On Monday, May 23rd, Yale celebrated its 315th Commencement. Read thoughts and reflections from faculty, administrators and members of the Class of 2016 below.

NEWS’ VIEW: To the class of 2016

This time of year bursts with clichés. You’re probably hearing a lot of them right now, a running mantra of: “Bright College Years,” “Be the change you wish to see” and “This is not an end, but a beginning.” Clichés are clichés because they’re true, albeit incomplete.

We at the News would like to offer you a little graduation metaphor of our own. Because this is Yale, for better or for worse, our commencement cliches often come from the annals of philosophy — quotes from Plato, Confucius and Maimonides. But since you are the remarkable, passionate, irreplaceable class of 2016, our cliche for you is a little different.

Come with us to Athens, around 350 B.C.E., to Plato’s Academy — the ancestor of our modern university. Plato has just famously defined man as a “featherless biped.” He’s brilliant, he’s an intellectual celebrity and he’s establishing Western philosophy. Yet sometimes, even Plato’s analyses can be deepened with the help of a peer. One day, one such peer, Diogenes, barges into Plato’s classroom. Dirty, and likely smelly, Diogenes holds a live, plucked chicken before Plato’s shocked students and cries: “Behold! I have brought you a man!” Diogenes was testing the limits of Plato’s initial definition of humankind. Beyond being rude, Diogenes demanded a deeper analysis of life, forcing Plato to broaden his definition of man.

We’ve chosen this particular classical reference because it demonstrates the purpose of the liberal arts. What is Yale, if not an agora to facilitate reflection, disagreement and dialogue among its students?

Let’s come back to New Haven. You, the class of 2016, have spent four years at one of the greatest liberal arts institutions in the world. You first came to Yale already curious and talented, ready to rove over this campus with your relentless intellect and restless drive, eager to impress yet deeply humbled by your peers and professors. You came to Yale with dreams. You leave Yale with dreams.

Time has been kind to you. At Yale, you have sung in choirs, dripped sweat on the playing field and worked until 11:59 p.m. to finish prize-winning essays. You have ladled soup for the hungry, interviewed diplomats and glimpsed the future in a petri dish.

But college is no easier at Yale than anywhere else. In these four years you have lost friends, flunked tests and cried in courtyards when you realized life was more confusing than an admissions brochure made it out to be. You have turned tears into change as you held your Yale accountable. You have called for racial justice, environmental change, mental health reform, sexual consent, international human rights and so much more. From New Haven to St. Louis, college voices like yours are shaping the course of this country. And in expressing your experience of isolation and oppression, you found a community and a home here. Perhaps this is the most important lesson you have taught us: None of us are alone. And throughout it all, you have made friends that will walk with you for the rest of your lives. You have changed Yale just as Yale has changed you.

And sometimes, you did all this with three hours of sleep and three cups of coffee. You filled four years with discussion: in dining halls, across seminar tables, over text and over megaphones. And this was not chatter; this was dialogue — the lynchpin of the liberal arts. You asked questions. You demanded answers. And the vibrations of your conversation shook the intellectual mortar of this place.

So thank you, class of 2016, for the Yale you leave behind and for the lessons your journey has taught those of us who will remain. Thank you for your brains, for your brawn and for constantly chafing against incomplete definitions of Yale. You, like so many classes before you and so many classes after you, have asked questions of each other and of the University that have complicated, developed and changed our definitions about the world.

And after you leave campus, keep talking, keep dreaming and keep asking questions. Take heed from Diogenes. Storm through the agoras of your life. Demand more of your peers and yourself. And always, always pluck your own chickens. We know you will.

AKINDOJU: What to make of Yale

“Yale … it’s what you make of it.” I heard this statement over and over throughout my first few days on campus, walking around Yale in 2012 as a wide-eyed freshman. Whether it was freshmen counselors telling me to take advantage of my time at Yale, or my dean talking about how quickly college goes by, I always got a sense that my time at Yale was special. Something to be cherished, remembered dearly and leveraged wisely.

Writing this piece, at the end of what has been both an awe-inspiring and difficult four years, I have come to realize that these messages of guidance indeed ring true. Yale is more than just an institution; it represents a time and a place that unique in each our lives. Yale gives us the space to dream and to chase those dreams as wholeheartedly. We are surrounded by some of the most intelligent, talented and kindest individuals we will ever meet.

By no means is Yale perfect. As a campus, we still struggle with issues of race and class, gender and socioeconomic status. As a first-generation student, immigrant from Nigeria and black man on this campus, I have experienced the full spectrum of campus experience, from prejudice to triumph. As students, we can no longer claim ignorance or turn a blind eye to the problems of the world. Instead, we ought to see these challenges as an opportunity to engage in discussions and work to solve these issues.

With great opportunity, comes great responsibility. So to those that will return to campus in the fall, make Yale yours. And to my fellow members of the class of 2016, let’s us take what we have learned, the friends we have made and the experiences we have had, both good and bad, to move forward and make the world a better place.

TOBI AKINDOJU is a senior in Davenport College. Contact him at oluwatobi.akindoju@yale.edu.

AVERBUCH: Maybe they’ll call me

Three days into our senior-year beach vacation, Juliet proposes that we all get matching tattoos. She traces a line down the ridge of her nose, says, “Let’s get our house number — 272 — right here.” All of my housemates raise their glasses in honor of her proposal, as if we love each other so much that we could prick each other’s reddened faces with needles. Too much wine has spoiled us. We avoid the quiet time that will make us think about what’s coming.

Several of my friends have tattoos, and I am jealous of them. A tiger peers out from one’s bathing suit when she sunbathes on the beach. Three bees — an ankle bee, a wrist bee, a chest bee — circle another. A map of the world rests on the inside of an arm. A seashell curls across a shoulder muscle. These tattoos are sometimes hidden, and catching sight of one feels like seeing a private memento. I’ve never liked the idea of something inked on my body, but I still admire that my friends have figured out how to make something permanent out of themselves. I pretend they have paid for stability, for knowing what they’ll be years from now, although they’d laugh at me for saying so.

In less than a week, we will haul their suitcases into cars to make our way far from here. To prepare for the onslaught of sadness, I have been listing all the items in our house that I don’t care about leaving behind: a poster of Putin in a leotard on an outdated magazine cover on the fridge, insects from an entomology class in the freezer, black twists of hair in the drain, an out-of-tune Everett piano, essays piled under a fold-out IKEA desk, a bulbous-eyed stuffed animal perched in the living room, a hand-me-down coffee table book of men’s butts, the waning moons of toenail clippings. I’m counting these strange inheritances to make loss seem inconsequential, so that significant losses will make me less sad.

Here’s what’s left: My housemates are bickering about when our families will meet one another, and we do not know how to make tea for 27 people. I will take a road trip in Colorado with my best friend in the fall, but we don’t know the details because I’m bad at committing. I am reading “Teaching to Transgress” because a friend lent it to me on the beach, and I am feeling ignorant. Often, our private college life seems gluttonous, and this book is making me think about how I have been educated. The absence of these friends — some ready to escape from Yale in a year when the school has let people down — catches in my throat.

Perhaps if friends keep calling me, if they pass books thirdhand, if they say: What mistakes are you making, graduation will be merely a pageant of an ending. Lent copies of “Antwerp,” “Citizen” and “Bluets” are in my suitcase, “White Girls” and “Life Beside Itself” on my beside table. Friends can leave permanent marks, even when their inked selves are out of sight, or even if we later fall out of touch.

MAYA AVERBUCH is a senior in Berkeley College. Contact her at maya.averbuch@yale.edu.

BILDNER: Complicated college years

Soon, the cavernous Woolsey Hall will be filled with the voices of the class of 2016, their family, friends and mentors singing Henry Durand’s, class of 1881, “Bright College Years.” The Glee Club will croon Yale’s unofficial school song — the lyrical bookend of our undergraduate years — will fill the billowing, ornate ceilings above. At the finale, when we will wave our white handkerchiefs, warbling the closing lines “For God, for Country and for Yale!” just as we did almost four years ago in the same room, it is hard not to get swept up in a surge of raw emotion.

I expect that I, too, will be caught up in the ridiculous bliss that comes with waving a “Y”-emblazoned handkerchief above my head. Yet the song has also caused me some bemused angst — I have to laugh: “Bright college years, with pleasure rife / The shortest, gladdest years of life … Those happy, golden, bygone days!”

Let’s just call it what it is: canned collegiate euphoria! These years, for so many of us, have not been only bright. They have also been long, stressful, chaotic, tense, challenging, complex and exhausting. And the ethos of the song — fit in, love college and drink the blue Yale Kool-Aid — is only half the picture.

I’m proud to write that Yale has been a roller coaster. I’ve experienced soaring highs, crashing lows and everything that comes in between. This is normal. This is right. I’ve both fallen in love on Old Campus and had my heart broken on Hillhouse Avenue. I’ve walked out of William L. Harkness Hall in tears and raced to the Hall of Graduate Studies to turn in my senior thesis a minute before the deadline. Sophomore year, I started work at the Yale Farm and had the best start to the semester I can remember, only to get a year-altering concussion just a short time later. I’ve laughed so hard with my housemates that our rickety house feels like it’s about to crumble from the weight of our giggling bodies. Yet after one of these joyful meals, I walked down Elm Street, tears streaming down my face, minutes after learning that my grandparents had passed away.

So what I really wish I could belt at the top of my lungs in Woolsey Hall (ideally to the tune of “Bright College Years,” which I do find very pleasing) would be the following, explicitly corny, yet deeply true line: “These have been the most up-and-down four years of my life, but man oh man, am I so grateful!” This is what, to me, is worth holding on to, during this last week of my undergraduate years: the “attitude of gratitude.” Gratefulness, while in the darkest of times can be challenging to hold on to, is a prime source of continuity and stability. I hope that — for all of us — these four years mark the beginning of a meaningful and productive life to come. Despite what our lovely lyricist Henry Durand wants us to believe, Yale is not the pinnacle of life on earth. And the greatest cure for the range of emotions we are all experiencing right now is without a doubt, gratitude.

The great 20th-century scholar Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.” I know come this weekend, my mind is going to be all over the place. When I hear “Bright College Years” in Woolsey, I’m going to be comforted by knowing that I am grateful for all that I have learned, experienced and encountered over these four years: both good and bad. These were bright, yes, but more than anything, they were complicated college years. And for that, I’m grateful.

RAFI BILDNER is a senior in Davenport College. Contact him at rafi.bildner@yale.edu.

FEINZIG: Memories and moments

Some friends and I drove from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to Woodstock, New York last week, a funny point-A-to-B pairing that I’ll probably never have reason to do again. The trip was long, strange and beautiful, marked by the warmth of friends. Sunburnt and sleepy, I found myself in a little Woodstock store with a couple other visitors, surrounded by the kinds of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tchotchkes and Richie Havens memorabilia my 16-year-old self would have loved. I opened a book filled with musicians’ stories and reactions to the concert that some cool aunt might buy. In the book, Jerry Garcia described the 1969 concert as a moment with “swollen historicity.” Garcia seemed sure that everyone at Woodstock had already predicted its momentous and historic legacy, as if the people of the future had traveled back in time as invisible ghosts to see things for themselves.

Yale is rife with similar (albeit perhaps smaller) “swollen” moments. Here, when experience and reflection coexist, we tell ourselves — if only for a second — “I’m going to remember this forever.”

Some of these Yale moments may be elevated to the level of public history and memory. Others might remain personal and private. Yet both will shape our identities and futures. Privately, I had this “swollen” sense when my suitemates and I converted our sophomore-year common room into a restaurant for our friend’s anniversary, and when 50-something students showed up to play four square in our backyard earlier this spring.

So too have we all shared in this sense together countless times for both celebratory and tragic reasons, during the March of Resilience and naming (in)decisions, national sports championships and the presidential inauguration. These moments swept us up in some great oceanic consciousness and invigorated our search for togetherness. Some of these collective memories might crumble out of public history and disperse into privately held stories. But it’s up to us to insist on which memories will benefit from interactive engagement and upkeep, and remain alive.

The other day, a friend and I recounted a funny story from sophomore year in different ways — disagreeing over trivial details of who had said what in an amusing encounter with an administrator. Although minor, it troubled me that the details of that story may have been obscured and reworked through time. On the one hand, I want the stories of the last four years preserved, like insects in amber, waiting for me to return to them. But it’s clear that these memories will change and evolve, reflecting our own subtle transformations.

