COVERAGE

I didn’t pack much: a small suitcase I could trust to fit in any overhead bin, a camera bag, my Canon G7 X, extra memory cards, my laptop, my cellphone, a Yale Baseball cap, my wallet, a monstrous 814-page novel by Hanya Yanagihara, and a toothbrush.

Historians don’t agree on the specific election that gave rise to the campaign embed, a masochistic subspecies of political journalist that turns their back on every comfort known to mankind every four years to travel across the country in the back of a glorified school bus. Many, however, like CNN alum Peter Hamby, point to a 1988 Time Magazine piece by Laurence Zuckerman that heralded a group of 20-somethings following presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson as the way of the future. They weren’t bothered by 4 a.m. wakeup calls. They didn’t mind subsisting on airline peanuts and protein bars. And they were young — free from the duties of serious relationships and family life. While network correspondents were tethered to hefty camera gear and nightly newscasts, embeds could pick up and move at a moment’s notice, traveling across the state or across the country.

In the last 20-plus years, the job has cemented itself within the American mythos. Stories “from the trail” of embeds boozing, seducing and marrying future White House bigwigs inspired Timothy Crouse’s famed The Boys on the Bus and half of all the television plot lines Aaron Sorkin has pumped out in the last two decades. It’s a romantic job. A tough, romantic job — one that tests just how much your body can take while forcing you to grapple with every conception you’ve ever had of this country, its politics and its people.

 ***

Three days before arriving in Albuquerque, I was in Boston, waiting in line for a small black coffee inside Logan International Airport. It was already late in the afternoon but I needed to be awake for the entire flight. I had footage to comb through, Airbnb hosts to contact, and an itinerary that seemed to evolve by the hour. Across the terminal, a panel of network news pundits was discussing the 2016 presidential campaign on television. They touched on Hillary Clinton’s persistent email woes, debated recent tightening in nationwide polling and then turned to the California primary. All three remaining campaigns would be descending upon the Golden State for the next few weeks, hoping for a groundswell of voter turnout to carry them into the nominating conventions come mid-July.

I was headed west too, just on a packed United Airlines Airbus A320 instead of a private plane. The plan was to fly to LAX, drive a few hundred miles to meet up with the Donald Trump campaign in New Mexico, and then follow his traveling press corps to San Diego and up the coast of California. It wasn’t much of a plan — more of a quarter-life crisis that Jack Kerouac could write a short, angsty book about. But that didn’t bother me, at least not at the time.

If you grew up in the United States, you’re probably familiar with the phrase “the most important election of our lifetimes.” Talking heads and campaign surrogates resurrect it once every four years, dredging up a maddening degree of party polarization, just so the media has something to cover and voters actually show up to vote. But even though it’s a tired, horribly overused phrase, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone at Yale who doesn’t think it genuinely applies this time around.

Regardless of who wins in November, Clinton and Trump will go down as two of the most significant characters in American history. One is the first female major-party presidential nominee in the country’s 238 years of existence. The other secured more primary votes than any GOP candidate ever. With light-years between their policy platforms, rhetorical styles and time in government, the pair comprises one of the strangest political odd-couples this country has ever seen. And, chances are, you absolutely, wholeheartedly, 100 percent despise one or both of them.

Yalies aren’t shy about their political beliefs; it’s often one of the reasons students are drawn here in the first place. I was the weird seven-year-old who opted for Meet the Press and The McLaughlin Group over Nickelodeon on Sunday mornings growing up; I’d plop myself on the living room couch in pajamas and eat breakfast watching Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift call each other sociopaths.

Trump and Clinton have transcended their roles as political standard-bearers, though, becoming de facto symbols of America’s evolving culture war. And, as such, they’ve become the two most disliked and distrusted candidates to ever get so close to the White House, demonized to such a degree that 27 percent of American voters in a Public Policy Polling survey said they would rather see a “giant meteor of death” hit Earth than vote to elect either major-party candidate.

Looking back to the beginning of the summer, no one had any idea who would win come November — and recent CNN/ORC polling suggests that the pair is still on relatively even ground. At print time of this article, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and a number of other swing states were all too close to call.

There’s a sense among the traveling press that they’re watching history, that nothing like this race has ever happened before (in retrospect, no, Barry Goldwater was not a billionaire real estate tycoon turned reality show host turned major-party candidate). And, perhaps more interestingly, that it will likely never happen again. Data from the Pew Research Center shows Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before, and the country will see even greater demographic shifts in the coming decades. The “Trump train” — a voting bloc of primarily white, male, middle-class, high school-educated voters — may never again hold as much power as it has in this election cycle.

In short, 2016 isn’t just a referendum on the Affordable Care Act, or the settlement of Syrian refugees or even the last eight years of Obama’s presidency; it will serve as perhaps the last competitive battle between a populist wing of the old Republican base — reinvigorated by Trump’s signature Trumpiness — and a growing Democratic coalition of women, millennials and people of color.

I met a young Black Lives Matter activist outside Cleveland’s Public Square before the second night of the GOP convention. Her braids were dyed bronze to complement a sleek pair of sunglasses, and she wore a shirt that read Brown As Fuck. She told me she identified as a Democrat, but didn’t love Clinton. I followed up by asking if she thought the race would still be competitive come November. “I think it’s going to be close,” she said, “but if we win this one, we’ll never lose again.”

