UP CLOSE: Is Yale becoming too corporate?

UP CLOSE:
Is Yale becoming too corporate?

by Finnegan Schick
Published on April 14, 2016

Down the block from Warner House sits an eight-story office building, a monolithic block of glass and brick. University Provost Benjamin Polak once worked in Warner House, but after Yale created a new position for a dean to oversee the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Polak’s offices relocated to the fourth floor of 2 Whitney Grove Square.

The relocation of the Provost’s Office from a classic Yale landmark on Hillhouse Avenue to a modern office building is more than just a change in locale. It also typifies what some have described as the increasing corporatization of Yale.

The so-called “corporatization” of the University is tricky to define and even trickier to actually observe. Staff members worry that their ranks continue to shrink after more than a decade of efforts to centralize the University’s body of staff and make it more efficient. Faculty members are more concerned that Yale’s senior administration is growing too large — expanding to include a bevy of vice presidents, provosts and deans — at the expense of the University’s academic community.

“People use the word [corporatization] without defining it,” said Vice President for Finance Stephen Murphy ’87, who helps Polak manage Yale’s finances. “The question becomes … Is the addition of administrative support at all levels, including the senior levels, effective and efficient?”

The inner workings of Yale’s administration are deeply complex, but staff and faculty with decades of institutional memory say Yale is no longer the same school it was only a decade ago, before large-scale staff reorganizations began. Furthermore, they said, working at Yale feels increasingly like being part of a company, not part of an institution devoted to research and education.

Has the restructuring of the staff and the growth of the senior administration really sacrificed community in the name of efficiency? Is corporatization sterilizing Yale, or strengthening it?

CENTRALIZING THE STAFF

For Yale’s staff, the trend of corporatization has become apparent in the University’s attempts to streamline and condense into central offices.

A few decades ago, many of Yale’s 9,455 administrative staff worked closer to central campus, working in departments and offices near Old Campus and Hillhouse Avenue. Today, around 1,000 staff work in a number of new finance, business, dining, printing and facilities offices in the 80-acre Science Park site more than a mile from Yale’s main campus.

Former Deputy Provost Charles “Chip” Long, who worked as an administrator at Yale from 1973 to 2010, described a work environment at Yale in the 1990s that was “like a family.” He said Yale used to have a reputation as a school that paid its staff relatively low wages but provided excellent benefits in health, retirement and college tuition support. Staff often stayed with departments for their entire lives.

But perhaps in part because of that level of comfort, the old Yale was not as efficient as it could have been.

“It felt like a very homey system. FAS had a mom-and-pop operation,” Long said. “This was not the most effective or efficient system. We often didn’t have the best outcomes.”

That system started to change in the early 2000s, as Yale hired more staff and took steps to make the workforce more cost-effective.

From 2005 to 2016, Yale’s staff grew by 18 percent, from 8,005 staff members to 9,455. The biggest gains by far were among a subsection of the staff known as managerial and professional workers, some of whom joined Yale as consultants to help make the University’s business teams more efficient. The number of service and maintenance as well as clerical and technical staff members declined over the past decade by almost 200 employees. But the M&P staff — many of whom work at centralized offices like the Shared Services building at Science Park and handle the noneducational, business side of the University — has grown by 16 percent.

(Miranda Escobar, Production & Design Staff)

The centralization and staff growth were partially the work of former Yale Corporation member John Pepper ’60, then the CEO of Proctor and Gamble, who was hired as vice president for finance and administration in 2003. During his two years at Yale, Pepper sought to improve labor relations and increase racial and gender diversity among the staff. And he brought his corporate know-how to bear on Yale’s inefficient staff.

“[Pepper] immediately recognized that, compared to industry standards, everything was inefficient,” Long said. “For example, in its construction projects, Yale came in over budget and underperforming. It appeared that we needed more exacting, professional people.”

What Pepper saw when he took the role of vice president for finance and administration, Long said, was that Yale had “the best programs, the best students and the best faculty in the world, but we didn’t have the best administration.”

Pepper laid the groundwork, but more significant changes came under Shauna King. King, who was hired in 2006 to take over some of Pepper’s responsibilities as vice president for finance and business operations, came to Yale after spending most of her career at PepsiCo. As president of PepsiCo Shared Services, King united all the PepsiCo Information Technology divisions. Before centralizing the soda company, King was an accountant, working with the Frito-Lay snack food company. King’s job at Yale was her first in the academic world.