Over time, we’ll see our stories through new prisms, and perpetually reopen and rethink our relationship to this amazing anthropological experiment called “Yale.” We will keep tabs on campus politics and happenings and voice our opinions as alumni, perhaps to the mild chagrin of a future batch of current Yale students. We will meet up for drinks and tap into our memories, which will include those moments “swollen” in addition to the mundanities and conventions we’re not quite far enough away from to miss. And when we reminiscence with friends, we will be present.

JOSHUA FEINZIG is a senior in Calhoun College. Contact him at joshua.feinzig@yale.edu.

GELBFISH: Pride and humility

A “Bildungsroman” is a coming-of-age story in which the main character undergoes moral and psychological growth throughout the narrative. If Yale were a Bildungsroman, we seniors would be poised to complete our narratives this Monday, when we accept our diplomas. We’re ending our Yale careers, but the ceremony is called “Commencement” — the beginning of our lives in the “real” world.

Comparing Yale to a movie or novel is fruitful, and not just because the visual landscape here recalls a storybook. Yale has been a Bildungsroman for me because I’ve changed so much during my years here, the main character in my own coming-of-age story. And as the Talmud says in Sanhedrin 4:5, “Every individual is required to say to oneself: The world was created for me.” As brand-new Yale grads, we can become artists, scientists, statesmen, doctors, lawyers, pretty much anything we want. At Commencement, Yale hangs a metaphorical key around our necks, a key to the world.

But while that impression is true, it’s also incomplete. Graduating from Yale is a huge accomplishment, but we risk hubris by thinking that it’s everything. The dictum from the Talmud seems to contradict Abraham in Genesis 18:27 of the Bible: “I am nothing but dust and ashes.” Compared to the infinitude of existence — or even the institution of Yale itself — we are each specks of dust. We’ve done nothing, changed nothing, accomplished nothing. It would be arrogant to claim that our service trips, our late-night philosophical arguments and above all the eyebrow-raising prestige we get back home actually portend an accomplishment. In reality we’re humans who are barely hatched, still figuring out the world, day by day.

If you were to show my high school self a picture of me at Yale graduation, he would be ecstatic at my accomplishment. In high school, we view a Yale diploma as a fixed pennant on our lapels, a shield against insecurities. Yet, if you showed that same graduation picture to 40-year-old me, he might laugh at how ignorant I was at Yale Commencement.

So which of the rabbis’ aphorisms is true — was the world created for us, and us alone? Or are we just specks of dust? How much can we pat ourselves on the back for graduating from Yale?

Perhaps it’s obvious: Both sentiments are simultaneously true. We should be unbelievably proud of our classmates, and ourselves, while also humbled by all those who helped get us here. We should be astonished by our growth over the past four years while simultaneously realizing that the majority of the work lies ahead. And we should view Yale as a Bildungsroman while also realizing that life isn’t like a movie or novel. There is no single totalizing lens, no overriding climactic change. Instead, our lives are a continuous series of localized narratives, a shelf full of Bildungsromans that doesn’t end in college.

With luck, we’ll have many other adventures. And we’ll view each as an entire world, a totalizing lens blocking out all other stories. It’s time to close the Bildungsroman of Yale, to replace it on the shelf and open another volume. Like a book of Talmud, we should kiss the spine as we put it away, realizing how large its knowledge is. But we should also step back and realize how narrow it is compared to the entire bookshelf. And how small our bookshelf is, in turn, compared to the whole of Sterling Memorial Library, or to all of the libraries the world over. So when we accept our diplomas, remember: We are all dust and ashes. But also remember: The whole world was created with our purposes in mind.

EZRIEL GELBFISH is a senior in Davenport College. Contact him at ezriel.gelbfish@yale.edu.

GILMORE: What you taught Yale

“An individual is no match for history,” Chilean author Roberto Bolaño wrote, but the class of 2016, some 1,356 individuals who came together four years ago, would dispute that. In your senior year, you proved that individuals make history. And the history that you made changed the University.

Arriving in 2012, a record 40.6 percent of admitted freshmen — today’s graduating seniors — were citizens or permanent residents who identified as a student of color. An independent admissions consultant lauded such diversity as “good PR” for Yale.
Although you came to campus ready for Yale, Yale was not yet ready for you. Among tenured professors, only 7 percent were underrepresented minorities. Among term faculty, that percentage fell from 10 percent in 2012 to 8 percent by 2015. Cultural houses suffered from lack of funding, despite student appeals to the University. Despite the generations of minority students who have attended Yale since the 1960s — some activists of color in the class of 2016 are third-generation Yalies — after almost half a century, few landmarks on campus honor any of Yale’s minority students. Yale expected you to conform to tradition, but you expected to shape Yale in your own image.

This year, many non-minority students joined their minority classmates to respond to University President Peter Salovey’s 2015 freshman address in which he challenged students to debate renaming Calhoun College: “Class of 2019, here is your first hard problem. Welcome to Yale!”

And after this year of campus dialogue, most undergraduates find it unconscionable that students live in a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, class of 1804, who was one of the chief architects of the states-rights system that fostered Jim Crow discrimination in the former Confederacy and who touted slavery as “a positive good.”

The debate changed many minds. As a historian, I once believed that racist symbols like Calhoun College should remain to underscore past wrongs, if the institution added an explanation of the harm their namesakes had caused. But in my 20 years at Yale, Calhoun College endured and no anti-racist monument appeared: Retaining a racist symbol as an anti-racism teaching tool rarely works. Student debate this past fall reversed my opinion; honoring Calhoun in perpetuity does no one any good.

Joining a national debate that marked the end of color blindness, some chafed at the term “master” for the faculty head of a residential college, considering its history in American slavery. Others found it shocking that an associate master advocated countermanding a Yale College dean’s call for sensitivity to ethnic slurs embodied by Halloween costumes. Instead, she urged students to be “a little bit obnoxious … a little bit provocative or, yes, offensive.”

The class of 2016 taught us valuable lessons about free speech, amid a national firestorm erroneously blaming them for suppressing it. Naming a college “Calhoun” and calling a head of college “master” were speech acts long ago, as is writing a letter encouraging students to be obnoxious. Yet the right to free speech does not exempt the speaker from criticism. When Yale students and their allies marched through New Haven streets, chalked slogans in courtyards and renamed a residential college “the college formerly known as Calhoun,” they too exercised their right to free speech.

And the students spoke convincingly. As a result of their actions, Yale administrators replaced “master” with “head” and named one of the two new residential colleges “Pauli Murray College” after a queer woman of color. Further, Yale began a diversity initiative to remedy its recent backward slide into a racially homogenous faculty.

Yet despite overwhelming campus sentiment, the Yale administration has refused to rename Calhoun College — so far. Last week the faculty wrote to Salovey and the Corporation members “to urge you to reverse your decision to retain the name of Calhoun College.” Over 360 Faculty of Arts and Sciences members signed, including 215 full professors. Without the student protests that we have shared this year, such a high number of signatures would have been inconceivable.

At a packed meeting on April 28 in Battell Chapel with Salovey, students poured out their frustrations over the decision to retain Calhoun. To paraphrase one student: Everyone says I’m lucky to go to Yale, but I’ve decided that Yale is lucky to have me here. And she was right: Yale University has indeed been lucky to have the class of 2016, who awakened a tradition of protest that has already made Yale a better place. You were out there, you are leaving, and you are loved.

GLENDA GILMORE is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History. Contact her at glenda.gilmore@yale.edu.

HOLLOWAY: This is where you start

Campus has come to life with the annual pageantry of Commencement. The gowns, the caps, the banners, flags and regalia that have sat in storage all year, waiting for their big moment, finally have their day. This is only my second Commencement as dean, but I have been part of eighteen Yale Commencement ceremonies — as a former head of a college, a member of the faculty and even as a Ph.D. student in 1995. It never gets old. The effect is always dazzling.

For this occasion, Yale pulls out all the stops. And with good reason: You have reached a major milestone, one of the biggest ones that come along in life. You have worked hard to get here, and you’ve started some of your life’s most important work in your years here — not only in your classes, but also in searching for your path in life and in finding some of the friends who will walk it with you, all the way to the end. You’ve asked hard questions of yourselves and of us who tend this place, starting a dialogue with good will and the shared goal of making Yale, and the world, better for everyone.

And your families are bursting with pride. Some of your relatives are going to be here this weekend to celebrate with you, but not all of them, either because they aren’t able to travel or because they have not lived to see this day. All of them are part of your journey, in the sacrifices they have made for you, the obstacles they have removed for you and the love they have shown you. As you celebrate with friends, think of the people who made it possible for you to be here, and honor them with your thanks and your remembrance. It is their day as much as yours.

We on campus are just as proud of you. You came here as strangers to all of us, but along the way you have shown us a light that you brought and kindled here as you prepared for lives of consequence. In so doing, you have made us part of your journey as well. From the day you first got here all of us wondered, just as you did, who you would one day be. And we are beyond impressed, although not at all surprised, to see that you turned out Just Fine. Great, in fact, with great things ahead, even if those great things are great questions.

In the pageantry of Commencement, we show our pride in all the things you’ve done. At the same time, we share your familiar pang of sadness knowing that you are getting ready to leave. It’s all part of the same moment — the pride as well as the sadness. But so is the excitement of what is still to come. If you’re feeling a little anxious, not quite sure of where these next steps will lead, remember that you are not alone. Beside you are your classmates, ahead of you are the thousands of Yale students who have come before you and behind you are the thousands who will follow you. In the days ahead, we welcome you into this excellent company and charge you with the rights and responsibilities that come with the education you have just received.

You have important work awaiting you, and you are ready to commence it. Enjoy the days ahead for what they are: a beginning.

JONATHAN HOLLOWAY is the dean of Yale College and the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies. Contact him at jonathan.holloway@yale.edu.

JOHNSON: The core of Yale

I have this friend, a fellow senior, who will ask intense, what-is-the-meaning-of-life questions at any moment. Most others and I, however, don’t consider it to be off-putting, but welcome the challenge of these “wild” inquiries.

On a drive down I-95 to South Carolina, she asked one of these questions. She said: “Do you feel like the core of who you are has shifted over the last four years? Or do you think you’re the same human with different opinions and preferences and perspectives?”
Wild right?

I guess road trips and “the end” on the horizon warrants a question like this, but I still wasn’t expecting it, nor prepared to think about who I have become and whether I like that person.

My three friends in the car and I stumbled for an answer. We said that we felt this paradox of “the core” of ourselves being mostly the same, but also immensely different in certain ways.

All of us have different opinions, preferences and perspectives. There is very little color in my wardrobe. I think about superdelegates, black Twitter memes are the main form of media that I consume and I cry almost every time that Bon Iver and James Blake harmonize on “I Need a Forest Fire.” That’s just me. The list goes on.

As my core is concerned, my obnoxious Midwestern foundation remains unbroken. What I believe has shifted, because of Yale, is the capacity to really have deeper, more developed emotions than I ever thought I was capable of having. Don’t interpret that as, “I was not an unfeeling polyp for my first 18 years of life.” But, I read my white moleskin (LOL) from freshman year and could tell how I now experienced emotions differently than before.

Love. I have had a gross amount of friendship and romantic love for more people than I thought possible. Some of you I just met this year, but you all mean a lot to me.
Hate. I don’t think I have actually felt pure hatred toward an individual. But I do hate certain aspects of human nature or the world, which assaulted our collective campus conscious this last year. There was not a day last November where I did not cry about the permanence of racism or have frustrating conversations about gender and sexual assault.

Passion. (Most) museums are dope. Ask me about my thesis.

Fear. I’ve sang “Bright College Years” with the Baker’s Dozen, my a cappella group, too many times to not wonder if we will ever experience more happiness than the happiness of these four years. This fear daily pushes me to question whether something has made me happy. If it does not, then I leave it or quit it. I also fear for others, who have despised their time here. That’s hard to hear. I wanted Yale to be that place of happiness for you, but that didn’t happen. And I have faith that it gets better after this.

At the beginning of this year I did not know if I could leave Yale, because this is the first place in my life that has actually felt like I could claim it as home. This year, friend drama, assault, racial strife, a lack of people on any “side” trying to understand my perspective, made it a lot easier to leave Yale. But that does not mean it won’t be hard.

Now, I find myself again walking through the New Haven Green to Caseus crying because I did not know life could be this good, even when I never buy Lactaid pills and someone will yell at me for party-ruining farts. Things will get harder in a more “real adult” fashion, but Yale taught me well, albeit sometimes too well.