***

Traditional presidential campaigns tend to announce rallies, fundraisers and sometimes even diner meet-and-greets days ahead of time; it allows journalists to adjust their schedules to easily follow candidates. Press coverage and media exposure equal a rise in poll numbers when most of the electorate is still undecided. That’s why many argue Trump’s estimated $2 billion worth of “free advertising” first vaulted him to the top of the GOP primary pecking order more than a year ago. Coverage is so valuable that campaigns charter buses and planes so major outlets can hire a cover-every-event traveling reporter. But the patriarch of America’s House Lannister decided to ignore this practice. Trump spent the summer hopscotching between cities on his Boeing 757 instead, announcing his plans often less than 24 hours ahead of time and leaving his press corps to fight over last-minute American Airlines tickets. As a result, veteran political operatives and one Yale freshman were constantly glued to their phones. Every moment of not refreshing the “Make America Great Again” homepage was one I could find myself stranded and left behind by the campaign.

Despite the constant chaos, routine on the trail still develops rather naturally. Mornings generally start the same way. You wake up at some ungodly hour before the sun rises, shower if you have time, and skim through the dozens of emails and AP updates you’ve received overnight. Breakfasts are fast and simple: coffee and cheap protein bars. Then the day is spent in a constant state of motion. You’re sprinting to catch the Democratic National Committee press bus to South Philly or hunched over in the back seat of a graveyard-shift Uber pretending to sleep. You’re headed down the tarmac on a flight headed for Orlando or editing stories on a SoCal Amtrak train, glancing out the window every few minutes at the Pacific Ocean. And in the rare moments of calm (during days both Trump and Clinton are out of reach or nights you make it to a motel at a reasonable hour) … well, you spend those moving, too: carpools to rooftop bars on Cleveland’s famed East 4th Street, midnight food pilgrimages to 7-Eleven, track workouts at public parks in West Hollywood. Tiny shifts in your schedule are the only things that keep days from blurring together.

As time goes on, most weeks end with the feeling you’ve both conquered the world and achieved absolutely nothing. You may have traveled halfway across a state — or even halfway across the country — but you’ve also been forced to listen to the same poll-tested, focus-grouped applause lines for the umpteenth time. Speeches rarely change. Gaudy spectacle gets tired. Celebrity testimonials are annoying. The same playlists drone out of high school gymnasium speakers on repeat (Clinton likes Katy Perry and Rachel Platten, Trump prefers Elton John and The Rolling Stones). And campaign slogans and party chants (Build the Wall, Dump Trump, I’m With Her, Lock Her Up) bludgeon themselves into one crazed, self-righteous cacophony.

The people make it interesting, though. Not Trump or Clinton — they’re special in their own way — but their supporters: The waitresses and obstetricians and truck drivers and retired teachers that form a line before dawn for the chance to post a single, blurry Snapchat story of their hero. I conducted more than a thousand individual interviews over the course of the summer, and every person manages to surprise you.

At my second Trump event in San Diego, I was still learning the ropes of the traveling press corps. I hadn’t woken up early enough to get screened into the media pen, so I was forced to enter with the 7,000 supporters that had poured into the city overnight. It was easy enough to make it to the front; people see a lanyard press pass with a camera and they literally run in the opposite direction. No one likes the press. Perhaps that’s the best lesson I learned this summer. The notion of a “neutral” observer doesn’t exist any more; journalists aren’t allies, or particularly “objective” witnesses. Anything they see may ultimately be tampered with, spun and polluted into some Frankenstein’s monster of a hit piece. You’re not necessarily the enemy, but you’re not welcome either. People look at and treat you like a hyena — a mangy scavenger that circles from a distance, waiting to snatch away just enough to write a story.

By the time I made it to the front of the convention center, Sarah Palin was onstage delivering an impassioned call to arms like only she can. She stuck to her usual talking points: Obama’s “apology tour,” the oppressive tax system, moose. The speech wandered a bit, but the crowd loved her. One young woman in particular, a short, fair-skinned brunette wearing a Spiderman sweatshirt, hung on every word. She erupted with glee any time Trump was mentioned by name, jumping up and down and screaming “Build the wall! Build the wall!” And she was so infatuated with Milo Yiannopoulos (the controversial Breitbart Tech editor) that when he walked onto the dais she almost started crying.

I asked her, casually, what she thought of his comments on feminism. She responded flatly, citing earlier remarks by Yiannopoulos, “I believe in equal rights, it’s just that feminism is worse than cancer.”

I dropped the topic and moved on to Trump. She thought his lack of time spent in Washington was a clear-cut asset, and when I followed up by asking if it might hamper his policy work, she countered, “It doesn’t matter. He’s a genius, all you have to do is look at his businesses.”

We talked a bit more about the real estate tycoon. She loved his children, especially Ivanka, and couldn’t wait to vote in November. It didn’t bother her that I was a reporter — or that I didn’t express agreement (or disagreement for that matter) with anything she said. “I don’t mind people who are neutral. It’s just that no one is really neutral. There’s a reason people call it the ‘liberal media.’” Donald Trump took to the stage then — the crowd exploded, of course — and I didn’t manage to ask her another question until after the rally ended.

We were walking out. She had removed the red, white and blue bows from her hair and was tossing them into the air on beat with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” I asked her what she planned to do should Trump lose. She didn’t answer right away. The question didn’t puzzle her, she just couldn’t find the words she wanted. Then she looked at me and smiled, “That’s the thing, though. He’s not going to lose.”