Five years into her tenure at Yale, in a 2011 interview with the Network of Executive Women, King expressed a hardline stance on reorganizing businesses.

“Look inside and have people take a meat cleaver to your processes,” she said. “You want the right people in the right seat.”

King’s primary role at Yale was to shift parts of Yale’s departmental staff — the secretaries and technology staff in each FAS department — to Shared Services, an office 1.5 miles away from central campus that consolidated work previously done by staff in each academic department. A Shared Services staff model is widespread in the private sector, used by large corporations to centralize and streamline day-to-day processes and paperwork.

In the summer of 2014, King led an initiative to reorganize another branch of the staff: Yale Dining. King created a central food-preparation center for all the dining halls that took many longtime dining hall workers out of their home kitchens and into the Culinary Support Center on Winchester Avenue near Shared Services.

“They shoved us up on the outskirts of campus in a refrigerated room, and we’re forgotten about,” one head pantry worker told the News shortly after the center’s creation.

During King’s time at Yale, the percentage of Yale’s operating budget spent on administration and institutional support jumped from 6 percent in 2006 to a high of 11 percent in 2010. King did not return multiple requests for comment, but her LinkedIn profile details how at Yale she “built a flat and self-directed workforce” and “used key performance metrics to demonstrate health of our processes.” Under her “Key Accomplishments” during the 2011 and 2015 fiscal years, King includes a “287 percent increase in staff productivity” and a “52 percent reduction in data entry turnaround time” in Yale’s Accounts Payable department.

THE COST OF CENTRALIZATION

But productivity came at a cost: face-to-face interactions between faculty and staff were replaced by emails and phone calls, and what once felt like a “Yale Family” began to resemble the streamlined structure of a business.

“The [Shared Services] initiative did significant damage to the smooth functioning of department offices, as it failed to recognize the valuable institutional knowledge held by staff in individual departments,” English professor Jill Campbell GRD ’88 told the News in June 2015.

History, African American studies and American studies professor Glenda Gilmore said Shared Services turned faculty and staff from co-workers to customers and clients.

“To talk about customers and clients is a corporate mindset that tends to erase the teaching and learning in a University,” anthropology professor William Kelly said.

In Judaic Studies, after administrators suggested relocating a senior administrative assistant to a centralized location, religious studies professor Steven Fraade said the attempt showed a lack of understanding about what makes academic departments and programs tick. For Fraade, having the staff nearby improves the general “quality of life” of the professors and students the staff serve.

“[Faculty] want to have access to their administrative staff, to see them on a daily basis, to smile at them, tell them they’re doing a good job,” he said. “Having [the assistant] down the hall from me is essential.”

Murphy acknowledged that Shared Services “got off to a rough start.”

“It came across as, ‘We’re doing this because it worked in corporate,’” Murphy said.  But these efforts were done to ease the work done by faculty and students, he added.

“Shared Services and anything else labeled as ‘corporatization’ is not the end, it’s the means to the end of providing more effective and efficient administrative support,” Murphy said. He said the growth of the staff was partly due to the growth of Yale’s clinical operations, and he noted that in terms of financial expenditures, the staff has grown less quickly relative to the rest of the University.

“Since 2001, the University has grown, stripping out inflation, in financial terms, by 82 percent,” Murphy said. “During that same period, the administration has grown more slowly than that.”

Music professor Daniel Harrison MUS ’86, who arrived at Yale in 2003 shortly before the advent of Shared Services, said the restructuring was a necessary step as the University expanded. Unlike Kelly, Harrison put minimal importance on the staff in a department’s general feel.

“It made perfect business sense and, of course, that’s what corporatism is,” Harrison said. “I was an early and outspoken proponent of Shared Services. Someone who recognized, given the financial pressures the University was facing, the need for a solution to improve efficiency and centralize the staff.”

Still, Long said that while centralization and standardization may work in a corporation, a university is a complex system of schools, departments and individuals, each with their own needs and ways of doing business.

“There’s a fundamental disparity between the corporate view of efficiency and the University’s view,” he said. “There’s no way to standardize what we do. In order to professionalize the business of a university, you need someone from the corporate world who understands all this, who also has intuition and is a good listener.”