Four years is enough. It forced most of us to appreciate every small moment in this short time frame. I hope you like what this experience has done to your core and I hope for the best for all of you well-intentioned, good-nature(d market) homies.

AUSTIN JOHNSON is a senior in Pierson College. Contact him at austin.johnson@yale.edu.

LAURANS: Why I love Yale

As I retire after 43 years, the News has asked me to write something, and I have chosen my love for Yale. True, I, like many of you, have always loved schools, from first grade on. And life in a great research university has always seemed a kind of paradise to me, for obvious reasons. But Yale is and always will be special in certain ways.

During most of my years here, I taught my favorite course, “Versification,” in one of the great places to study poetry in the world. Imprinted forever on my mind are the moments of discovery when students finally see that poetry evolves over time, and learning about its formal aspects enables you to identify precisely how and when that historical evolution took place, and that it unlocks the door to deeper understanding and appreciation.

As head of Jonathan Edwards College for seven and a half years, I have come to understand at close hand that there is something about the intensity of community here, recognized from the 19th century on, that is almost unique. The quality of the relationships I have formed with impressive young people from around the globe, ready to break old categories and place their mark on the world, has made me one of the lucky few. JE — you have my heart.

A few years ago, I had a public back and forth with a faculty friend at another Ivy League school. He wrote of how he loved visiting Yale, but in the end preferred the pleasures of being a “country mouse” at his great university, since Yale seemed the more “stressful and competitive” place. I took issue this way:

I’m happy to be the “city mouse” visiting the country. I have always liked the atmosphere that keeps Yalies in a state of exhausted and edgy excitement. I like the hum and drive of the city, the four schools of the arts where young people are painting and making music and building and acting and pushing the boundaries of creative experience, the pop and fizz of Chapel Street on Friday evening before two or three openings at the Rep and the Dramat. I like the Galleries and Museums, those gorgeous entities, where something is always going on in front of ageless beauty.

I like the wild heterogeneity in the international world of the Center for the Study of Globalization and the MacMillan Center, the film festivals and conferences at the Whitney Humanities Center, the residential colleges with their quirky flags and cheers and hometown spirit, the walls in the Law School where dissenting opinions are posted, the engineers making things in the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design, the passionate environmentalists who fill opinion columns with lectures on sustainability, the plethora of journals and periodicals and even scandal sheets that emerge in the colleges, sitting there and practically daring you to question their options for free speech.

I like the Dwight Hall participants reminding you of worlds at your doorstep and beyond your own limited vision that need your help, the voices that expect you to answer to a world beyond your own privilege, and the people thinking nonstop about how we can improve education, feed the hungry, help the sick.

There is often din. But most of the time, even when I am frustrated by it, I like the fact that ideas always roil, standards are high, nothing is ever calm, no one is ever fully satisfied, few ever entirely agree, something big is at stake at every instant, and Yalies are constantly duking it out on opposite sides of everything. The scale and clamor helps to test big ideas, gives a representation of what it might be like to achieve something credible in the real world and allows a vital background for change and growth.

And then the place itself: courtyards with flowering trees, the spring walk up Hillhouse Avenue, flags waving from the Yale Bowl on an autumn afternoon, the sight of the shells coming down the river from the Gilder Boathouse, nooks and crannies in the colleges, the brutalist Rudolph Building — an acquired taste I have acquired — and, of course, Old Campus at any season. Who, who could resist these? People in civilizations old and new have died fighting with the vision of such a place before them.

My appreciation does not mean that Yale is a place where I have always succeeded. Like most people, I learned a great deal here about my capacities, but also my limitations. I did some things well and others not so well; but there is more I might have achieved, and other things I feel sure I might have contributed, had I been different in personality and temperament.

Still, I gave every ounce of whatever is in my nature. Why? Because it seems to me that life is only worth living if you are trying to give yourself to something worthwhile beyond yourself — and it was always in my mind and heart that Yale was that.
Yale situates you at a vital center and offers a place that fulfills the Aristotelian definition of happiness by asking of you at every moment “the full use of powers along the lines of excellence.”

As Samuel Johnson said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” And it is at the point when I am tired of life, and only at that point, that I expect to be tired of Yale.

PENELOPE LAURANS is the Head of Jonathan Edwards College and the Special Assistant to University President Peter Salovey. Contact her at penelope.laurans@yale.edu.

RICO: It’s in the past

Despite all the life I’ve lived, I never seem to get better at saying goodbye. Right now, my mind is straining to capture all the facets of my friends. I want to remember how they strut, the look on their faces before they break into laughter, their soft drunken voices calling out for another Chance song. It will never be like this again because we will never live so close, be so young, wild and unsleeping. We will lose our naivete and love of all things uncommitted. We will actually grow up, become the butt of little kids’ jokes, receive international wedding invitations and watch our friends become the aunts, uncles and godparents of our children.

As I write this I am sitting in the back seat of an overly cramped car. I’m watching the painted mountains of upstate New York slide by, listening to Kendrick Lamar after smoking cigars on Rick James’s grave with my closest friends. I am making it a habit to count the blessings that fall upon my lap.

A few times when nobody was looking I forced the tears back. Crying feels stupid when everything is alright. But I’m upset that I cannot hold onto these moments forever. My best friend is sleeping quietly on my shoulder, waking if the car hits a bump. The driver wears a crown of flowers we gathered at the cemetery while the navigator harmonizes with Green Day. Next to me in the backseat, my friend sleeps on the memory of blowing his money at the casino. Why is it so hard to keep holding these tears back?

I know that we are still going to be friends, that better days are waiting and that the real world is the inevitable end of college. I also know that everyone has to grow up. Nothing lasts forever and that we all have important work to do. However, I am not sure my heart is ready for another year of magic to end.

I want to be 10 years old and throw a tantrum. I want to scream and cry until my parents tell me that I can visit my friends tomorrow. I want a lifetime of good tomorrows and an eternal supply of road trips. I want every new Beyoncé album to give us a new anthem and to dance to bachata until our hips grow sore. I want to stop chasing this feeling of unconditional love and sit down with it. I want these people to be mine forever. And I will gladly give my vows to cherish them always. I want at least 100 more silly-face contests and 1,000 bottles of Amaretto and I want to stop tearing up every time they bless me.

But as Rick James once said “I’ve had it all, I’ve done it all, I’ve seen it all, it’s all about love” and if my heart aches from the pure quality of my relationships and I loved so hard it hurts, well, I guess in the end, I didn’t do Yale that badly at all.

DAVID RICO is a senior in Branford College. Contact him at david.rico@yale.edu.

ROSEN: Bigger than Yale

I’ve told a number of people that my senior year at Yale has felt like a series of existential conversations. With each passing day, my friends and I have discussed our hazy futures in increasingly dramatic terms. Our questions range from the minute: Why did I never learn to code? Am I still financially independent if I stay on my family’s cell phone plan? — to the consequentially unanswerable: What am I supposed to do with my life? Will I stay in touch with any of my friends after college?

Among these questions, one particularly cynical query has risen to the top: Do Yale students authentically care about anything?

Sure, we’re all involved in time-intensive extracurriculars and spend too much time writing theses, but maybe only to build up our resumes. Around a third of our class will work in finance or consulting because it pays well and because we’re not sure what other options we had for next year anyway. Although we wrote about global inequalities and disparate impact in our seminars, it’s not like we can do anything about it. We’re only 22 and, save for the couple of us who learned how to code, graduating with just as few hard skills as the liberal arts intended. Right?

In his commencement speech at Howard University earlier this month, President Barack Obama gave some advice that should resonate from D.C. to New Haven: “Yes, you’ve worked hard, but you’ve also been lucky. That’s a pet peeve of mine: people who have been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky. … We must expand our moral imaginations to understand and empathize with all people who are struggling.”

We are all so, so lucky. Although, surely, extreme inequalities within our class persist, all of us — from the first-generation college student to the third-generation Yalie — have been granted an immense privilege. Our four years here have opened doors, shattered expectations and challenged opinions. We have a responsibility to understand that privilege, and to make sure we don’t waste it.

“Change is the effort of committed citizens who hitch their wagons to something bigger than themselves and fight for it every single day,” Obama told Howard. As graduates, we have the ability to latch onto something bigger than us — a political cause, a field of scientific inquiry, an artistic form — and leverage the power we’ve been given to create change.

We’ve already had some practice. We’re leaving Yale a very different place than it was in August 2012. Student advocacy on issues from financial aid to mental health to sexual violence has led to concrete policy change. This year, our campus mobilized in defiance of racism and hostility perpetrated within our own walls. I challenge you to watch more than 1,000 students confidently march down High Street and still think Yalies don’t know how to care authentically and intensely.

I’m not convinced Yalies have a problem caring about issues or ideas; I think we’re scared of failing to find solutions. We’ve spent our entire lives being successful, at least according to the metrics considered by the undergraduate admissions office. Many of us spent our college careers pursuing prototypical “success” — taking the famous classes, meeting the right people and attending the most photographed events. With our nearly perfect records of success, we’re afraid to risk failure on problems that cannot be solved easily.

I don’t claim to know exactly what I’m supposed to do with the diploma I’ll be handed on Monday. But I do know that the class of 2016 has potential to be both successful professionals and successful people, and I want to see it met. We have ideas and passions. We care about fixing the broken pieces of the world. It’s time to turn our degrees into something bigger than us, something bigger than Yale.

DIANA ROSEN is a senior in Pierson College. She is a former staff columnist and Opinion Editor of the News. Contact her at diana.rosen@yale.edu.

STANLEY-BECKER: The risky splendor of Yale

I never expected to find clarity about Yale’s purpose in the far Willoughby’s, the one on the corner of Grove and Church. But I was there with a professor, going over the beginning of my term paper for her class, when our conversation changed course, and we began discussing a professor who’d met an early, unexpected end. Bent over my loose-leaf draft, my professor cried — there, before me, in a cramped coffee shop on a Wednesday afternoon, on one of the first truly cold days in December.

She cried just for a few seconds before drying her eyes, and then we went back to discussing my introduction.

This interaction stands as one of the most formative in my time here. In my most personal view, it is an example of the risky splendor of Yale: a moment of earnest human understanding, built on the bedrock of an intellectual union, a teacher-student relation, that exceeded its own rigid limits. The rituals and formalities of that relation, of which my professor and I had been devoted servants all semester, didn’t suit our purposes in that moment, as a doleful memory suddenly surfaced between us. So we reached for coordinates more profound than the ones the etiquette of office hours could provide. I became a witness to her unguarded sentiment, as we both bore the risk of vulnerability.

Isn’t this the lesson of a liberal arts education? To use the tools of interpretation we learn in the classroom, the ones that form the basis of humanistic inquiry, to make sense of the ambiguity of human relationships? The gaps and the pauses in poetry are in fact the spaces where every passion can be discerned; the same is true for the dialogues we enter with one another. Historical records are imperfect, subject to bias and faulty recollection; the same is true for acts of self-invention we undertake for ourselves or encounter as we aim to understand other people and their pasts.

What I’ve learned at Yale is that nothing is beyond question, and that everything can be responded to and reconsidered. Even something as well-tried as the teacher-student relationship.

Of course, this is an aspiration; often there isn’t time for such radical scrutiny. But Yale at its best beckons us to upend the expectations that have been set for us — academic, personal or relational, in the classroom, in the intimate spaces of our dorm rooms and apartments or even in Willoughby’s. At its worst, Yale cultivates only conformism and complacency.

We need this lesson now more than ever, as complacency sets in about some of the most vexed problems we face as a society: falling incomes and rising poverty levels that test our values at home, and a global terror network bent on subverting freedom and democracy abroad. On so many issues — from the environment to gun violence — there isn’t just a difference of opinion about priorities but a disagreement over the factual claims and interpretive mechanisms that make common understanding and collective action possible. So we appear bereft of means for even understanding these problems and our own power to address them. All of this is abetted by a national political culture where spectacle has replaced substance, where ideas have little currency.

We didn’t choose the conditions underlying this reality, and so we must refuse them as normal, searching for a new set of conceptual coordinates, and therefore new ways of relating to one another.

The university is the ideal place for this sort of experimentation — it promises us insight, adventure and mirth in exchange for our devotion and gives us the space to test new ideas against the concerns that become acute to us as we become adults.

There is something about Yale in particular that makes these concerns seem vital. I would submit it has much to do with the city that surrounds us, small enough that we can see it legibly but large enough that what we see includes situations of grave public concern. Our self-conception as citizens of New Haven helps meld life within and without the classroom, calling on us to view our education as simultaneously a speculative and worldly endeavor, with a purpose higher than mundane memorization, office-hour appointments and email salutations — all rivals to genuine insight and intimacy.