***

The traveling press corps combines “the incestuousness of a New England hamlet with the giddiness of a mid-ocean gala and the physical rigors of the Long March,” or at least it did for Crouse and the reporters who covered the 1972 presidential race between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. As Katy Tur explains in an essay chronicling her year as an NBC campaign embed, life on the road has evolved to some extent. For starters, the culture has become distinctly more professional. Journalists spend less time drinking and more time debating objectivity — what it means to strive for balanced coverage in the age of Trump. Not everything has changed, though. Flying, driving and running after the future president is still a family affair. Over the course of the summer you recognize more and more of the usual suspects: Nancy Cordes from CBS, Brianna Keilar from CNN, Jennifer Griffin from Fox News. Awkward conversations get started. They turn into normal conversations, which in turn produce introductions and more awkward conversations.

I met Alex Stone, a national correspondent for ABC News, in the middle of a Trump protest in downtown San Diego. The rally had just ended — it was the one where he questioned U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s impartiality because of his Mexican heritage — and Trump supporters began flooding into the street. Waiting for them was what Reuters later estimated to be nearly 1,000 demonstrators.

In the heat of a protest — or even a riot — a press pass and camera garner you some protection. You’re generally safe from the line of fire. Bottles and rocks are lobbed at police and rally-goers. Sucker punches, tear gas and smoke grenades are thrown back. People claim different sections of the street, barricade themselves around one another and test just how much the other side will take. Arguments over who is more un-American escalate into screaming matches which erupt into fist fights. Then officers clad in riot gear sweep in as a unit, herding people into smaller, more controllable pockets. Only the press move freely.

Stone and I found ourselves interviewing a SDPD officer. A police helicopter had just announced overhead that the protest had been deemed an “unlawful assembly.” We both wanted to know if officers planned to use tear gas on the hundreds that refused to leave. He declined to comment.

Reporters and cameramen began taking precautionary measures, passing out impromptu gas masks jerry-rigged from the facial screens surgeons use in hospitals. The crowd was getting more volatile: A Trump doll had been hanged in effigy from a lamppost. A group of men wearing military camo responded by hoisting a Confederate flag into the air.

I recorded, by happenstance, a neighborly couple in their late 40s walk up to a young woman with olive skin. The man — who was dressed so much like a “typical dad” it scared me — thrust his middle finger into the girl’s face, screaming “Go back to your country! Fuck you and fuck Mexico!”

I looked to Stone, who was also there, also recording. I can remember saying I couldn’t believe this was happening in our country. Political unrest of this scale was something you saw on the news, but never in person, never in a commercial district of San Diego.

All around us massive, faceless men cloaked in Kevlar were throwing people to the ground, wrapping their hands with plastic cuffs. It wasn’t working, though. For every arrest made, three more protesters would brandish masks and rocks and bottles. Everyone was filled with anger, and they didn’t need much provocation to act on it. Nearly as soon as the rally ended, one boy, no older than 16, was screaming for help. His face was covered with blood. He kept shouting, “I don’t even support Trump! Why did they hit me!?”

***

San Diego and Albuquerque were the two worst protests I witnessed on the road, but they weren’t the only ones. Demonstrations followed both Trump and Clinton all the way to their respective nominating conventions, fluctuating in intensity and violence. I’d greet them nearly every time I walked out of a campaign event, and every time I would be received differently. Some days I would be allowed to take pictures. Other days — especially if I was wearing too much red or blue — they’d curse at me, cover their faces with signs, scream that I was a racist or a socialist or a communist or a bigot.

I’d curate the stories I sent back to my parents. Calls home were light and happy: I’d rave about West Coast weather and discuss the latest episode of Game of Thrones; mentions of tear gas exposure, sucker punches, flying bricks, and the like were edited out. They were only a small part of the summer anyway. What mattered more was simply being on the campaign trail, seeing firsthand what everyone else glimpses on television. It’s tiring. And frustrating. But you keep going because you love it. There’s something incredible about meeting people who are so passionate about the state of their country. You may disagree with their politics, you may disagree with their methods, but that doesn’t matter. You’re there for the adventure, to watch and to report on history.

UP CLOSE:
A Coalition for the future?

by Jon Victor

Published on September 21, 2016

0

Karina Hernandez, who has worked as a college advisor at Moisés E. Molina High School in Dallas for the past two years, knows potential when she sees it.

Every year, out of the 2,000 students enrolled at the majority Hispanic, low-income Texas high school, Hernandez identifies a few students whom she thinks could hold their own in the often-opaque process that determines acceptance at elite universities. She tells them what any college counselor would: that there are schools looking for students with life experiences like theirs, that they could attend for comparatively cheaper and, in some cases, free of charge.

The problem is, they don’t believe her.

“When I reach out to students who I would consider to be competitive [applicants], and I ask them whether they want to apply to schools like Harvard or Yale, most look at me like I’m crazy,” Hernandez said.

A brand-new application platform is seeking to change that mentality.

The Coalition Application was announced last September as part of a joint initiative among Yale and more than 80 other elite colleges calling themselves the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success. Membership in the Coalition has expanded to more than 90 schools since last year, and the number is still climbing.

The goal was to create an application that would fundamentally change the way the college application process operates. It would encourage high school students — especially low-income ones — to think about college starting in ninth grade, rather than in the months before applications are due, and it would do so via a sleek, simple interface that would compete with the outdated, unreliable Common Application.