(Miranda Escobar, Production & Design Staff)

Polak said he believes centralization can be necessary, but not in every case. While Polak acknowledged that universities across the country have been relatively slow in using new technologies to make certain processes more efficient, he also said the corporate emphasis on centralization and efficiency is not always applicable to a university setting.

“I am loudly agnostic about centralization versus decentralization,” Polak said. “I think that there are some things that work better centralized, and some things that work better decentralized, and one should do it on a case-by-case basis.”

THE UNIONS FOREVER?

Perhaps nowhere has the effect of the corporatization of Yale’s staff been more evident than in the University’s negotiations with its two recognized unions, Locals 34 and 35.

On March 2, when Local 34 Secretary-Treasurer Ken Suzuki walked into the lobby of 2 Whitney Grove Square, he was prohibited from moving farther than the entrance.

Suzuki was trying to deliver a petition  signed by over 2,500 union members to Polak, requesting that Yale protect the 986 clinical union jobs at the School of Medicine. To Suzuki, who has worked at Yale for over 30 years, the rebuff at the door signaled a change in how the administration manages its staff. King’s leadership, controversial though it was, brought a number of new hires to the staff; but now the administration has begun to slow that growth via a number of recent layoffs, and union leaders say University leaders have been uncommunicative.

Suzuki said the unions settled a labor contract peacefully in 2009 and again in 2012. But union leaders, who enter contract negotiations this spring, suspect that the Yale administration under University President Peter Salovey and Polak — who both took office in 2013 — is not as willing to collaborate.

Polak and Salovey announced layoffs in 2013 as part of a five-year plan to close Yale’s post-recession budget deficit. This spring, 24 staff members in Information Technology Services learned suddenly that they were being laid off to balance the University’s budget.

As explanation, Salovey, Polak and King have said that reducing the administrative staff would allow a reallocation of resources toward teaching and research. In fiscal year 2015 the University reduced administrative costs by 3 percent.

“Every dollar you spend on administration is a dollar not put toward the mission,” King told the News in 2013.

This spring, several leaders of Local 34, Yale’s union for clerical and technical workers, confronted the University about the ITS layoffs. Although it was Chief Information Officer Len Peters who announced the layoffs, Local 34 President Laurie Kennington said she believes the decision to cut costs came directly from the provost. These budget cuts, she said, forced ITS management to make layoffs.

Suzuki said administrators have made other decisions in the past three years that have caused union leaders and members to question whether the so-called “legacy of labor peace” under former-University President Richard Levin will continue under Salovey and Polak.

He pointed to the creation of the Culinary Support Center, which he said violated Local 35’s contract with the University. In September 2014, Local 35 — Yale’s blue-collar union — filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging that Yale breached the union contract by failing to negotiate before changing the terms and conditions of employment for union members.

“That was a big wake-up call to Local 35 … something was amiss in the top levels of the administration,” Suzuki said. “It said to the leaders of both unions: ‘Where are we really with the new administration?’”

Shortly after Local 35 filed the complaint with the NLRB, administrators came to an agreement with the union, although plans for the culinary center went forward.

Since 2013, for the first time in the union’s decadeslong existence, Local 34’s numbers began to shrink, after years of consistent growth. As the unions enter contract negotiations with the University this spring, Suzuki said union leaders feel more distant from the current administration, suggesting to him that trends of corporatization have threatened Yale’s unions.

THE FACULTY VIEW

For faculty, corporatization means something different.

Instead of threatening their jobs, professors said, corporatization — in the form of an expanding senior administration and less engagement between the provost and Faculty of Arts and Sciences  department heads — threatens faculty empowerment.

FAS Dean Tamar Gendler said her position was actually created largely to empower the faculty. Rather than decreasing FAS professors’ access to the upper administration, Gendler said her role has given them a voice to articulate the FAS’s future.

“I no longer serve the function of being the person responsible for the day-to-day budget or the day-to-day running of the FAS,” Polak said. “Various new responsibilities grow up because of regulation, scale and new areas of focus. It’s good to have people focusing on those specific areas.”

But some professors interviewed maintained that the creation of administrative positions like Gendler’s is one of the clearest symptoms of a growing gulf between faculty and the administration. When Pepper left his role in 2006, his position was divided into three administrative titles: King became the vice president for finance and business operations, Michael Peel became the vice president for human resources and administration, and Bruce Alexander ’65 took on the role of vice president for the Office of New Haven and State Affairs. The University is currently searching for its first vice president for operations, who will supervise several administrators. In January, Salovey announced that Eileen O’Connor would take on the inaugural role of vice president for communications.