The best sort of education teaches us what’s at stake, and that there’s too much at stake simply to accept the world as it’s given to us. We have to look deeper — in each text, in each idea, in each person — even when this involves risk.

I think this is the reason why we are always asking more of Yale, why we debate each question as if it were a matter of life and death, and why the University by turns delights and enrages us. It’s why I’m not quite ready to let go, even now. It’s why I’m writing in the present tense.

ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College. He was the Editor in Chief of the Yale Daily News Managing Board of 2016. Contact him at isaac.stanley-becker@yale.edu.

SLEEPER: Let go and begin again

In conversations with seniors last month I learned that many of you are leaving here with an unusually shared sense of history and foreboding. Although you don’t all agree on the meaning of what’s happened at Yale and beyond, you’ve learned that a useful disagreement needs agreed-upon practices and premises, such as listening well to opponents.

In finding courage to negotiate that common ground, you find your identity as a Yalie. This college was established to save the world from being flattened by commerce. Its founders insisted that the world has abysses, opening suddenly at our feet and in our hearts, and that students need to face the demons in them and sometimes even to defy worldly power instead of just facilitating it.

That’s true even now, when students arrive here with distinctive commitments, talents and burdens. Inevitably, contestations ensue. But Yalies still learn to cultivate enough common ground to make disagreements possible. They learn to weave the arts, graces and disciplines of public trust into messy, even dangerous situations.

Not everyone does it well. “To a remarkable extent, this place has detected and rejected those who wear the colors of high purpose falsely,” former University President Kingman Brewster Jr. told my class of 1969. “This has not been done by administrative edict … [but] by a pervasive ethic of student and faculty loyalty and responsibility … which lies deep in our origins and traditions.”

If that sounds like a boast about the Yale in crowd, Brewster insisted that “Anyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to. If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” He also called for a “generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”

Has Yale strengthened that spirit in you? In 2014, former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz claimed that “the exhaustion … the fearfulness and cynicism” in elite-college life produce “the spectacular failure of leadership” of a new aristocracy. Conservative critics blamed political correctness, even as market pressures subordinated liberal education’s public mission to private careerism and debt, which diminish social trust.

But such “spectacular failures” are widespread beyond campus gates. Students have sought protection and guidance here, sometimes too rigidly, but sometimes beautifully, as in last fall’s March of Resilience.

Yales’s public sphere has showed you that while the American Constitution rightly protects freedom of speech, civil society rightly modulates it, not “by administrative edict” but by shared understandings. As Austin Bryniarski ’16, proposed, make whatever you say, however impassioned, helpful, not incendiary or self-indulgent (“The Helpful Test,” Nov. 06, 2016).

The late Marina Keegan ’12 went further, observing that although “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness,” it’s “what I’m… thankful to have found at Yale…. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people… who are in this together…. We won’t have [that] next year” (“The Opposite of Loneliness,” May 27, 2012).

You won’t have that next year, either. But you can cultivate the “opposite of loneliness” with strangers — perhaps those whose own loneliness is prompted by economic forces driving them to desperation and demagogues. Spurring economic growth alone won’t reweave trust if it “grows” inequality and hardness of heart. “Diversity” certainly won’t do it if it yields only a colorful managerial class answering to no democratic polity or moral code.

Your college expects something more of you: that you’ll help to “free the oppressed in such a way that the oppressor, too, is freed,” as Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49 put the challenge at my own commencement. It’s your commencement now. But has the challenge changed? If anything, I think it’s more compelling.

JIM SLEEPER ’69 is a lecturer in Political Science and teaches a seminar on “Journalism, Liberalism and Democracy.” Contact him at james.sleeper@yale.edu.

VERNOIT: Of rights and responsibilities

This May, as we say our farewells and don our caps and gowns, our thoughts turn inevitably to contemplating the future. We cannot know for certain what the coming decades will hold for us, our communities or our world. What future generations will make of 2016, we likewise cannot say with certainty.

What we do know is that there are a great many challenges facing our world today. We have discussed these challenges in dorm rooms, dining halls and classrooms. We are encouraged to honor ideals of public service. To cap it all, in time-honored Commencement parlance, Yale will confer upon us our degrees with “all their rights and responsibilities.”

This tradition embodies a recognition that the freedom to work for change is often a privilege, a freedom that, perversely, is often least accessible to those who need it most.

There are a great many challenges facing our world today, but there is one that threatens the fabric of the world itself. That challenge, climate change, is one where those who have done the least to create the problem are precisely those who are most at risk.
Climate change threatens to destroy gains of development and render the goal of poverty eradication infeasible. It worsens threats such as disease and conflict. It correlates with matters such as ethnicity and gender. And it transcends boundaries, ranging from the bayous of Louisiana, where members of a Native American tribe have now become the first official climate refugees in the United States, to the drought-stricken regions of the Middle East, where vulnerable communities understand the link between precipitation and domestic stability all too well.

During our time in college, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide crossed the threshold of 400 parts per million for the first time in the history of human civilization. Climate change is here, and 2016 is on track to become the hottest year in recorded history. In 2016, however, the world’s governments joined together to sign the Paris Agreement, the first-ever universal international agreement to combat climate change. The event was the largest single-day signing of an international agreement in the history of diplomacy. While the Paris Agreement alone does not guarantee that its stated goals will be met, it commits the international community to achieving an emissions-neutral global economy by the end of the 21st century.

We graduate in an extraordinary year. We live in extraordinary times.

A great deal hangs on the course of the coming decades, and therefore, as we embark on our careers, the ethos of assuming rights and responsibilities is made all the more important. Wherever our careers take us, we will all have something to contribute; the world has embarked on an unprecedented transition, and it will take everything — from politics and policy to science and engineering, from economics and market forces to humanities and the arts — to successfully make this transition happen.

These circumstances raise difficult questions. What does it mean to graduate in 2016? One way or another, it means coming of age in an age of climate change. It means that when our children graduate into their careers, the world they enter will be, for better or for worse, significantly different from our own. We have an opportunity to contribute to the making of that future world.

In the spirit of Commencement, this opportunity entails a responsibility. Our four years here, hopefully, have taught us to be restless and maladjusted in the face of our society’s problems. The danger of false complacency is real; we must face the future and face up to our responsibilities.

Come, class of 2016! Let’s build a sense of agency and rightful urgency. Let’s work together toward the brighter future that is imperiled but still within reach. Let’s grapple and collectively come to terms with the enormity of the world’s challenges in 2016. Let’s remember 2016 not as an end but as a beginning. We can start by seeking each other and having the necessary conversations — conversations we have already begun in these four full years, conversations to last us the rest of our lives.

ALEXANDER VERNOIT is a senior in Saybrook College. He is the former president of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition. Contact him at alexander.vernoit@yale.edu.

YAO: The good can endure

I never intended to make writing a habit.

Last semester, I diligently wrote essays and grant proposals for the Fulbright Fellowship, a scholarship that funds a year of research in the country of one’s choosing. For months, I poured my heart into the application, dreaming of pursuing my research project and all the future exposures I would experience abroad. But more often than we’d like, things sometimes do not work out the way we want — sometime last January, the Fulbright Commission notified me that I had not advanced past the first round.

It may seem strange that I am using this space to share a relatively unpleasant story. Yet despite the deep disappointment, I remember making a very determined decision that I would not allow rejection to define my application process.

Through all the application essays, I began to appreciate how narrative writing could be used as a space to process my thoughts and make some sense of the larger world. I had applied to the Fulbright on the premise of pushing myself outside my comfort zone and bettering society in any small way I could. Even in the absence of an external fellowship, there was absolutely no reason why I couldn’t continue aiming for these goals.

My five years on this campus have at times come frighteningly close to suffocating the idealism with which I first came to Yale. There was a time in my adolescence when I had only wanted to see the best in everything. Admittedly, sustaining such sanguine beliefs has been more strenuous as I’ve gotten older. And yet, some part of me has still sought to return to this state of mind.

Finding my passion for writing in the ultimately disappointing Fulbright process is an example of one of Yale’s most valuable lessons to me: grit. Although my actions can often feel meaningless and arbitrary in the vacuum of time, writing has reminded me that with an underlying foundation of values and a conscientiousness capacity for persistence, progress can be measured, and a greater design slowly reveals itself in unforeseeable ways. In turn, our work can create ripples of effect the impact of which we might never fully comprehend.

I witnessed these ripples from the fifth row of a spoken-word show earlier this year. After the performance, the underclassmen in the group revealed to the graduating senior how much she had positively touched all of their lives in seemingly ordinary and mundane ways. The younger members of the group promised to spread benevolence and warmth to others just as this senior had extended to them. Just as one flame can kindle another, so too can one person illuminate another. The moment spoke to what’s best in us — the categorical compassion I believe we all enjoyed in our youth. Something special happens when we capture these sentiments and emanate them. Heart by heart, community by community, the glow from this light can ignite an entire society.

Our time at this place is both perfect and imperfect — incredibly privileged, yet marred by inevitable disappointment. We have accomplished so much as individuals and together as a group, and yet, we will always strive for something greater. That’s the nature of the work we seek to do, the impact we aim to make. But even in the never-ending quest for that perfection, we can still find our ideal. Our ideal exists throughout our narrative, and it is there if you know how to look. It is in those moments, in those ripples of benevolence, that we are kinder, sincerer, stronger — perhaps better people than we actually are.

Time is fleeting, but the moment was real. And in that truth — if we can remember it — the good can endure.

JOHNATHAN YAO is a 2015 graduate of Jonathan Edwards College and is now graduating from the School of Public Health. Contact him at johnathan.yao@yale.edu.

UP CLOSE:
The many faces of Malloy

by Noah Daponte-Smith

Published on April 29, 2016

Recounting a Donald J. Trump rally may seem like an unconventional way to introduce a story about Connecticut politics.

But the scene in the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford on April 15 was too good to pass up. In the midst of the businessman’s usual screed about the loss of American manufacturing jobs — often, but not always, to overseas — he took an opportunity to address the particular travails of the state in which he was speaking.

(Noah Daponte-Smith, Contributing Photographer)

“We lost General Electric!” Trump exclaimed incredulously, referring to the company’s January announcement that it would move its Fairfield headquarters to Boston. “How do you lose General Electric?”

From the crowd, shouts arose: “Malloy! Malloy!” And as Trump cited statistics about the hardships of northern Connecticut — rising numbers on the food-stamp rolls, a shrinking workforce, disappearing manufacturing jobs that once kept the region humming — Gov. Dannel Malloy’s name rose from the crowd again and again, shouted not as an explanation but as an accusation, a vituperative indictment of the governor’s tenure.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE NUTMEG STATE

The former mayor of Stamford, the state’s white-collar hub, has endured a stormy six years as Connecticut’s chief executive. Economic turmoil has come and left its mark in what appears to many a permanent stagnation. Connecticut, it seems, is being left behind while more vibrant, sunnier quarters — Cambridge, Massachusetts springs to mind — pull ahead. And since Malloy took office in early 2011, after a bitter and narrow victory against Greenwich Republican Tom Foley, he has bore the brunt of criticism for the state’s stagnation.

Malloy is deeply unpopular in Connecticut. Quinnipiac University opinion polling from October 2015 — the most recent data available — found Malloy had a 32 percent approval rating among the state’s residents. Just over a third of residents thought Malloy “[cared] about voters’ needs and problems.” A mere 19 percent approved of his handling of taxes and the state’s budget. Just under a quarter thought he was managing the economy and job creation well. And — most damningly — a scant 10 percent of residents said the economy was improving.

But these difficulties are nothing new. To put it frankly, Malloy, who could not be reached for an interview, has never enjoyed widespread popularity. His election in 2010 was won by the skin of his teeth, and without Malloy’s landslide margins in the inner cities of Bridgeport and Hartford, Foley would be sitting in the governor’s office today.

Malloy’s approval ratings hovered in the 30s and 40s throughout his first term, and have never exceeded 50 percent in Quinnipiac’s surveys. His re-election campaign in 2014, coming after he passed the largest tax increase in the history of Connecticut, was similarly tight. A smattering of polls throughout the race showed Foley with a slight lead, but by the end of the day, Malloy clinched victory by only 2.5 percentage points.

Malloy, for his part, has always maintained that he does not need to be liked. That said, he has acknowledged that  it would have been preferable, naturally, to preside over an economic boom.