Representatives from the Coalition have highlighted features such as a simplified fee-waiver process, a messaging system for easy communication between students and college counselors and the “Locker,” a digital archive that allows students to upload noteworthy schoolwork for counselors to review, so that when they actually apply to college their senior years, they have a portfolio with files ready to submit.

(Elinor Hills)

“The idea of the Coalition App is to provide an opportunity, particularly to low-income students and community-based organizations, to engage students early in the process,” said Dick Nesbitt, director of admissions at Williams College, a Coalition school.

Yet in its first year, the Coalition App has been plagued by a host of issues, from the logistical — a shaky rollout caused almost half of the Coalition member schools to delay using it this year — to the existential, as it struggles to distinguish itself from the Common App. Critics have also speculated that the new platform may do more harm than good for low-income students by further complicating the application process.

Through criticism and uncertainty, Yale and other schools are forging a path forward, citing a commitment to increasing access to affordable education for high-achieving students of any socioeconomic background. Tomorrow, as hundreds of college counselors from across the country gather in Columbus, Ohio for the annual National Association for College Admissions Counseling National Conference, where the Coalition made its debut last September, proponents of the Coalition will have the opportunity to defend it anew.

But the question remains: Is this the admissions revolution many had hoped for?

OPTIONS, OPTIONS, OPTIONS

For the first time this fall, applicants to Yale’s next class of freshmen will have their choice of three different applications: the Common Application, the Coalition Application and the QuestBridge application.

The development marks a historic shift in the way Yale looks at applicants, and fits within an increasing effort by the Office of Undergraduate Admissions to reduce barriers for low-income students applying to college.

Previously, QuestBridge applicants — high achieving, low-income students who were “matched” with Yale — had to fill out the Common Application in addition to the QuestBridge application, which discouraged some students who might have otherwise applied, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan said. With the addition of the Coalition App, the Admissions Office has arranged for the QuestBridge application to stand on its own in the review process, meaning QuestBridge applicants are no longer required to submit the Common App.

The changes mean that the Admissions Office now has to compare students across three separate applications. However, admissions officials at Yale and other colleges using the Coalition App this year promised to smooth the transition by making sure the applications are as similar as possible for easy comparison.

Yale changed its questions on the Common App this year to nearly mirror those on the Coalition App. In the past, the Common Application had just one general question asking students to reflect on something the admissions committee might not glean from their applications; now, applicants can choose to answer two of three questions about community, learning and an activity they love doing — the first two of which are repeated verbatim on the Coalition App.

However, students using the Coalition App must also submit a digital document, image, audio file or video they are proud of from their Locker and reflect on it in the context of one of those two questions.

Quinlan said he does not anticipate that comparing applicants across various platforms will be difficult, adding that the two applications are very similar, with the exception of one Yale-specific question on the Coalition App. The Admissions Office is agnostic to the type of application a student uses, he said, reflecting the way standardized tests like the ACT and the SAT are used in the admissions process.

“Students should choose whichever application they feel allows them to put their best foot forward in the process,” he said.

Nesbitt said the similarity was designed to ease the transition into the platform for many students.

“We didn’t want to make it any more difficult for students, particularly students who are perhaps applying to schools that are not Coalition App schools,” he said. “We didn’t want to create something that would be completely different.”

A DIFFERENCE IN NAME ONLY?

But the efforts by the Coalition App’s creators to ensure a smooth transition have created a new problem: With so much similarity between the Coalition App and the Common App, was there really a need to create yet another platform for students and counselors to familiarize themselves with?

And if the two applications do not differ, how can colleges be sure that low-income students will feel the Coalition’s intended effect at all?

Emmi Harward, executive director of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools, said the Coalition App did not deliver on the change it purported to bring to the admissions process.

“I don’t see it as being nearly as different from what the Common App offers as I had anticipated it would be, and the majority of the colleges’ applications that I have clicked through on the Coalition site look to be almost identical to the information that’s being requested on the Common Application,” Harward said.

She acknowledged that Yale is an exception, because its section of the Coalition App allows students to submit files from their Lockers in relation to the questions.

But other schools that have rolled out the new app have not capitalized on its new software capabilities. University of Florida’s section of the Coalition App, for example, does not involve questions that relate to materials students upload through the Locker.

(Quinn Lewis)

Andrea Felder, director of freshman and international admissions at the University of Florida, said that although the school is accepting only the Coalition App this year, it did not make any changes to the questions it asked on the application, nor does it plan to incorporate functions made possible by the Locker, as Yale is doing.

“We actually modeled it on exactly what we had on our own institutional application,” Felder said. “We would typically change the question each year anyway. We chose to go with the questions that were suggested by the Coalition.”

While many students in Florida will use the Coalition App this year, Felder said, those from out of state may need to be convinced that it is the best option. Still, the number of applications received this year is already up 32 percent compared to the same time last year, she said, which could reveal students’ eagerness to try out the new platform.

However, Katherine Cohen GRD ’97, founder of the college advising company IvyWise and a former reader in the Yale Admissions Office, said that for most students, using the Coalition App would create unnecessary work, since the majority of schools accepting the Coalition App also accept the Common App.

Only 15 schools using the Coalition App did not already use the Common App; these were mostly schools like University of Florida and the University of Maryland, College Park that used applications unique to their institutions.

