”

The role of Deans’ Designees

“Overall, we want students to turn to staff with whom they feel comfortable to initially sort through their concerns.”

—Burgwell Howard, associate vice president of student life and one of two Deans’ Designees for undergraduates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I loosely knew about it, primarily because of the roles I play as a PL and [member] on the track team. What I would say is because I’ve been in University-sponsored positions of mentorship, I’m more likely to know about these kinds of systems than the average student.”

—Juma Sei ’22, an Afro-American Cultural Center peer liaison

Who do students turn to?

Juma Sei ’22, an Afro-American Cultural Center peer liaison, said he “loosely knew” about the Deans’ Designees and process to report discrimination or harassment, but pointed his first-year students to other systems of support on a much more regular basis.

“I loosely knew about it, primarily because of the roles I play as a PL and [member] on the track team,” Sei told the News. “What I would say is because I’ve been in University-sponsored positions of mentorship, I’m more likely to know about these kinds of systems than the average student.”

Sei said that his track coach had mentioned Howard as someone team members could go to if they faced discrimination or harassment. Sei said that for himself, he was “much more inclined” to talk with his first-year counselor and peer liaison during his first year at Yale because student support systems were “more comfortable.”

Now as a peer liaison, Sei said that if an incident occurred, his advice would be to first speak with Afro-American Cultural Center Director Risë Nelson. Asian American Cultural Center peer liaison Isabelle Rhee ’22 expressed similar sentiments.

“If I had a first year who had an incident of racial discrimination or like a microaggression from someone at Yale, my first impulse would definitely be to talk to Dean [Joliana] Yee,” Rhee told the News.

As peer liaisons, Rhee and Sei recalled Howard giving talks about the resources available for addressing discrimination or harassment in diversity training sessions. They also said that in their conversations with their respective first years, there was not any talk of discrimination or harassment as defined by the University, but rather concerns regarding microaggressions, imposter syndrome or frustrations over national issues related to race.

Both Howard and Conklin cited cultural center deans — along with deans and heads of residential colleges — as members of the Yale community undergraduates can turn to.

But for Howard, he would like to see “institutional resources bolstered” at the OIEA, because not only do graduate students turn to the OIEA more frequently than undergraduates, but so do faculty members and employees of the University at large.

“Dean Boyd and I can manage what comes through Yale College,” Howard said, “[But] I would love to see that office expanded even further.”

OIEA: Infrastructure and criticisms

In his 2019 report Reese wrote that the then-named Office for Equal Opportunity Program needed to “reorganize, strengthen, expand … [and] be staffed to enhance its ability to conduct investigations” in a “timely manner.”

People involved in two recent OIEA inquiries — one into comments made by a former YSN professor and one into the workplace culture of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence — described a process plagued by delays, lacking in transparency and culminating in disappointment.

“I didn’t know what to expect [writing to Stanley], but in terms of my experience at Yale in general I wasn’t expecting much,” wrote Andrés Richner-Maldonado, a former YCEI employee who co-authored a letter about workplace racism, including a Zoom bombing at an anti-racism event. “And so I personally wasn’t surprised that it took about a month to get a reply, I was just more surprised that given everything we wrote the reply was just thinned. It’s like, why bother?”

While both Deans’ Designees and the OIEA can navigate students through various options to discuss and address incidents and concerns, the OIEA is a University-wide resource that has the broader capacity to conduct investigations, Conklin said. In addition to students, the office serves current employees as well as applicants for programs and employment.

According to Conklin, the OIEA has three staff members — the same number Reese originally noted in his report. Conklin wrote the search process for two new OIEA positions began in late 2019, but was halted with the onset of the pandemic. She added after “assessing organizational needs,” one of the two positions was elevated to associate director. Both searches were reactivated in early 2021, and Conklin predicts they will begin in the early summer. She added that OIEA is in “active recruitment” for the two additional staff members: one equity and access representative and one associate director — a new role for the office. Conklin said that a larger staff will help shorten the timeframe of OIEA investigations.