“I wish I was more popular, as I wish I had been governor in good times,” Malloy told reporters in his Hartford office earlier this month. “I’m really energized. I enjoy being the governor, I enjoy working, I enjoy taking on these issues … I’m happy. Don’t anyone think I’m unhappy.”

FROM CRISIS TO CRISIS

But why would anyone think Malloy is unhappy?

Traditionally, governors are judged by their financial acumen. But for Malloy, balancing the state’s budget has proved a near-impossible task, and the state has drifted from budget crisis to budget crisis with no end in sight. These crises have become the hallmark of Malloy’s tenure and public perceptions of his strength as a governor.

But now, the governor has deemed, these crises must stop. In his annual State of the State address to the General Assembly in February, Malloy declared that the previous era of fiscal largesse was over. No longer will the state use its current spending to determine its future spending, in which cutting spending is politically painful as state departments expect to maintain funding levels akin to the previous year.

No, now the state has entered “a new economic reality” that is forcing a change in the state’s fiscal policies.

(Phoebe Gould, Production & Design Staff)

“Connecticut is not going back to that pre-recession reality,” Malloy said. “It just doesn’t exist anymore. The people of Connecticut know it — they’ve accepted it — and so must their government.”

The practical implications of this declaration? Fiscal austerity. Whatever could be cut should be cut — nonprofits, labor contracts, even funding for funerals. Immense layoffs, numbering in the thousands. For Malloy, Connecticut’s “new economic reality” is not just economic. It required a radical rethinking of the role of government in citizens’ lives, a significant and unwelcome departure from the previous governing philosophy.

Malloy made that much clear in his State of the State address. Government, he said, would have to close ranks, protecting “core functions” while maintaining a critical eye on superfluous services.

“We must concentrate on the core functions of state government, namely: protecting the public, ensuring a social safety net, building a strong economy, safeguarding our environment, providing a public education and administering justice,” he said in the address on Feb. 3. “To that end, functions that fall outside of these core services must be considered on merit alone.”

In other words, state government can no longer be “everything to everyone,” a phrase Malloy has repeated throughout the town hall meetings that have taken him across the state, from New Haven to Enfield to Waterbury.

(Phoebe Gould, Production & Design Staff)

Malloy laid out five principles in that budget speech, all aimed at reining in the state’s finances and ushering in an era of more fiscally constrained government. Those proposals sat well with the state’s business community, which has long called for Connecticut to foster a more welcoming environment for economic development.

“Those five principles that he laid out resonated well with the business community, because there are things that we have been talking about, certain legislators have been talking about — probably more Republican than Democrat — for quite a while,” said Joe Brennan, president and chief executive officer of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association. “Live within means, focus on core services … those five principles combined were very well-received within the business community.”

But even the cuts Malloy proposed in February will not be enough. In fact, the estimated size of the budget deficit for fiscal year 2017 has grown in the last three months — from $560 million in February to somewhere in the region of $920 million today.

Since the February speech, Malloy has doubled down on his proposals. He declared two weeks ago that filling the deficit by raising taxes, borrowing money or dipping into the state’s rainy day fund was strictly off the table. The implication, of course, is that cuts are the only way out.

Malloy has gotten no help from his fellow Democrats in the General Assembly. The legislature’s Appropriations Committee typically passes a budget that represents an alternative to the governor’s proposal. That pattern repeated itself this year — but that budget passed by the Democrat-controlled committee only covered the original $560 million deficit, not the new $920 million one. That situation persisted until Thursday afternoon, when the legislative Democrats put forth a new budget that resolves the $920 million deficit, though its chances of passage in the General Assembly are slim and its chances of receiving Malloy’s signature even slimmer.

Malloy has responded in kind: Insisting the budget fill the $920 million gap — an insistence he shares with his Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano ’81, R-North Haven, who memorably described the Democrats’ budget as developed “in a time machine or a warp-place.” Malloy has proposed savage new cuts, the brunt of which would fall on the Municipal Revenue Sharing Account, a scheme championed by legislature Democrats to share sales-tax revenues with the state’s municipalities.

According to Betsy Gara, executive director of the Connecticut Council of Small Towns, those cuts could wreak havoc on the finances of many towns and cities. Most municipalities, she said, have already passed their budgets for the year, taking into account expected receipts from MRSA. But the governor’s new proposal would severely reduce those receipts.

If the cuts pass the General Assembly, towns will be forced to adjust their mill rates — that is, raise taxes — to cover the resulting gap. And in cities like New Haven, where property taxes already present heavy burdens on city residents, tax hikes could be disastrous.

“You’ll certainly understand that the governor and the legislature are facing a monumental task in trying to fix the deficit,” Gara said. “They’re trying to address the budget, but there’s just not a lot of options.”

THE END OF THE AFFAIR

It should come as no surprise that the right wing criticizes Malloy. What is unusual, though, is the degree of left-wing discontent with the governor. The October Quinnipiac poll found that nearly a third of self-identified Democrats disapprove of Malloy’s performance, along with 61 percent of independents and 86 percent of Republicans.

(Phoebe Gould, Production & Design Staff)

The sentiments expressed by Kimberly Rice, a New Haven resident, at a town hall with Malloy in New Haven in February are typical of the left’s attitudes toward the governor. Rice campaigned for Malloy in 2014; she spoke to thousands on his behalf, beseeching them to vote for the incumbent governor. But now, she said, Malloy seems to have betrayed the principles for which he once stood.

“I truly believed that you were the best man for the job,” Rice said to the governor. “You have a choice to make. I’m here tonight because I’m concerned. And that concern is that you appear to be abandoning your policies and adopting an austerity budget, and that concerns me, because what we’re doing in effect is abandoning the people who are most in need.”

Malloy, in response to Rice, denied any charge that he had abandoned his core principles, the principles for which the unions supported him in his re-election campaign. Instead, he said, material exigencies had forced him into his current quandary. And he insisted that, as governor, his job is not to focus on the short-term livelihood of the state, but its long-term vitality, stretching into the next two decades. Some sacrifices, he said, must be made today for the state’s fiscal health tomorrow.

Rice’s criticism has echoed across the left. The state’s employee unions, facing the specter of enormous layoffs under Malloy’s plans, have staged numerous protests in the state capitol over the last few weeks, calling for Malloy to raise taxes on the state’s highest earners instead of laying off middle-income state workers.

Lori Pelletier, president of the Connecticut branch of major labor union AFL-CIO, said budget struggles will likely continue until Malloy and his counterparts in the General Assembly realize that budget cuts, no matter how savage, offer no long-term answers. Instead, she said, the governor must consider new sources of additional revenue.

Citing the economic malaise in Greece, where many left-wing economists argue austerity policies have slowed economic growth for years, she criticized Malloy’s apparent willingness to “be austere for the point of being austere.”

(Wikimedia Commons)

Some of the harshest condemnation of Malloy’s proposed budget cuts has come from House Speaker Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden, who declined to be interviewed for this piece. After Malloy insisted last week that his proposed budget, and not the legislature’s, be the starting point of negotiations, Sharkey viciously lashed out, terming Malloy’s budget a “public enemies list” and “personal hit list.”

Those remarks were a response to an op-ed Malloy wrote in the Hartford Courant the week before, in which he disparaged any proposals — like the legislature’s — that do not plug every gap in the state’s budget crisis.

“I won’t accept half-measures or Band-Aid solutions,” Malloy wrote, throwing down the gauntlet to legislative Democrats. “Anyone who wants to negotiate with my administration should either come ready with their own balanced plan, or be prepared to work off mine. We can’t negotiate off incomplete budgets or no budget at all.”

In other words: if the legislature has no proposals of its own to address the $920 million deficit, Malloy will expect that all negotiations proceed from his own proposals. The legislature has yet to offer any proposals that meet the governor’s expectations and Sharkey pulled out of bipartisan budget talks last Tuesday.

There is also a sense that Malloy, perhaps, is too much of a dictator. Sharkey has noted that Malloy’s proposals would grant the executive broad powers to make unilateral cuts as the governor sees fit, without the explicit assent of the legislature.

When reporters asked Malloy what he thought of Sharkey’s remarks at a press conference last week, he refrained from descending into ad hominem attacks. Everyone has a bad day, he said, and a “pressurized” situation gives rise to tension. He acknowledged, moreover, that doing what it takes to live within the state’s new fiscal constraints is difficult for any politician, let alone one who must answer to the party’s base.

“I don’t feel jilted,” Malloy said. “Listen, I feel it’s really hard — adjusting to a new economic reality of slow growth is very, very hard, and they have big constituencies. My constituency, in these negotiations, is largely six people … they have much larger constituencies. They have a lot of Democratic senators and a lot of Democratic representatives.”

But the sense that Malloy might harbor some sympathy for an iron-fisted method of politics still remains.

Fasano and Pelletier, though coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, offered the same criticism of Malloy: that he has too much of a one-track mind, unwilling to seriously consider alternatives to his own plans. Fasano said his experience with Malloy — before talks in December to resolve yet another budget deficit — was that negotiating with him is either “his way or the highway.”

Fasano noted, however, that Malloy appeared more open-minded in December, willing to promote discussion and foster compromise. And since then, Republicans have met with Malloy repeatedly in talks over the state’s budget crisis, a sign of cooling tensions between the sides.

“Listen, I feel it’s really hard — adjusting to a new economic reality of slow growth is very, very hard, and they have big constituencies. My constituency, in these negotiations, is largely six people … they have much larger constituencies. They have a lot of Democratic senators and a lot of Democratic representatives.”

—Gov. Dannel Malloy

Pelletier, meanwhile, called on Malloy to have an open discussion with the state’s unions.

“[What would restore relations] would be to sit down and be willing to have an honest conversation about how to fix the state, and listen to our suggestions. That hasn’t happened yet,” she said. “The governor seems to have made up his mind that this is the path he wants to take, and he’s not really willing to listen to other sides.”

The unions, for their part, have launched an assault on the governor’s fiscal policies, reflecting the extent of left-wing discontent. In video advertisements making their way across the internet, the American Federation of Teachers and Council 4 AFSCME demand that Malloy stop firing “everyday heroes” who “pay their dues in service and sacrifice” to balance the state’s budget deficit.

Instead, the narrator says, Malloy should force the “richest 1 percent” to “pay their fair share.” “Malloy’s budget problem is a fairness problem.”

Malloy refuses to raise taxes. Connecticut, he says, is already at a tax disadvantage relative to other states in the region; raising its exorbitantly high rate of income tax on the highest earners would risk pushing those earners to other states and depleting Connecticut’s tax base.

The current tax structure, Malloy has noted, is risky enough: those high earners mostly work on Wall Street, and as Wall Street’s fortunes slip, so do the state’s income tax receipts. Making the state’s tax system more dependent on those high earners would place the state more at the mercy of the capricious stock markets.

Despite his budget stance’s unpopularity on the left, Malloy has garnered praise from the editorial boards of the Connecticut Post, Journal Inquirer, Norwich Bulletin and New London Day, all of which have criticized the legislature Democrats’ plans.

“It is good … that Malloy took it upon himself to finish the job, in so doing defying the party,” the Norwich Bulletin wrote in an editorial. “Someone has to solve the problem. The legislature shows little inclination or ability to get it done and is no position to object to the exertions of the governor’s office in this regard.”

MALLOY THE LIONHEART

Despite the governor’s deep domestic unpopularity, his image throughout the country is glowing. On the national stage — one dominated by The New York Times, not the Hartford Courant — Malloy resembles a moral crusader for progressive causes.

When Indiana passed its version of a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibited the state government from “substantially [burdening] a person’s exercise of religion, Malloy banned nonessential state-funded travel to the Hoosier State. When North Carolina and Mississippi passed their much-maligned “bathroom bills” earlier this month, Malloy did the same.

And — in a continuation of the feud between Connecticut and Indiana — when Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana refused to allow Syrian refugees into his state after the November terrorist attacks in Paris, Malloy was happy to accept them into Connecticut, and a family of three has settled in New Haven. Malloy relished in the national press coverage that action brought, and earlier this month, was declared the recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his stance on refugees.

Malloy’s reasoning in all those instances was simple, and it had much to do with his background as a man of faith — a classic New England Irish Catholic. He presented his moral worldview in an essay in Time, and the world he portrayed was one of sharp, black-and-white delineations between friend and foe. Pence, in his account, fell firmly on the wrong side of history — the arc of which does indeed bend toward social justice, but only when individuals actively push it in that direction.