Quinlan acknowledged that relatively few students will actually use the option in its first year: He anticipates that the “vast majority” of applicants will choose the Common App. Nesbitt offered a more specific estimate, saying he did not expect more than 10 percent of Williams’ total applicants to use the Coalition App.

IDENTITY CRISIS

If not different in format, the Coalition is supposed to be different in scope: the group has actively marketed its platform as a way to specifically help low-income students. But administrators involved deny that it is intended to be a niche application like the QuestBridge application, leading to confusion over who the Coalition App really serves.

Though Coalition leaders like Quinlan insist that the Coalition App is for everyone, wealthier students have yet to feel the need to switch over to an application that remains functionally identical to the one that already works for them. The result is an application that, in practice if not in name, fills a need felt only by low-income students.

Cohen — who offers paid college counseling services — said she recommended that her students not use the Coalition App this year, given that there are still many unknowns associated with the platform.

And Erik Michels, head of college counseling at Bellarmine Preparatory School in Tacoma, Washington, where tuition exceeds $13,000 per year, had even less to say about it: this year, none of the 1,000 students at Bellarmine Prep will be using the Coalition App.

“It’s really not even affecting our students,” he said. “I haven’t gotten into it in very much depth.”

(Quinn Lewis)

Kaily Chou, a junior at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago, said she had never heard of the Coalition App, even though her potential college list includes Yale, Cornell and Johns Hopkins — all schools that are part of the Coalition.

But Nesbitt said the Coalition App is available to anyone who wants to use it. He highlighted the platform’s streamlined fee waiver process as a potential draw for all students. He also said that having a large number of public universities using the same general application as many private ones was another reason why students should use the Coalition App.

Chou said that although she hasn’t used the Coalition App, spreading the college process over four years would reduce the time crunch students feel during application season.

“I think it would be better all through high school because a lot of the seniors I know are really struggling and stressed out to get it finished on time,” Chou said.

Sara Urquidez, executive director of Academic Success Program Dallas, a nonprofit organization that operates in public schools, said in the past her organization has had trouble convincing students to apply to Texas A&M in addition to schools on the Common App, since the two applications were so different. Texas A&M is a member of the Coalition.

However, Aba Blankson, the Common Application’s director of communications, highlighted the diversity of colleges and universities that use the Common App. More than 700 schools are registered with the Common App, she said, including over 200 that require no application fee.

While an overwhelming majority of Coalition schools also accept the Common App, Quinlan spoke to a potential divide between set of colleges that take mostly one or the other.

“The real decision is, ‘Does my college list include a lot of overlap with the Common App schools or the Coalition schools?’” he said.

TECHNOLOGY WOES

While questions of expanding access have dominated conversations about the Coalition App since its release, it also remains unclear whether it will fulfill one of the initial motives for its existence: dependability.

The story of the Coalition begins in October 2013, when days before the deadline for early applications to hundreds of colleges nationwide, the Common App did what panicked students had always feared it would: it crashed.

Yale had no choice but to extend its early application deadline by four days that fall, delaying its entire review process. But in the weeks and months thereafter, college admissions officers chatted informally about creating a new application to avoid being totally reliant on just one platform, which had proven itself to be faulty.

Quinlan was involved in early conversations about developing an application platform that would be more reliable and user-friendly. By May 2014, a small group of colleges including Harvard and Yale had submitted a proposal to software vendors outlining the specifications for the platform.

But in its first year, technological difficulties have already undercut the Coalition App’s promised efficiency.

When it was announced last year, the Coalition intended to have its platform up and running by January so that students could begin adding to their digital Locker. Some colleges would then begin accepting the Coalition App as early as July 2016.

The timeline for the rollout ended up being completely different. Annie Reznik, executive director of the Coalition, said the software wasn’t delivered to all member institutions until July 1, and the portal did not open to students until July 28.

Colleges have also had difficulty integrating the Coalition App into their existing technology systems. As a result, less than two-thirds of the group’s member institutions will be accepting the Coalition App this fall. In the Ivy League alone, Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth have decided not to accept the Coalition Application for now, leaving it split down the middle.

(Quinn Lewis)

The University of Washington, where about 80 students from Bellarmine Prep apply each year, intended to accept only the Coalition App this year, but technological difficulties, coupled with an issue over the application’s disciplinary section, have pushed those plans back a year.

“Anytime you are doing something brand-new there is going to be an adjustment period,” Reznik said. “But I think the technology has rolled out really smoothly, and I think the interface is really user-friendly for students. I’m really happy where we are in a moment of year one.”

Fortunately for Yale, it has not had such problems. This year, with the help of local technology firm Technolutions, the Admissions Office has found a way to incorporate data from multiple application platforms into Slate, an application reading software used by more than 400 colleges and universities.

WAIT AND SEE

So far, the Coalition App has not led to the watershed moment in college admissions that it promised. But the jury is still out for its role in the future.

College counselors and admissions officers interviewed for this article agreed that the Coalition App would not replace the Common App, but would be another option for any student in search of one. The volume of applications that colleges will receive yearly through the new platform remains uncertain.

“I think the most remarkable thing is how little we’ve heard about it,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University and an outspoken critic of the Coalition since its inception. “Even when representatives from Coalition schools go to their high schools, they’re not talking about it. The rank-and-file admissions members seem to know little about what’s going on.”