Although the Office of Institutional Research did not provide specific figures for senior administrative growth, faculty pointed to these newly created positions as examples of rapid administrative expansion.

Kelly said faculty interactions with upper-level administrators have changed during his 36 years at Yale. In the early 1990s, Kelly said, each department met individually with the provost, going through the departmental budgets line by line and making the case for each budgeted item. Gendler, not the provost, now oversees the FAS departmental budgets.

Kelly said the growth of the administration has created a buffer between the departments and the administration.

“The chain of command is longer,” he said.

For Kelly, the addition of deputy provosts and associate provosts has encumbered the administration and clouded the vision of administrative leadership — leading the provost to treat faculty and staff as numbers, not people.

“The perception is that [Polak] is very good at what he does, but he’s indirect with department chairs, much more than his predecessors,” Fraade said. “There is a sense of loss of direct engagement.”

Some faculty also pointed to new administrative structures that have sprung up over the years, in particular the host of lawyers and legal experts Yale retains to protect against lawsuits on issues ranging from sexual misconduct to racial discrimination in the University workplace. Yale’s Office of General Counsel employs 20 attorneys and seven staff members, and a branch of the Provost’s Office is tasked with managing Yale’s Title IX complaints. According to Murphy, the growth of research administration and compliance officers is the result of new federal regulations.

Gilmore said the lawyers are effective, but they also prevent the community from learning about what actually happens on campus and where certain decisions come from — adding layers of red tape and keeping details from the public eye.

“You can’t operate in a way that builds administrative layers in an effort not to get sued,” Gilmore said.

A MIXED STANCE ON CORPORATE LEADERSHIP

Faculty interviewed were divided over the implications of corporatization and its potential to reshape Yale’s community of academics.

Some argued that corporatization had led to poor University leadership and damaged Yale’s intellectual climate.

“At present there is not leadership, there is only administration, and it’s heavy-handed, narrow-minded and insistently micromanaged administration,” Kelly said. “And that’s been, to me, the dominant trend over the last 10 years.”

Faculty members worried that their distance from top budgetary administrators could lead to poor decisions about the allocation of academic resources. As the University has sought to balance its budget while creating more administrative positions, some faculty members say it has become more difficult for faculty to argue directly to the provost for certain budget items, as they were once able to do.

Biology professor Joel Rosenbaum felt the effects of cost-cutting when his fall 2014 electron microscopy course was cut due to reductions in the Biology Department’s budget. In a March 31, 2014 op-ed in the News entitled “Why My Class?” Rosenbaum called for Yale to stop adding new deans to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. These appointments, he argued, have bloated the administration and forced Yale to cut costs in other areas of the University.

Several recent administrative interventions in FAS departments may highlight the trend Kelly and Rosenbaum described.

In November 2015, Classics Department chair Kirk Freudenburg reported to the FAS Senate that, since 2008, the administration had used hundreds of thousands of dollars of restricted department funds for the central administrative budget. While Gendler called the use of more-restricted funds before less-restricted funds a method for “responsible stewardship” of the University, Classics professors called the reallocation of funds a “raid.”

In the realm of faculty hiring decisions, too, Gilmore said Polak and Gendler do not give FAS departments enough freedom when opening new positions. She said departments end up competing with one another to get administrative authorization to search for candidates, which can neglect the needs of individual departments.

“Corporatization is not necessarily a bad thing, if it leads to better management of the core mission,” Gilmore said. “But Yale seems to have forgotten that the University’s business is teaching, research and learning.”

According to Gilmore — who worked as a corporate officer in two publicly held companies, and was the CEO of her own start-up for two decades before entering academia — corporate attitudes have also seeped into the way administrators communicate with faculty.

The result, she said, has been a “public relations” approach, even to internal communications. Posters on campus appear extolling administrative milestones and slogans like “An excellent faculty is a diverse faculty,” Gilmore said, calling this “’80s corporate-speak.” She also criticized the strange uniformity of language in University-wide emails from the provost and president.

But others see corporatization as a force that can save Yale time and money.

(Miranda Escobar, Production & Design Staff)

Harrison said he believes corporatization allows faculty members to do their jobs better. Professors should attend to their scholarship, and business professionals should run the business side of Yale, he said.