“If we stand idly by while states legalize bigotry, we are responsible for allowing it to happen,” Malloy wrote. “The [RFRA] law is disturbing, disgraceful and outright discriminatory. Governor Mike Pence knew what he was doing. He knew this legislation would allow discrimination against American citizens. He signed it anyway.”

Malloy elaborated on that moral stance in New Haven’s City Hall in November, where he held a press conference about the Syrian refugees he had welcomed to Connecticut. There, he expounded a theory of cosmopolitanism: As Americans, he said, we have an obligation to the nations of the world. And “If you believe in God, I think it’s the moral thing to do.”

(Phoebe Gould, Production & Design Staff)

The list of Malloy’s nationally recognized accomplishments goes on.

After President Barack Obama called on Congress to ban those on the federal no-fly list from purchasing firearms, Malloy was happy to circumvent Congress’ legislative inaction and issued an executive order prohibiting the issuance of gun permits to those on federal terrorist watch lists.

That stance — as well as extensive gun-control legislation passed in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre — was enough to garner Malloy a trip to the nation’s capital, where he sat next to First Lady Michelle Obama for the president’s last State of the Union. Between the two dignitaries was an empty seat, symbolizing the thousands who have died as a result of gun violence in recent years.

But Malloy’s national popularity has not provoked universal goodwill in the state. Pelletier worried Malloy’s national prominence might be distracting him from his duties to his constituents. She noted Malloy has touted his stance as a progressive to fundraise for the Democratic Governors Association.

“Listen, he’s done some amazing work around criminal justice reform. His response to Sandy Hook was what a governor should do,” she said. “But the fact that he’s got a tin ear when it comes to changing the tax structure is a problem. He’s still governor of this state.”

A HEARTBEAT AWAY

Given the screen time devoted to Trump’s bleached blonde hair, it should not be forgotten that this is an election year.

Malloy’s national popularity has fostered speculation about a possible vice-presidential pick if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 wins the Democratic nomination. Malloy, for his part, has denied the rumors, with his spokesman insisting that the governor is focused on his job in Connecticut.

In an appearance on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC in January, the host confronted the governor with the simple question: Are you in the running to be the vice-presidential nominee for the Democratic Party this year?

Malloy said no — or, rather, that he hoped not.

Vice President Joe Biden, he said, should be given the nod for a third year running. Then, despite his public profession of disinterest in the role, Malloy offered a laundry list of his accomplishments as governor, amounting in Maddow’s eyes to a “pretty good audition reel.”

“We were the first to pass paid sick days. We did it in ’11. No other state did it until ’14, and now only four states have done it,” Malloy said on the show. “We were the first state to get behind $10.10 as a minimum wage. We were the best implementer of Obamacare. We have taken on the issue of education. We were the first state to be certified as having ended chronic homelessness amongst veterans, just this past summer. We’ve done a lot of good work.”

According to Brad Bannon, a Washington political analyst who founded Bannon Communications Research, wherever Malloy ends up after November’s election will be the result of the cards Malloy strategically played throughout the Democratic primary. Brannon referred to Malloy’s decision to support Clinton, the current frontrunner for the presidency. Malloy — a champion of gun control — has, at times, served as Clinton’s attack dog, slamming her opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, for his votes against the Brady Bill in the Senate.

In that respect, Malloy’s focus on gun control after the Sandy Hook massacre — and Connecticut’s unique place in the national gun-control debate — has paid off, giving him a platform on which to stand in the national spotlight and a vector through which to express his support for Clinton in what has become an increasingly vicious Democratic primary.

Political support is a two-way street, involving implicit deals and quid pro quos. Picking whom to support can make or break careers, and with Clinton the heavy favorite to win the presidency, Malloy’s support for the former secretary of state may reap generous rewards.

But the outcomes of presidential politics can be up in the air, and the fortunes of selection and appointment depend heavily on proper timing and placement — and plain old good luck. Malloy’s chances of ascending to a heartbeat away from the presidency will likely be hampered by the exigencies of presidential politics, Bannon said.

“There’s really no incentive for Sanders or for Clinton to pick someone from Connecticut [for vice president],” Bannon said. “The reality is, first you’re looking at someone from Ohio or Florida, for candidates. And on the Democratic side, I believe there would be a lot of pressure on both Clinton and Sanders to pick a Latino running mate.”

That Latino running mate could very well be Julian Castro — the current secretary of housing and urban development, a graduate of Harvard Law School and former mayor of San Antonio — who, incidentally, visited the Elm City in January to meet with a group of prominent Connecticut Latinos. Other names thrown around include Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Sen. Sherrod Brown ’74 of Ohio, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Secretary of Labor Tom Perez.

“We were the first to pass paid sick days. We did it in ’11. No other state did it until ’14, and now only four states have done it.”

—Gov. Dannel Malloy

But all those names are either ethnic minorities or from a crucial swing state. Malloy can boast neither of those attributes.

What Malloy could be in the running for, Brannon said, is a domestic position in the Cabinet of a potential President Hillary Clinton — secretary of housing and urban development or transportation, perhaps.

Or Malloy could take a different route, plunging deeper into partisan politics. Malloy currently serves as chair of the Democratic Governors Association, a role that mostly entails fundraising. Brannon said Malloy would be a strong candidate for chairman of the Democratic National Committee when current chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz steps down from the position after the November election. This summer, Malloy will serve as the co-chairman of the platform committee at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, a position that could prove valuable in blocking the incorporation of some of Sanders’ more radical policy stances into the Democratic Party’s platform, regardless of who ultimately wins the Democratic nomination.

Wherever Malloy decides to go — or is tapped to go — one thing is clear: It will depend on the outcome of the presidential election. And with prediction markets estimating Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency at 73 percent, Malloy is in a very good position indeed.

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD

(Wikimedia Commons)

The General Assembly’s session ends May 6.

Talks between the governor and the legislative Democrats are non-existent, but Sharkey has now called for negotiations to begin again. The Republicans have put forth their budget plan, which the governor has acknowledged resembles his own in many respects, and the Democrats, as of Thursday night, have one too. But the possibility that the deadlock continues — that the session ends without a budget — remains very real.

Malloy will have none of it.

If the legislature fails to pass a budget before the expiration of the session, he has said, he will simply demand they return to Hartford.

“If they adjourn before they do it, we’ll call them back,” Malloy said. “They have a job to do, and we’ve got to get the job done. I don’t have a magic wand to make people do their jobs, but I can make it uncomfortable for them not to do their jobs, and that means being here all summer, if that’s what it means.”

Calhoun, Murray & Franklin:
Community condemns decisions

 

On Wednesday, April 27, University President Peter Salovey announced long-awaited decisions on the names of the two new residential colleges, the naming of Calhoun College and the title of residential college master. See the News’ full coverage below.

COVERAGE

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Students hold Calhoun renaming ceremony

Hundreds of activists and their allies gathered in front of Calhoun College Friday afternoon to protest the Corporation’s decision to retain the college’s name and rechristen it as “the college formerly known as Calhoun.”

Holding signs inscribed with potential replacement namesakes, such as Grace Hopper and Edward Bouchet, students dressed in black lined up in front of the college. A handful of activists spoke to the audience of roughly 600, lamenting that the University has honored a white supremacist for more than 80 years and explaining that the gathering marks the first step toward a new path. One speaker explained that Calhoun College will not be given a new name yet; rather, students will take a moment to reflect first. Others read spoken word poetry, sang “Lift Ev’ry Voice” and decried the “historical and ongoing injustices” enabled by Yale administrators.

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Students confront Salovey at town hall

As a shower of fake $1 million bills rained down upon him, University President Peter Salovey found himself confronted with questions about race, money and historical memory on Thursday.

The bills were thrown by dozens of students in the balcony of Battell Chapel who were angry about the recently announced decision to retain the name of Calhoun College and to name one of the two new residential colleges after Benjamin Franklin. Salovey — who stood ashen-faced as students passionately questioned him, sometimes shouting to make their voices heard — hosted the town hall to hear student reactions to the controversial decisions. Hundreds of students attended the event, and student activists formed a particularly prominent block at the front of the chapel; many wore duct tape over their mouths and custom T-shirts protesting the decisions.

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Calhoun grapples with fate

Austin Strayhorn ’19, a student in Calhoun College, was napping in his dorm room when the University announced Wednesday evening that it would retain the name of the college. He was awakened by screams of disgust from the next room, as his suitemates reacted angrily to the news.

“The next couple weeks, it’s not going to be easy to be here [in Calhoun College],” said Strayhorn, who is African-American. “This thing hasn’t made it easier on the students of color … We’ll find other places to be.”

The naming announcement — which came in a Wednesday evening email from University President Peter Salovey  alongside verdicts on the title of “master” and the naming of the two new residential colleges — has provoked a furious reaction from student activists both within Calhoun and throughout the larger University community.

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Students rechristen Franklin College

In response to the University’s announcement that it will name one of the new residential colleges after Benjamin Franklin, some students have adopted a different Franklin to stand in as the college’s namesake: legendary soul singer Aretha Franklin.

In a campuswide email Wednesday afternoon announcing the naming decision, University President Peter Salovey acknowledged Benjamin Franklin’s accomplishments in “the arts, the sciences, government and service to society.” Salovey wrote that Franklin was also selected as the college’s namesake because he is a “personal role model” to Charles Johnson ’54, whose $250 million donation toward the new colleges’ construction was the largest gift from a single donor in the University’s history.

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Prefrosh weigh names, choices

Sidney Saint-Hilaire, an admitted student from New York who is African-American, said the University’s decision has given him pause about committing to Yale, adding that schools like Brown work harder toward faculty diversity and inclusion for people of color in general.

“Less than a day after I sent in my early action application, I turned on the television and saw Yale students protesting the University’s refusal to protect [people of color] on campus intellectually and morally under a guise of preserving free speech,” Saint-Hilaire said. “I was ashamed of the University, but it was my pride in the students that stopped me from rescinding my application. I feel that same feeling sitting here less than 24 hours after Bulldog Days, on the verge of committing, and looking at this news.”

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Alumni weigh in on names

In the hours after University President Peter Salovey announced resolutions to three long-standing campus naming debates, the decisions reverberated throughout a community of over 150,000 Yale alumni worldwide.

In a campuswide email on Wednesday, Salovey wrote that Calhoun College would not be renamed, the title of residential college master would change to “head of college” and Yale’s two new residential colleges would be named after Anna Pauline Murray LAW ’65 and Benjamin Franklin. Salovey made it clear from the outset of the naming debates that alumni opinions — along with those of students, faculty and staff — would be considered in the decision-making process.

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ANALYSIS: Salovey stands alone

On Wednesday, Salovey announced the names of the two new residential colleges, the elimination of the title “master” and the retention of the name of Calhoun College. The timing of the decisions, as well as the maintenance of Calhoun and establishment of Benjamin Franklin College, have sparked fierce reactions from many student groups, including those who were particularly vocal last semester on issues of race, diversity and inclusion. By penning the announcement email and hosting a heated town hall the next day, Salovey has sent a clear message: he wants to be held accountable for these decisions.

“I am the president of Yale,” Salovey told the News after the town hall. “It is my job to take responsibility, to listen and to connect with our community.”

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 Calhoun to remain namesake

In 1931, the University named a residential college after John Caldwell Calhoun, one of the fiercest advocates of slavery in American history. Eighty-five years later, following heated campus protests and more than two decades of debate over the college’s namesake, the University reaffirmed its decision.

University President Peter Salovey announced the decision to retain the name of Calhoun College as part of a community-wide email Wednesday evening. The controversy over Calhoun — named for the senator, vice president and notorious slavery advocate who graduated from Yale College in 1804 — has spanned a generation. But the naming debate, like a number of similar discussions at colleges across the country, gained new momentum this fall as racially charged protests shook campus.

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Pauli Murray LAW ’65, Benjamin Franklin honored

Anna Pauline Murray LAW ’65, the first woman or person of color to be honored by the name of a college, was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women, a famous civil rights activist and the first African-American to graduate from Yale with a doctorate in juridical science. Murray, who was queer, also received an honorary degree from the Divinity School in 1979. Salovey called her a champion of racial and gender equity, adding that Murray represents “the best of Yale: a preeminent intellectual inspired to lead and prepared to serve her community and her country.”

Benjamin Franklin, the other namesake, never graduated from Yale, although he did receive an honorary degree in 1753. The founder and a former president of the University of Pennsylvania, Franklin was a member of the “Committee of Five” that drafted the Declaration of Independence. As an innovator and self-taught scientist, Franklin also invented the lightning rod and made key scientific discoveries related to electricity and the wave theory of light. Salovey wrote that Franklin’s “commitment as a scientist, statesman, philosopher and writer” have shaped America.