Parke Muth, former associate dean of admissions at University of Virginia and an independent college counselor, said many in the admissions community still doubt that the Coalition App can bring about the intended effect for low-income students.

“Although it’s meant for that, the low-income kids may well be the last ones to use it,” Muth said. “There’s a feeling that that’s going to be a field day for people like me. People are going to be seeking even more help.”

Boeckenstedt said he was puzzled at how fracturing the college admissions process by rolling out a new application portal would increase access for low-income students.

He was also cynical about the Coalition’s purported emphasis on access, given the elite caliber of its member institutions.

“If you’re really about access, you don’t just pull together the institutions that have historically have been the worst at granting access and slap that label on them,” he said.

But Nesbitt said if the Coalition App makes it simpler for any low-income student to consider his or her college options more fully, then the portal would be doing what the Coalition had envisioned.

And though there were still many questions outstanding about the Coalition App, Muth, Boeckenstedt, Harward and Cohen all said the platform still had promise.

“We’re kind of taking a wait-and-see approach,” Cohen said. “We definitely don’t want to have students doing more work than they have to right now, but I do think that the Coalition Application is promising and we may have different advice next year.”

Muth said one of the Coalition’s best features was the flexibility it had in demanding a variety of content from applicants, which could change the general public’s perception that college admissions are just a “crapshoot.” If the Coalition App can allow students more opportunity to get their voices across, colleges could make more nuanced decisions, he said.

For Nesbitt, the Coalition App is still a kind of experiment.

“It will take a few years, I think, for this to catch on,” Nesbitt said. “It’s still relatively new.”

And until the Coalition figures out where it stands on key questions of its identity — a more reliable version of the Common App or something brand-new, a niche portal or one with mass appeal — counselors like Hernandez and Urquidez will continue advertising it, while other students will get away with ignoring it.

UP CLOSE:
Architecture a difficult path for women

by Joey Ye

Published on September 14, 2016

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After Julia Medina ’18 officially began the architecture major in the spring of her sophomore year, she received her first list of roughly 50 notable architectural works to serve as an inspiration and guide for her own designs. She noticed that within the list of works, called precedents, there were only about four works by females from which to choose.

This fall, when she began a junior studio course required in the major, “Methods and Form in Architecture,” she was again presented with 20 precedent studies, this time with roughly two buildings attributable to women.

For female students studying architecture, this problem is symbolic of a larger issue — although the numbers do not necessarily reflect it. The undergraduate major at Yale is made up of 28 students, just 12 of whom are male. The Yale School of Architecture, with over 200 graduate students, is 42 percent female according to digital-data company Graphiq,  and is led this year by the first female dean in its history, Deborah Berke. Comparable institutions like the Princeton School of Architecture and the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation are also composed of a roughly equal proportion of men and women.

But despite the near gender parity in the classroom, discrepancies persist in the professional field, with very few women serving as partners or leaders of firms. According to a 2012 American Institute of Architects survey of 2,805 member firms, only 17 percent of firm partners and principals are women.

“When I look at firms and none of their partners or principals are women, it makes it tough to find a role model and that’s something that I’ve always worked for,” Daphne Binder ARC ’16 said. “I guess it is not necessary that the role model has to be a woman, but that would definitely answer a lot of questions I have about my own course in architecture.”

This jump to a professional gender disparity can be attributed to a number of factors, from long hours and unequal pay to a lack of family-friendly policies and female role models. But even before joining the workforce, architecture students are taught in an environment which encourages late nights and often favors men.

And all of these factors combined make current female students reconsider whether architecture at Yale is for them.

“Beyond just a rather patriarchal understanding of architecture in general, architecture has a work culture that is quite inhospitable to women,” architecture major Sheau Yun Lim ’18 said. “It definitely makes me rethink whether I want to go into architecture as a career.”

(Ken Yanagisawa)

“AN INVISIBLE WALL”

In February 2006, the News reported that nine School of Architecture students received notices to take a semester off in light of inadequate performance judged during portfolio reviews. Six of the students were women. At the time, there were only 45 architecture students in the students’ class, just over a third of whom were female. Currently, the class of 2017 has 56 students.

Since then, the number of women enrolled at the school has steadily grown, with the current class of 2017 made up of more women than men. Mark Foster Gage ARC ’01, assistant dean and associate professor at the school, said the number of female applicants is generally equal to, or greater than, that of their male counterparts. Several classes in the past have included more women than men. This year’s post-professional degree program is 67 percent women, Gage said, as compared to the two women he had in his own graduating architecture class of 15 at Yale. He added that the school also has significantly more tenured female faculty than male — three men and six women are tenured.

Gage also pointed to “Yale Women in Architecture,” a group of students and alumni of the graduate school that discusses the legacy and status of women in the field. The group shares professional information and opportunities with women, and was formed following the school’s 2012 symposium with the same name, which drew nearly 200 female Architecture School graduates for a series of lectures and discussions about gender in the field. The symposium was held to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the Sonia Albert Schimberg Award, given annually to a high-achieving female School of Architecture student. And since Medina’s first day of the junior seminar this fall, even the troubling list of precedents has been expanded to include more buildings by females, according to Architecture Director of Undergraduate Studies Bimal Mendis ’98 ARC ’02, who co-teaches the course.

But despite these strides forward, students interviewed say that subtle undertones of prejudice still exist within the school.