Indeed, while Polak said he seeks to balance the number of administrators from the corporate world with those from academia, he admitted that in making provostial decisions he relies on advice from Peel, Alexander and Murphy — all of whom worked in the private sector.

“I get an enormous amount of help here,” Polak said. “I would have been absolutely lost and this University would have been a total mess if I haven’t have and continue to have the advice and knowledge of people who come from outside.”

The Music Department implemented Shared Services before many other departments, and after a few initial problems, the department now runs more smoothly and efficiently than it did before, Harrison said.

In particular, the filing of departmental expense reports, which had formerly incurred very high error rates — including misplaced numbers and inaccurate expense reporting — was made faster and more accurate under Shared Services. The move to Shared Services required a great deal of centralization, but Harrison is happy Yale made the shift.

“I think my department has been well-served,” he said.

University administrators, too, have preached efficiency and budget-balancing. Gendler noted that both Levin and Polak are economists, which has brought much-needed financial leadership to the University.

Polak said Yale has many services that are best kept centralized. For example, Polak said the office that processes work visas and green cards would not function well if it were decentralized.

Despite Gendler’s new role in the FAS, Polak said certain responsibilities pertaining to the FAS, like the planning and organization of FAS campus buildings, still rest with the provost.

And some professors disputed that corporatization has brought faculty disempowerment.

Philosophy Chair Stephen Darwall said that while Yale has not been immune from the “corporatizing pressures” affecting universities nationwide, he believes the University’s recent creation of a FAS dean position and a Faculty Senate have helped counteract those pressures.

Darwall said the new FAS dean position does not seem to be a buffer between the faculty and the provost, but rather a way to give departments greater authority over budgetary decisions than was possible when the Provost’s Office oversaw them.

Political Science Department Chair Steven Wilkinson said faculty — both at FAS Senate meetings and in monthly department chair meetings with the administration — are setting the agenda as never before.

“[Agendas] used to be set by the administration,” Wilkinson said. “The administration has become more open to faculty voices in the past few years.”

Still, Long maintained that top-level positions like the president and provost should be held by academics. The question is one of priorities, he said, adding that administrators should not rely too heavily on corporate management strategies, as the needs of the administration should always come second to the teaching and research mission of the University.

“The person making those very important allocation decisions, the person at the head of the table, ought to be an academic person,” Long said. “It’s a university after all.”

NOT JUST AT YALE

For all the debate about corporatization, Murphy challenged the idea that Yale is intentionally creating ruthless corporate structures.

“Administrators are not here to make [Yale] the most efficient place on the planet,” said Murphy. “Sometimes we need more administrators and sometimes we don’t. Our job is to find out just the right balance.”

Still, according to Freddie DeBoer, a writer and teacher at Purdue University whose work touches on higher education policy, corporatization at universities is a national trend.

DeBoer attributed the growth of administrative departments to a market-based approach to institutions. The idea that a college or university should be run the same way as a corporation, he said, creates a “business, capitalist philosophy.”

Corporatization can be seen in terms of changing power structures, he explained. In the past few decades, universities have given more power and responsibility to central administrative authorities.

“Particularly troublingly, you have this ‘mushrooming effect’ of more and more administrators who are ordered to enforce that top-down mission,” DeBoer said. “So you hire more and more people whose job it is to look after minor elements of campus life that used to be left up to instructors or individual departments.”

Joseph Grasso, Cornell University’s associate dean for finance, administration and corporate relations, said higher education is going through a transformative period, with  universities trying to become more efficient by bringing corporate models to bear on educational structures.

“We’re trying to find a way to deliver high-quality services at an accessible price,” Grasso said. “[These demands] change the type of leadership and the type of management that are needed by a university.”

And while the Ivy League has resisted some of the more extreme kinds of corporatization, other universities have adopted the corporate model so intensely that their presidents call themselves “CEOs,” Grasso said. Boards of trustees are increasingly populated by the heads of industries and companies, who often influence university administrative decisions.

“We’re in a pressure-cooker environment in higher education,” Grasso said. “All of these pressures have been leading to, or fostering, the corporatization of higher education.”

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Huang: putting students first

by David Shimer
Published on April 13, 2016

As president of the Yale College Council, Peter Huang ’18 would work to address major campus issues: faculty diversity, the student income contribution and sexual climate. But Huang said that unlike other candidates’ platforms, his has a common thread: It is ambitious but focused.