Tanis told the News that following the January 2019 Graduate Entry Prespecialty in Nursing Program town hall where a former professor did a “stereotypical impersonation of a Black woman” directed at her, Tanis took her grievances “directly to the Provost’s Office” after the incident occurred.

From there, she was pointed in the direction of the OIEA, where she got in contact with Stanley on Jan. 31, 2019. According to Tanis and emails obtained by the News, Stanley told her that the OIEA handled complaints and that they could meet the next day in the office. During the meeting, Tanis recalled Stanley mentioning that conducting an OIEA investigation meant that the findings were only recommendations to the YSN administration.

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

—Leonne Tanis NUR ’21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Elizabeth Conklin, associate vice president for institutional equity, access and belonging

Looking ahead

Tanis told the News that much later after her OIEA investigation was complete, as she was sharing her experience with a faculty member, they mentioned another potential resource: the YSM’s ombudsperson — a confidential investigator external from YSM faculty that attempts to resolve complaints and problems between employees and an employer or students and a university. Tanis did not know about the ombudsperson prior to her conversation with the faculty member. She also wondered if they were available to speak with YSN students, or were restricted to YSM community members.

According to Nancy Angoff — associate dean for student affairs and a Deans’ Designee at the medical school — “the office of the ombuds does not continue now that there is a robust Office of Academic and Professional Development headed by Dr. Linda Mayes.”

The OAPD helps medical school faculty through mentorship, leadership development and overseeing faculty development programs in all medical school departments — according to their website. According to Angoff and Michael Schwartz, another Deans’ Designee at the School of Medicine, the medical school surveys students anonymously about “experiences of discrimination, harassment and bias” at the end of every course, elective and clinical clerkship. These reports are then reviewed by associate deans, course directors, chairs and the OAPD, but are not accessible to the entire student body or public due to confidentiality.

Currently, Yale and Dartmouth College are the only two universities in the Ivy League without a University-wide ombuds office, and members of the Graduate Student Assembly are advocating for its creation.

For former Graduate Student Assembly chair Lucylle Armentano GRD ’21 and former vice chair Ryan Petersburg GRD ’21, the creation of a University-wide ombuds office could not be more necessary.

“The real advantage to this obviously is that an ombuds person is completely neutral, it’s intended to be an office that is not tied to the graduate school, graduate students or Yale College,” Armentano said. “There’s a lack of knowledge that these [Deans’ Designees] exist, and the Office of Institutional Equity and Access, I think many people don’t understand that that exists also. And even if they know, there might be that hesitation because of the potential links to their department or professor.”

Armentano added that though the Deans’ Designees “were fantastic,” the transparency of an ombuds office can be “promoted really well” because it is a “stand-alone office.”

“The real advantage to this obviously is that an ombuds person is completely neutral, it’s intended to be an office that is not tied to the graduate school, graduate students or Yale College. There’s a lack of knowledge that these [Deans’ Designees] exist, and the Office of Institutional Equity and Access, I think many people don’t understand that that exists also. And even if they know, there might be that hesitation because of the potential links to their department or professor.”

—Lucylle Armentano GRD ’21, former Graduate Student Assembly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zaporah Price | zaporah.price@yale.edu

 

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

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

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

Story by Christian Robles
Cover photo by Cassidy Arrington
Published on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not all students have shifted into the hybrid model.

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

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

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

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

‘There’s no playbook’: Teaching remotely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A false dawn? Switching to a hybrid model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NHFT advocacy

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

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

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

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

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

Similar challenges from Yale students in teaching roles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a post-pandemic education system might look like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christian Robles | christian.robles@yale.edu

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

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

Story by Beatriz Horta
Cover photo by Hedy Tung
Published on April 9, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prioritizing remote research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funding research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Akiko Iwasaki, Professor of Immunology

An expedited publishing process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pivoting research focus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long-term impacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Beatriz Horta | beatriz.horta@yale.edu