“When I came to Yale I felt the change immediately. It was like an invisible wall that barred certain people from making progress or expressing themselves in productive ways,” Ioanna Angelidou GRD ’18 said. “There was a tendency to disrespect younger voices in general and women in particular, by finding minor excuses to reprimand or marginalize them, mostly indirectly but often in explicit or even rather offending ways.”

Angelidou said that in many instances, these discriminatory attitudes from faculty members set an example for some students, and also prompted student skepticism toward female instructors.

Similarly, Melinda Agron ARC ’19 said that while discrimination has not occurred in every group setting she has worked in within the school, there have been cases where she felt her voice was ignored in favor of those of male group members. Architecture major Charlotte Smith ’17 said she thinks that she, along with her ideas, would have been taken more seriously if she were male, though such impressions are difficult to prove.

“It’s hard to say for sure if putting my gender down would change the opportunities I have, and that’s the hard thing about gender inequality, because the things you can pinpoint are small and you can only change that specific point,” Smith said.

Examples of discrimination are not unique to student experiences. School of Architecture professor Peggy Deamer said she experienced discrimination as an architecture professor at Yale when she became a mother and chose to continue teaching full-time. She said derogatory comments were made about her decision to keep working, with both faculty and administrators saying men would not have made the same choice to give up raising a child the “proper way” in order to become a full-time academic. Beyond parenting, there has been an element of discrimination involved when determining desirable teaching slots and positions of leadership within the school, she said.

Berke noted that discrimination against women in architecture exists across the academic field. She added that while she has experienced various forms of gender-based discrimination herself in the past, she hopes that such incidents will diminish with the rise in female leadership. Berke said that by assuming the deanship, she can be a voice for female architecture students and help them overcome discriminatory challenges before and after their education.

“Looking at the contemporary architecture scene, it is a lot different from where it was a few years ago, because the role models that are out there are much broader than those in the recent past and they will continue to improve,” Mendis said. “What the school can do is expose students to more female practitioners and faculty that can serve as role models and see that there are women doing incredible things in academia and profession.”

PROFESSIONAL BOYS’ CLUB

Nowhere is the disparity between women and men in architecture more evident than in the transition between education and career.

A 2012 American Institute of Architects survey of 2,805 member firms found that women comprise 49 percent of architecture students and 39 percent of interns. However, when looking at the professional field, only one-fifth of firm partners and principals are women, according to the same survey. And when it comes to academia, only 25 percent of architecture faculty members and professors in the U.S. are women, according to data released in 2015 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

(Rebecca Yan)

Somewhere between school and career, women in architecture drop off. Given the large time commitment architecture requires, one of the largest obstacles to females attaining senior positions is the balance between childbearing and work. –Smith said that since architectural projects are stretched out over a span of a couple years, missing even just one year due to pregnancy and childbirth can be a big loss for an architect due to the lack of continuity.

Even with the rise of laws and benefits that may help to alleviate the burdens of child care, including paid maternity leave and extended paternity leave, stunted career growth persists.

Smith, an architecture major whose mother and father are both architects, said that giving birth and raising a child pose significant challenges to female architects due to the physical commitment required of the mother. Smith said she was fortunate in that her mother had her own firm, allowing her to work from home during pregnancy and while caring for a newborn.

However, Smith noted that the same cannot be said for most female architects who are not in control of their own hours and have to travel often.

“We usually act the way that we’re raised, and the way that we’re raised is that the mom is the one who takes care of kids,” architecture major Victoria Ereskina ’18 said. “Even if the burden is mitigated by paternity leave, it doesn’t take away the fact that there are nine months of pregnancy or the commitments like breast-feeding that follow.”

Deamer said the profession does not lend itself to raising a family, adding that there is practically no discussion within the field of family-friendly policies in the profession. Agron said that the culture of the field sets people up to be mostly devoted to their work, ignoring family roles played at home. At the Architecture School, family obligations are not really discussed, she said, and the reality remains that women tend to be the ones associated with fulfilling family obligations both in the field and in society more broadly.

But alongside issues of family care, many students pointed to the nature of the profession itself as another root problem. Medina said that since architecture is a client-based profession, patrons are likely to be attracted to certain representations or impressions of what — and who — they think an architect is. Similarly, Binder said some architecture firms have policies where partners are expected to bring in their own clients and projects, putting female partners at a disadvantage because clients will be more likely to hire men.

These power dynamics also exist between architects and developers. Samantha Monge Kaser ARC ’19 said that in her professional experience at an architecture firm, the interactions between female architects and developers are different from those between those same developers and male architects. Women’s opinions are not usually given as much weight, she said. Similarly, Deamer said that when working with contractors, the attitude taken toward women is usually one of skepticism.

Furthermore, relationships between teachers and their students also can pose difficulties for women. Angelidou said the field is male-dominated because it is based as much on creativity as it is on interpersonal relationships and power structures on the master-apprentice level. In academia as well as the profession, any close collaboration between males is considered natural and mutually beneficial, she said, but that is not the case when it comes to women working with men.

“How many male professors or professionals would not think twice before favoring one of their brightest female disciples or associates, in sheer fear of the relationship being considered inappropriate by their peers and the potential of everyone involved being deconstructed morally and professionally?” Angelidou asked. “This is terrible, but unfortunately an issue that a female academic or professional has to face every day.”

EXAMPLES SET IN THE CLASSROOM

Architecture students and faculty interviewed suggested that in order to combat discriminatory attitudes in the job market, change would have to first begin in the classroom, where the expectation of an unusually high time commitment is fostered.