“I prioritize in my platform and still might not be able to get to everything,” Huang said. “Every other candidate does not expect to cover everything they propose.”

Indeed, Othmane Fourtassi ’19 — a member of Huang’s campaign team — said Huang offers practical solutions and is “a doer who does not overpromise.”

Huang said one of his main, most pragmatic ideas is to build a website that maps out what each University administrator does. Doing so will enable students with specific issues to directly communicate with relevant officials, he explained.

Another major goal is to directly engage with student groups on campus, and Huang added that he is uniquely qualified to lead such an effort.

“I want student government to work directly with student groups instead of getting survey feedback and doing listening campaigns; I want to go one step beyond that,” he said. “I have been active in the Asian American Cultural Center and believe I am well-connected with many student groups. And I think this is important because the point of student government is to work with students.”

But Huang said his top priority is to address issues of diversity and inclusion on campus by fighting for faculty diversity and improving ethnic studies programming, among other initiatives.

In terms of experience, Huang is a typical student-government insider: He has served on the Freshman Class Council, as a YCC associate and is currently one of Silliman College’s two YCC representatives. Throughout, Huang said he has consistently engaged with students and fought for them.

Sasha Rae-Grant ’18, who works on art and design and is advising Huang’s campaign, said supporting Huang was an easy decision because of his long-standing commitment to the student body.

“I have known Peter since day one, and since then he has genuinely been working to make Yale better for everyone,” Rae-Grant said. “I support all of his initiatives, especially regarding the student income contribution … Increased transparency is important to me, as is improved faculty diversity since we’re losing a lot of professors of color, female professors and LGBTQ professors.”

Regarding the student income contribution, Huang said he will work with the Office of Development to organize a fundraising campaign to eliminate the fee. He has not yet reached out to the Office of Development to discuss the feasibility of such an idea, but he explained that he believes doing so would be unproductive as a presidential candidate.

“We will also approach the Provost’s Office,” Huang said. “The University is saying we don’t have funds to reallocate to the SIC. Even if that is true, I want to figure out why … If you add all [the people of highest-need pay] up, it is still below the amount of interest the endowment earns per year.”

Beyond student government, Huang is a board member of the Dwight Hall Socially Responsible Investment Fund, an intercultural liaison for the Asian American Student Alliance and a member of the Asian American Studies Task Force.

Hochman: focused on social equality

by Ayla Besemer
Published on

For Joshua Hochman ’18, a combination of realism and idealism forms the basis of a YCC presidential campaign that emphasizes social issues on Yale’s campus.

Hochman, who currently serves on the YCC’s Executive Board as academics director, is running on a platform of “equity and accountability,” promoting social equality in areas such as racial equity, sexual climate and financial aid. His platform — measuring 32 pages — is divided by “what Yale should do, and what the YCC can do,” creating a set of ideas he called both visionary and realistic. Hochman further emphasized that the platform is a result of conversations he has already conducted with students and group leaders, ranging from the president of the Student Athlete Council to members of Next Yale.

“A lot of candidates in this race are saying ‘I don’t want to give you a big platform because you are my platform,’” Hochman said. “What I am saying is that my platform is your platform. I don’t want to start listening to people once I become president; those conversations have started already.”

Hochman said he wants to expand financial support of the cultural centers and demonstrate a commitment to further developing ethnic studies, an area he has already worked on as YCC academics director. Sexual climate, he continued, should be improved by ensuring that resources are reaching students as efficiently as possible, and that confidentiality is preserved. In terms of financial aid, he said that though a long-term goal would call for the elimination of the student income contribution, initial steps include eliminating course-drop fees and setting up criteria for emergency funds in the residential colleges.

Even so, Hochman said that he is “extremely cognizant” of the fact that he is running on a platform of issues that he has not personally experienced due to his being a “white man on campus.” Despite his apparent position of privilege, Hochman emphasized that he has actively listened to concerned students and incorporated these conversations into his platform.

This year on the YCC, Hochman worked on a dozen projects, including changing the Credit/D/Fail-conversion deadline from two weeks to four, a project during which he successfully advocated to Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway and began productive conversations with administrators. He also worked with the Sophomore Class Council to develop sophomore seminars for next year.