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ANALYSIS: Who was this for?

Renewed debate over Calhoun College and the title of master emerged at the beginning of the 2015–16 academic year, while students and alumni have been debating the names of the new residential colleges since their construction was announced in 2008. But on Wednesday, Salovey announced the outcome of each debate in one fell swoop, answering three separate, distinct questions in one University-wide email.

The choice to intertwine these decisions begs the question: What, if anything, was the University’s broader strategy?

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“Master” to become “head of college”

An hour after naming David Evans ’92 the new head of Berkeley college, University President Peter Salovey announced in a campuswide email that Yale will discard the title, replacing it with “head of college.” Salovey’s message also included two other key naming decisions regarding the name of Calhoun College and the two new residential colleges.

Pierson head of college Stephen Davis opened a conversation about the title last August when he asked Pierson students to stop referring to him as “master,” citing concerns about the term’s associations with slavery and oppression. In the subsequent months, the title has generated heated debate on campus, as students, faculty and alumni have expressed emotions ranging from support to disdain for Davis’ request. Because the title was built into the University bylaws, the Yale Corporation held the final say. The body made the decision to change the title during its April meeting — months after Harvard and Princeton announced a similar change in the title in their residential systems.

 

OPINIONS

NEWS’ VIEW: Our missed opportunity

Amidst the tears and painful conversations last semester, a note of optimism hung in the air. The March of Resilience in November affirmed a widespread commitment to, in University President Peter Salovey’s own words, “a better Yale.” Student activists delivered concrete policy demands to administrators, with some tangible results. Despite the University’s past failures to address the concerns of students and faculty of color, there was a glimmer of hope.

At around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, that hope was unceremoniously dashed.

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SALOVEY: We cannot seek truth by hiding it

Although one may feel disappointment and even anger at some aspects of the decisions announced on Wednesday, the decisions connect to the mission of the University in ways that can inspire us to improve the world. These are turning points toward a better Yale, a bright future we can make by joining from our individual points of view, honestly examining the past and committing to work together to strengthen our common ties.

Yale’s motto is “light and truth,” and we cannot seek the truth by hiding it. As a University, as students and faculty, we search out knowledge and pursue discovery. We cannot inhibit this pursuit by marking the ugliest aspects of our own nature “off-limits.”

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MIELE: What we taught at Yale

I almost didn’t go here. It took three adult women (my mother, a family friend and a teacher) to convince me to apply to Yale after I was named a QuestBridge finalist. I argued with them — I shouldn’t even bother applying. I wasn’t good enough. But they convinced me to give it a shot.

I know better now: I am good enough. It took four years, international headlines, many tears, sleepless nights, protests, tremendous love and spiritual reawakening for me to understand that every moment I have spent at Yale is an act of defiance. I am a woman of color who has attended an institution that, for most of its existence, did not think a person like me was worthy of an education.

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TIRUMALA: Everyone’s human

In the coming days, many students will be inundated with Facebook posts eviscerating the Yale administration and Corporation — and for good reason. It’s duplicitous to change the title of “master” because it makes some students feel uncomfortable, but keep the far more disturbing name of John C. Calhoun emblazoned on a residential college. It’s also strange, if not entirely absurd, to name a new residential college after Benjamin Franklin.

But that’s about all I want to say about that. What I’m more interested in is the way students and administrators appear to conceive of one another.

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NIERENBERG: Money talks

One of my all-time favorite movies, “All the President’s Men,” offers the best advice I’ve ever received as a journalist: Follow the money. Certainly, that was true for the Watergate scandal, the subject of the film. And it’s true now — especially in the names of our two newest colleges. Let’s follow the money. It’s the most obvious lead here.

Although the size of our endowment may suggest otherwise, Yale is a nonprofit entity. A nonprofit seeks revenue, yes, but also adheres to its mission. In reflecting on our two newly named additions to Yale, let’s take this two-pronged approach: We must consider both wallet and mission.

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SHERLEY: The same Yale roots

Yale says that it respects civil dialogue. But these decisions reveal to us that what Yale really respects — power. This campus had a civil, well-researched, passionate dialogue about Calhoun College for months. The News reported that the average student on campus thought the name of the college should be changed. Surely, the Yale Corporation knew this, so why did they decide to keep the name?

Yale is obsessed with its history, but only a certain version of it. The story goes that people like John C. Calhoun (or even Benjamin Franklin) are great men whose racism is just a blight on their pristine legacies. However, this is only partly true. Men like Calhoun were essential to the history of this country. But their racism is not just a stain; it was integral to the vision of the United States that people like him were working towards.

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ARONSON: The Case for Dr. Franklin

What’s against him? Principally, Franklin did not earn a degree at Yale — he was granted an honorary one. I have spoken with several people very concerned about this apparent departure from the tradition of naming colleges after Yale grads. Fortunately, the leaders of Yale wisely remained within the school’s ancient practice concerning names of residential colleges. Berkeley, Davenport and Pierson are named for people who did not graduate from Yale. And Trumbull — like Franklin College — is named for the (Harvard-educated) holder of an honorary Yale degree. There’s also the matter of Franklin’s skin color and sex. But why should this be a point against him? Franklin, like his collegiate sister Pauli Murray LAW ’65, is just the sort of person Yale should want its students of every color and both sexes to emulate.

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ZHANG: For the students

This is for the senior who will not have a college named after her: who feels the ghosts of slaveowner’s past yanking a rose stem out of her throat, who slit her tongue and watched the blood spill in October — how it flowed into the palms of a thousand newspapers, how the nation glared at those seeds of hope, how the fire blazed in the distance, how the students stood there in the rain like something beautiful would grow out of pain.

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GOLDENBERG: One step forward, two steps back

President Peter Salovey’s announcement yesterday regarding the names of the residential colleges was profoundly discouraging. The potential renaming of Calhoun and the christening of the two new colleges were excellent opportunities to move Yale forward, to celebrate our diversity as well as our excellence and to reject some of our beloved institution’s most troublesome legacies. This was a time for Yale to shed some of its worst legacies of exclusion and stodginess. Unfortunately, Salovey seems to have squandered that precious opportunity.

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STERN: We should say no

To President Peter Salovey, to the members of the Yale Corporation, to all who played a role in choosing to retain the name of Calhoun College and in choosing to christen Benjamin Franklin College, I say no.

Much has already been said about these decisions, and much will undoubtedly be said in the days to come. The universally outraged reactions on social media were telling. The decision to change the title of “master” is long overdue, and the choice of honoring Pauli Murray LAW ’65 is an inspired one; she was a pioneer and is an inspiration. But Calhoun and Franklin — oy vey.

The Rule of Three:
Yale, Claremont McKenna and Mizzou

by Jon Victor

Published on April 28, 2016

It’s Thursday evening in Columbia, Missouri, and I’m sitting in one of the back rows of Room Seven in Hulston Hall, a building located squarely in the middle of the University of Missouri’s campus. Tonight, the university’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force is meeting. The matter at hand: an update on “Phase II: Expanding Membership.”

All University of Missouri students (of which there over 35,000), faculty (over 3,000) and staff (over 12,000) were invited to attend this meeting. There are around 20 people in the room.

The people who did come seem to be either professors or student journalists, and they’re scattered around the room looking vaguely bored. At the front of the room, David Mitchell, the task force chair, is fiddling with his laptop, preparing to give an address that will discuss the process by which students and faculty can apply to be on the task force.

One attendee, Director of Residential Life Frankie Minor, tells me it’s his first time going to such an event, and he hadn’t come in with any expectations about attendance.

“It’s St. Patrick’s Day on a college campus,” he says.

This is what the situation looks like now that The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media outlets have packed up and left the University of Missouri just as quickly as they came. Mel Carnahan Quadrangle, which is right outside, would now be unrecognizable to most people without the tent city and masses of students once pictured all over the national media. Students stroll unceremoniously across the quad; it could be that of any campus in America.

Last fall, a string of protests took place, revolving around incidents of racism at Mizzou. The final and most intense protest ended with a weeklong hunger strike, a threat by the football team to boycott a game and the resignation of two of the University of Missouri System’s top administrators. But the protests have died down in recent months, as conversations on campus race relations move to closed meetings of university decision-makers and open campuswide forums like the one I’m attending.

November’s protests were the beginning of a series of events that has thrust the entire University of Missouri System into crisis mode. After the two administrators resigned, an interim president and chancellor, Mike Middleton and Hank Foley, were appointed. They have yet to be replaced. Mizzou faces a budget crisis brought on by a drop in enrollment and plummeting donations. And to make matters worse, the Missouri House of Representatives recently announced budget cuts to the university totaling over $8 million.

Mizzou was just one campus out of dozens nationwide that became hotbeds of student protests last fall. At Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, Dean of Students Mary Spellman chose to step down amid student furor over an email she sent that suggested one student of color didn’t “fit our CMC mold.” At Yale, an email from Silliman College Associate Master Erika Christakis defending students’ choice to wear offensive Halloween costumes, as well as an alleged incident of racial discrimination at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, sparked widespread demonstrations against discrimination on campus. In the Ivy League and elsewhere, students marched, protested and submitted lists of demands designed to improve college life for students of color.

Yet five months later, students studying, working and living on these same campuses are split over how much has really changed.

Mizzou Legacy Circle at the Mel Carnahan Quadrangle, where students pitched tents in November to protest racial discrimination on campus. (Jon Victor, Contributing Photographer)

“I hesitate to use the word ‘progress,’” said Jonathan Butler, a graduate student at Mizzou who waged the hunger strike that led to the resignation of University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe. “We’re not where we need to be, but we’re not where we used to be.”

Butler became interested in activism at an early age, participating in community organizations throughout middle and high school. He has a soft-spoken demeanor, but an intense devotion to progress. “I don’t fear death because I believe in God and I feel that whenever it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go,” he told me, recounting all the hate emails and other forms of backlash he received as a result of his involvement with the protests.

During Butler’s first semester at Mizzou in 2008, another student wrote “nigger” on the door of his room. He had also been called that slur and others while attending parties in Greektown, the section of Columbia that houses the majority of the school’s fraternities and sororities. He says his decision to launch a hunger strike “really just came down to the fact that I’ve really been fed up with the status quo of the university, its leadership and policies.”

Students at Mizzou, including Butler, said they’ve noticed greater sensitivity on campus since the protests. The administration is more loath to brush off something it might once have interpreted as simple vandalism, according to Mark Schierbecker, a student journalist who took video of the protests in November. At the beginning of March, a student wrote “Hitler rules” on a piece of paper in a hallway, he said, which was then treated as a sign of racism rather than an isolated incident.

“I hesitate to use the word ‘progress.’ We’re not where we need to be, but we’re not where we used to be.”

—Jonathan Butler, Mizzou graduate student

But at Mizzou, students are still waiting for more concrete changes. Concerned Student 1950, the group that led the protests in the fall, has since issued a revised list of demands to the administration, which call for an increase to 10 percent faculty of color by 2017 and comprehensive racial awareness curricula across all departments, among others.

“Concerned Student’s demands and everything they’ve listed as things that need to be considered haven’t been considered,” said Denajha Phillips, a black student who marched with the group in the fall. “There’s been word that change is going to happen but nothing has yet been put into play.”

On Nov. 9, the Board of Curators — the University of Missouri’s governing board — announced a series of initiatives to address “diversity, equity and inclusion.” These initiatives included the appointment of a chief diversity officer, a review of all UM System policies as they relate to staff and student conduct and additional financial resources for hiring a more diverse faculty and supporting students and staff who have experienced racial discrimination. The initiative also set up a task force to report on the racial climate throughout the University of Missouri System’s four campuses.

But Kendrick Washington — a senior and one of the current leaders of Concerned Student 1950 — dismissed the task force as idle talk, designed to placate the protesters. Others agreed.

“I feel like that was put into place kind of like a Band-Aid,” Phillips said. “[The task force] fixed the whole uprising for the moment, but I feel like that kind of totally disregards the initial demands.”

This is also true at Yale and Claremont McKenna, where some students remain frustrated with the pace at which reforms are moving.

Ivetty Estepan ’18, one of the organizers of the student demonstrations at Yale, acknowledged that the effects of concrete changes, like a $50 million initiative to increase faculty diversity and a new center dedicated to the study of race, will not be felt until much later. But certain demands — the renaming of Calhoun College and relabeling the term “master” — have taken much longer than she would have liked, given that Harvard and Princeton both made their decisions about a month after students pushed the issue.