Deamer said one of the reasons the field is not accommodating to women in pregnancy is its tendency to reward long hours, a mechanism reinforced starting in students’ careers as undergraduates and carried over into the workplace.

“This is a problem that starts in academia, where students are praised for spending two nights without sleep, which shows dedication, which leads to passion, which leads to talent,” Deamer said. “Professors can definitely talk to their students about how to be sensitive to comments from faculty or other fellow students that imply sacrificing yourself for the good of the course is not enlightening and ultimately will not yield good work.”

Architecture major Margaret Gleberman ’17 said there is an expectation that architecture students will spend all of their free time working on projects, and even if it is not explicitly stated, the caliber of work expected is not possible otherwise.

Beyond the time commitment, students have also raised concerns about the lack of female architectural works in the curriculum. Architecture major Thaddeus Lee ’17 said that due to the male bias in the history of the field, the number of notable female architects in the past that can serve as role models is far fewer when compared to their male counterparts.

Further, students interviewed highlighted the large number of male critics and visiting lecturers regularly invited to the school. Medina said that posters were spread over the architecture school last year highlighting the fact that only 35 percent of architecture critics that the school brought in as jurors for student work were women.

But Lim said these issues are not only women’s battles to fight. The structures in place that hinder women from excelling in the field need to be addressed by men as well, she said. Architecture major Cameron Nelson ’18 agreed that the number of male architectural works students are taught is “glaring” given the number of works by females that are eligible for study. He said that it should not fall upon just female students to bring such discrepancies to the attention of instructors, adding that the lack of female works in the curriculum is an incomplete picture of the profession that affects everyone.

“The problem is that the students are half and half, yet we’re still being taught primarily by males and being taught primarily male canon,” Medina said.

Gage said the school relies on well-known and established visiting practitioners, most of whom have founded their own firms and achieved notable acclaim, to teach a large portion of the advanced graduate studios.

The pool of candidates from which these visitors are selected is overwhelmingly male, which reflects the profession at-large, he added. Gage added that while the school is aware of the problem and wants to diversify the visitors brought to campus, a delicate balance exists because the school does not want to turn away a particular male candidate who still has expertise to offer.

“Moving forward, the school is making focused efforts toward gender equity in our lecture series, visiting appointments, faculty representation at all levels and support for our women graduates,” Gage said. “Four out of nine advanced studio classes will be taught by women next semester, and before I was granted tenure, it was awarded to three women in a row.”

(Ken Yanagisawa)

FEW FEMALE ROLE MODELS

“I’m deeply honored to be the first female dean of the Architecture School, but I tend to look at it more broadly, which is to say that while I’m a female dean at Yale, there’s a female dean at Princeton, a female dean at Columbia and there recently was one at Penn,” Berke said. “What we’re seeing is a real acknowledgement of women’s progress in architecture by the number of female deans across the country.”

This year marks the first time the School of Architecture is under the direction of a female dean. Berke succeeded Robert Stern ARC ’65 and is the third woman to head one of Yale’s 12 graduate and professional schools. In addition to having taught architectural design at Yale since 1987, Berke also leads her own firm, Deborah Berke Partners, which focuses on designing hotels, residences and institutional projects.

The School of Architecture lagged behind some of its peer institutions in appointing a female dean. Amale Andraos was named the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 2014, and Monica Ponce de Leon was named dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture in 2015.

“We now have a woman at the helm of the school and she also happens to be a person of a very different generation,” Angelidou said. “I think that in many ways this change will have a very positive impact on the politics within the school by releasing pressure and providing a much-needed paradigm shift for everyone involved.”

But while Yale named Berke to a historic deanship, it soon lost one of its most world-renowned visiting professors with the death of Zaha Hadid. Hadid, a visiting professor at the Architecture School since 2013, was widely lauded as the greatest modern female architect. Born in 1950 in Baghdad, Hadid was the first female to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is regarded as the Nobel Prize-equivalent in the field of architecture. Around the world, her buildings include the Guangzhou Opera House and the London Olympics Aquatic Center. Hadid died March 31 of a heart attack while being treated for bronchitis.

Berke, who studied alongside Hadid while they were students together at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, said Hadid was brilliant from early on. She added that Hadid’s gifts extended beyond architecture, from her outgoing personality to her talent for drawing.

Despite Hadid’s accomplishments, her gender sometimes still overshadowed her identity as an architect. And as there are so few living female role models for women in architecture, her death was a particularly striking loss.

“People who knew [Hadid] would clearly tell you that she was not a diva, that she was humble and down-to-earth,” Medina said. “People do not care about personalities when it comes to men, but [Hadid] was a genius, and people still managed to degrade and insult her.”

How people categorize female pioneers in architecture is related to how women are viewed as leaders in all fields, Monge Kaser said. She added that there is a tendency to call women bossy or demanding, when those adjectives would not be used for male leaders who act the same way. Women have to fight their way to earn respect and the majority of famous female architects have a reputation as overbearing, Monge Kaser said.

Since Hadid won the Pritzker Prize 12 years ago, the number of female architects within the U.S. has barely increased. According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of women in the field has risen only to 25.7, up from 24 in 2004, the year Hadid received the award.

“For a woman to go out alone in architecture is still very, very hard,” Hadid told The Guardian in 2006. “It’s still a man’s world.”