“[Hochman] is the type of leader and personality on the YCC that makes for a very good president, but at the same time a very unexpected leader,” said Larry Fulton ’19, who serves on the YCC with Hochman as Jonathan Edwards’ Freshman Class Council representative. “His commitment to the YCC has been unyielding for his entire time since he has been at Yale … He is the type of leader who you want to work with, who you want to mentor you and guide you through successful projects in order to make the entire organization work as it is supposed to.”

Dasia Moore ’18 spoke also to Hochman’s character, referring to him as a “welcomer” who actively works to make fellow students feel comfortable and included. She emphasized that Hochman’s strength lies in his ability to listen, and added that he is adept at making students feel heard as they share personal experiences on the road to schoolwide policy reforms.

Helschien: reaching students with humor

by Finnegan Schick
Published on

In his own words, Carter Helschien ’18 is running for Yale College Council president, “all kidding aside.”

Helschien, who has spent the past two years with the YCC as a representative from Morse College and was a member of the Freshman Class Council, is running a campaign he hopes will engage more students with a student government that he said is out of touch with its constituents. Despite his unorthodox campaign slogans that claim he is “the only candidate running for Yale College Council president” and repeated promise to “make things less bad,” Helschien said he is completely serious about the issues facing students.

“The YCC only works well when you have the power of the students behind it,” he said. “[The YCC] is not working with student groups as well as it can be.”

Helschien said his humorous campaign promotions, which include a petition to expand Toad’s, a flip book with photos of Helschien paired with satirical quotations and a joking YouTube video, are tools to get more students engaged with the YCC process. Helschien said he thinks many students view the YCC as a slow-moving organization that is out of touch with many student groups.

“How can we mobilize these voters who typically don’t vote?” Helschien asked. “People have said to me ‘Carter, these are hilarious videos. These are fun campaign ideas.’ There’s been a failure of imagination on the YCC.”

His more serious platform contains a proposal to reform financial aid by eliminating the student income contribution, to expand undergraduate mental health resources and to boost funding for both STEM and the cultural centers.

In particular, Helschien said the YCC should be a better advocate for student groups like the Yale Climate and Energy Institute, which the University defunded this spring to the outrage of the students and faculty involved with the project. Helschien said as YCC president he would give more power to student groups while advocating on their behalf.

“I actually want to minimize the role that the YCC plays in advocacy work,” Helschien said. “Student groups are doing such great work — we should give them guidance.”

Helschien’s friends and coworkers described him as an excellent listener whose humor helps him engage with more students. Sarah DiMagno ’18, who serves as Helschien’s co-president on the Yale American Civil Liberties Union, said Helschien has an interest in law and social justice coupled with a good sense of humor.

Former chairman of the Yale Politic Jacek Oleszczuk ’17 said Helschien would make a “fun YCC president” who would also address the issues vital to students. After working with Helschien at the Politic, where Helschien served as treasurer, Oleszczuk described his colleague as diligent and someone who thinks outside the box.

Like Helschien, Oleszczuk stressed the importance of student groups in creating substantial change at Yale. The protests on campus last semester demonstrated that progress can be accomplished without the YCC, Oleszczuk said.

“I think he is a great counterpoint to the seriousness with which a lot of people conduct themselves at Yale,” DiMagno said. “His ideas and strategies are a pushback against Yalies taking themselves too seriously. He approaches situations with levity and with humor, which I think is a great trait.”

Brahmbhatt: focusing on connections

by Victor Wang
Published on

If elected president of the Yale College Council, Diksha Brahmbhatt ’18 will look to channel the “power of face-to-face collaborations” and facilitate partnerships both within and beyond the council.

“We need someone who deeply cares not about the title, but about connecting the community and being a face that is approachable,” Brahmbhatt said. “There is a power in everyday connections and that is what I do on a daily basis. I try to connect people with each other.”

Connecting people is a big part of what Brahmbhatt does on campus, she said. As Berkeley College’s YCC representative, Brahmbhatt has spent this year developing ways for students to engage with the New Haven community beyond community service activities. She is also a FOOT leader and part of the Civic Leadership Initiative, which aims to empower Yalies to make change in their community. She is also a Berkeley College Master’s Aide.