On Nov. 17, University President Peter Salovey sent a campuswide email responding to student demonstrators, but his proposed initiatives did not address several of Next Yale's demands. (Aydin Akyol, Staff Photographer)

In most cases, it’s not that what students want isn’t being considered. It’s that universities and students can’t agree on how best to move forward.

According to interviews with current and former administrators at Claremont McKenna and Mizzou, including R. Bowen Loftin, who resigned as Mizzou’s chancellor following the protests, the barrier to faster, more tangible change is the glacial pace at which university policy moves. Both bureaucracy and sheer diversity of opinion can make it difficult for decision-makers to achieve any consensus.

“There is an impatience — understandably so — on the part of the students who have been subject to racial discrimination on this campus to see change,” Loftin said. “That’s the tension we have to deal with: How do you effect lasting change when most people believe that change which is lasting will take some time to craft and implement?”

Among the demands of Concerned Student 1950 were mandatory ethnic studies courses on the school’s curriculum, which Loftin said was not a reform that could be implemented quickly. Concerned Student 1950 also called for a floor on the number of minority faculty teaching at the university, a practice that Chuck Henson ’87, the school’s newly appointed Interim Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, said would be illegal in an open letter to the group.

Henson declined to comment for this article. Interim President Middleton, Interim Chancellor Foley and Title IX Administrator Ellen Eardley also declined to be interviewed.

Washington lamented the fact that, in his view, much of the action has taken the form of preparation: search committees, task forces, administrative appointments, working groups, internal reviews. And while administrators continue to assure students that real change is coming, student movements have slowed down in recent months, their organizers awaiting developments on initiatives they are skeptical will meet their expectations.

“That’s the tension we have to deal with: How do you effect lasting change when most people believe that change which is lasting will take some time to craft and implement?”

—R. Bowen Loftin, former Mizzou chancellor

At Claremont McKenna, the dorms are literally within spitting distance of the college’s main administrative buildings. This isn’t an accident, or because of space constraints. This is the kind of school where the dining staff rolls your burrito for you, then asks if you’re having a good day.

As one might expect at a school with a total enrollment of 1,328, students and faculty are accustomed to a greater degree of communication than would be found at Mizzou, for example, where a majority of students are sequestered in housing complexes a 10-minute drive from campus.

“If someone demanded these things at big schools, that would be kind of ridiculous,” said one Claremont McKenna student who supported the protests. “I guess since we are at a small college, we deserve to expect a lot of personal attention.”

But the closeness of students and faculty did not exempt Claremont McKenna from a similar wave of protests in November, led by a student group called “CMCers of Color.” The students demanded a permanent resource center, the immediate creation of two diversity officers for student affairs and faculty and a general education requirement for ethnic, racial and sexuality theory, among other reforms.

Claremont McKenna administrators, in particular President Hiram Chodosh LAW ’90, agree that student concerns should play an integral role in shaping college policy, though some said that didn’t necessarily mean implementing their demands without subjecting them to scrutiny. “Students should be empowered to grow awareness of their experiences, their observations about the world, their normative views on how the society or any particular college can change for the better,” Chodosh said. “I think that we also need to recognize that those views need to be engaged critically, thoughtfully, openly — and, in a phrase, any particular view, extreme, moderate, controversial or noncontroversial, needs to persuade.”

Claremont McKenna Dean of the Faculty Peter Uvin toed a similar line. Ultimately, he said, the administration’s goal is not to respond to the demands of the students — it is to do what is best for the college as a whole. In Uvin’s view, a college has many constituents: small groups shouldn’t single-handedly be able to drive the decision-making.

But when do student demands go beyond the mission of the college, or the scope of what it can reasonably achieve? W. Torrey Sun, who has served as acting dean of students since January, said he would work to implement any demands as long as they were reasonable given logistical limitations like timing and budget constraints. But these last two points have been the biggest points of disconnect between students and administrators, who, like Loftin, say students sometimes have an unrealistic or incomplete vision of how their reforms will be implemented.

In the fall, Claremont McKenna Dean of Students Mary Spellman resigned amid student outcry over an email they deemed racially insensitive. (Jon Victor, Contributing Photographer)

Denys Reyes, a senior who led the student protests at Claremont McKenna in the fall, believes the administration can do more to hear the voices of students of color. She said the search for a replacement dean has yet to begin, and as a result, the college is missing out on prime time to search for applicants, as people in higher education typically look for work during the spring. Furthermore, she said, decisions about the college’s new resource center for students of color are being pushed to the summer, when students will not be around to provide feedback.

Reyes believes that since the protests, the college could have included students in the conversation who feel marginalized, rather than those who already had ties with the administration. “One of our demands is that we be included in the dean search,” Reyes said. “They chose students at their own discretion to be part of that search. Some of the students feel perfectly fine at CMC, or they’re white-passing. There should have been a better selection process, and students of marginalized identities should have been included in that selection process.”

Administrators see it differently. Nyree Gray, assistant vice president for diversity and inclusion, said Claremont McKenna has been communicating with students. An email went out to all students inviting them to be part of a steering committee, she said, in addition to hosting open forums and updating a website with details of the administration’s progress.

But Reyes’ complaint was also noted by Washington at Mizzou, and Estepan at Yale. Estepan has felt frustrated that only one undergraduate serves on the Yale Presidential Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion, which was formed shortly after the protests. “There’s this separation between the student body and administration that maybe is bridged by a certain few, but who are those certain few? At the end of the day, I think we’re all students and we should be asked for feedback before something is completely decided.”

Gray, at Claremont McKenna, agrees that student involvement in the decisions surrounding matters of inclusion is critical: “Students need to feel that they are part of these outcomes, and having them on the committees, having them make proposals, having them as part of our evaluation process and our feedback loop lets us know that we are assessing the issues correctly and that we are being responsive to their needs.”

But Washington did say that while students want additional support from the administration, students should not have to resort to protest to have their needs met.

“We shouldn’t have to tell the administration how they should be doing their job,” he said.

To the dismay of student activists at Claremont McKenna, initiatives such as increasing faculty diversity and implementing a general education requirement for ethnic, racial and sexuality theory will not take shape quickly. (Jon Victor, Contributing Photographer)

The administration would respond that their job is more complicated than it seems.

Loftin was quick to point out that some demands, like reforms to the school curriculum to require ethnic studies coursework, do not fall under the jurisdiction of the chancellor but rather the faculty. This is also the case at Claremont McKenna, where the faculty are widely split on whether the college should implement such a requirement or not, according to Uvin.

Hiring minority faculty, too, is not a reform that can happen overnight, administrators say. While there are limited funds for faculty salaries and a comparatively smaller pool of faculty of color from which to hire, Gray said the college has plans for more diverse hires once positions at Claremont McKenna open up. Of 52,749 doctorates conferred in the United States in 2013, just 2,167, or 4.1 percent, were earned by African Americans, according to the annual Survey of Earned Doctorates.

“What is frustrating for me, being one of few minority faculty members, is that one of the demands that the group has is to increase minority hires,” said Cynthia Frisby, a black journalism professor who has taught at Mizzou for the past 18 years. “One of the things I know for certain is that that’s good ideally, but there’s not a lot of us that are going on for higher ed degrees. It’s like fishing in a pool where the fish aren’t there.”

It has become increasingly clear that while students champion immediate reforms, certain barriers, like the inherent exclusivity of a working group and the level of consensus required to change policy, create frustration for those anxious for change.

“Yes, the resource center is happening. Yes, the dean of students is working more actively with affinity groups,” Reyes said. “It’s just moving so slowly.”

“One of the things I know for certain is that [increasing minority hires] is good ideally, but there’s not a lot of us that are going on for higher ed degrees. It’s like fishing in a pool where the fish aren’t there.”

—Cynthia Frisby, Mizzou journalism professor

As proposals move from the minds of campus protesters to the desks of high-up administrators, questions remain about how to make sure students are happy with the reforms. The activist groups that were once active are starting to disintegrate, and support has waned.

At Mizzou, just two of the 11 founding members of Concerned Student 1950 remain, with many having dropped out to give younger students an opportunity to lead. Even Butler, around whom Concerned Student was formed in its earliest days, has distanced himself from the group. And Next Yale, a collective of student groups that marched on University President Peter Salovey’s house in December to submit a list of demands, has not held any other protests in recent months. Shortly after the demonstration, Salovey sent an email to the Yale community announcing a list of inclusion initiatives. But his email did not address all of the students’ demands, and there has been little, if any, follow-up on specific requests like the implementation of an ethnic studies requirement for undergraduates.

“[Students] get tired of hearing the same voices on campus all the time,” Schierbecker said of Concerned Student 1950. “So a lot of the novelty of the group has worn off.” Time has had the same effect at Yale, with Next Yale’s list of demands fading from the Facebook group “Overheard at Yale” and campus bulletin boards. Estepan said this has been largely due to students’ need to recuperate emotionally after a demanding second half of the fall semester. But she also noted that the nature of the group’s activism has shifted, and that it is ongoing in different forms. Now, instead of protests, there are teach-ins about race as well as other informal talks about issues coming out of the events of last fall. The caveat is that these events are organized largely by students, not the administration. But Estepan was optimistic that the protests had incited a new dialogue about race on campus that had previously been lacking. In the African studies and ethnicity, race and migration courses she shopped this semester, all were filled to capacity or above.

But it is not necessarily so at Mizzou. Sensing that conversations about issues of race on campus had been slowing down in the beginning of a new semester, Washington saw an opportunity to stir the pot. Along with Washington, around two dozen protesters interrupted a Board of Curators meeting in February to read a list of demands for improving the racial climate on campus. The protest was intended to remind people that the group’s efforts are ongoing, and that issues related to inclusion have yet to be resolved, he said.

“Those conversations should have kept happening,” Washington said. “We felt that people were not conscious about what was still happening on this campus. It was so much bigger than Tim Wolfe leaving office. We want people to know that it’s a movement, not a moment.”

Protests at Mizzou have slowed down in recent months, but students have noted a heightened degree of racial sensitivity on campus. (Jon Victor, Contributing Photographer)

Students of color interviewed at Yale, Claremont McKenna and Mizzou don’t agree on whether they feel any differently now about being a minority on predominantly white campuses. But aside from influencing policy, the protests have served to show some students that they aren’t alone in feeling out of place on campus. Although a campus revolution is yet to come — and may be for some time — Washington and others said that part of what has come out of the protests is a greater sense of belonging among students of color.

“Now that Tim Wolfe isn’t in the position he is, there’s more comfort knowing that if something is going to happen it would be taken care of correctly,” said Rachel Cheever, a black student at Mizzou. “Walking on campus, there’s more of a feeling that your color and your life is valued.”

Even as affinity groups have solidified, many students and faculty at Mizzou spoke to an animosity that fall’s unrest has stirred up among the student body. Stephanie Shonekan, director of the Black Studies department at Mizzou, said the amount of backlash the protesters received raised pre-existing tensions to another level.

In the weeks immediately following the protests, matters were tense even among minority students. Some black students at Mizzou said they felt pressured to take part in the demonstrations, even though one student said that joining Concerned Student 1950 meant separating yourself from the rest of campus. Cheever said there was a binary on campus, with little room in between for students who were conflicted or uncertain. “It was either you were protesting or you weren’t.” Yale had its own share of these troubles: during the weeks of unrest, a minority student who attended a free-speech conference claimed he had been labeled a “traitor” by other minority students.

Frisby noted that in the weeks following the protests at Mizzou, people would assume that people of color, including herself, were in support of the demonstrations. She added that the racial climate on campus is more tense than it used to be: she said some of her black students would walk around campus unsure of whether they were supported or hated.

“It’s not that white people have become more racist,” Schierbecker said. “I can see a lot of white people that wouldn’t be racist otherwise have dug in and their inner racist has started to show.”

And these tensions transcend campuses.

“I don’t feel any better,” Reyes, the Claremont McKenna senior, said. “If anything, I feel worse. I don’t even feel safe on my campus anymore. A lot of people don’t feel comfortable talking about race because there’s been so much backlash.”

Perhaps this division is one of the protests’ most concrete, universal, lingering effects. It’s unclear whether anything at the ground level has improved for students of color. But it’s obvious that those who are not convinced of the protesters’ cause are not afraid to make that fact known. As Washington stood and left the table where I had interviewed him, a white student who had eavesdropped on our conversation made a fart noise with her mouth and smiled, content in her mockery.