As YCC president, Brahmbhatt would work to connect the YCC taskforces with other organizations at Yale and in New Haven. She said YCC projects can sometimes become “insular” and get placed on the back burner when students are busy. Instead, YCC taskforces should actively build relationships and partnerships with groups that have similar missions, she said.

Brahmbhatt said she also envisions YCC utilizing its unique position and connection with University administrators to empower the voices of other student leaders. She said YCC leaders often engage in face-to-face meetings with administrators, but few other organizations have the same access.

“The YCC president and vice president are important, but they shouldn’t be the only faces for students on campus,” she said, adding that as president she would bring student leaders of other organizations to joint meetings with administrators in order to facilitate discussions.

Brahmbhatt said she would also work with peer liaisons to increase the presence of the cultural centers in residential colleges.

“The residential college needs to be a comfortable, inclusive living space,” she said.

Brahmbhatt’s friends and professors praised her dedication and passion, and highlighted the ways in which she has enriched the Yale community.

“One of Diksha’s best traits is that she genuinely listens to what others have to say and doesn’t come to conclusions until she has every piece of information,” Shreni Shah ’18, Brahmbhatt’s teammate in the dance group MonstRAASity, said. “This was very evident last semester as she did her best to step back and hear each story, and made it her first priority to listen and to ensure the emotional and mental well-being of her friends and peers.”

Elizabeth Karron ’18, who is also in Berkeley, said Brahmbhatt is committed to building a campus environment in which everyone feels welcome. For example, Karron said, Brahmbhatt helped run a book club within Berkeley as a way to bring together students from different class years to bond over stories and food.

Anthropology and International Affairs professor Marcia Inhorn described Brahmbhatt as a “bright spark” and a “natural leader.”

“Diksha would do her best to make the YCC the crucial ‘hub’ for all the other student groups on campus, thereby helping to link them to the Yale administration,” Inhorn said. “In short, I think the world of Diksha. If I could vote, I would vote for her to be president.”

Armstrong: a link to the administration

by Jon Victor
Published on

Sarah Armstrong ’18, the current Sophomore Class Council president, does not want to be the voice of the students.

“The students are already voicing what they want,” the Yale College Council presidential candidate said. “I want to be the link between the students and the administration. I don’t want the YCC to speak for people who are already speaking really well for themselves.”

Instead, Armstrong said she aims to bring leaders of various student groups into conversations with administrators and YCC representatives on issues that matter to them. That way, she said, students can voice their opinions more directly and more accurately, without having to go through any administrative body.

Armstrong counts financial aid, cultural inclusion and the campus sexual climate among her top priorities, but much of her platform is also based on improving efficiency within the YCC and avoiding bureaucratic systems that prevent reforms from coming to fruition. Armstrong said she wants to streamline how the YCC operates by publishing policy recommendations as a single-page “sales pitch” with a list of highlights, rather than in lengthy reports, the format the YCC currently uses.

Her involvement with the Sophomore Class Council — which operates outside of the YCC’s main executive structure — has given her an outsider’s perspective on how to improve these processes, she said.

Armstrong’s work organizing the first-ever Sophomore Brunch this year has convinced her that going directly to the University administration with brief, clear proposals is most effective. When the YCC presented her with a timeline for the project that she considered unsatisfactory, Armstrong circumvented the body to deliver her one-page plan and was granted funding for the new tradition.

Armstrong, who suffers from dyslexia, said her experience has informed her advocacy for groups whose problems have traditionally slipped under the radar, like students with intellectual disabilities and those whose parents do not speak English — a factor that can complicate the financial aid process.

In addition to being Sophomore Class Council president, Armstrong is an Association of Yale Alumni delegate for the class of 2018 and a campus leader for Unite Against Sexual Assault Yale. She has also done extensive work with Dwight Hall, which she says would motivate her to be a more service-minded YCC president than Yale has seen in the past.

Bennett Byerley ’19, who serves as community service chair for the Freshman Class Council — a post that Armstrong herself created — said Armstrong’s passion for community service would help her make it a more prominent part of the YCC’s work.

“[Armstrong] is the one that represented Dwight Hall most in her platform and allowed service to be integrated with the mission of student government,” Byerley said.

He added that Armstrong’s targeted advocacy for students whose voices have gone unheard makes her a strong candidate, and highlighted her commitment to reforming financial aid and improving the sexual climate on campus as strengths of her platform.

Madeleine Colbert ’18, a friend of Armstrong’s and a volunteer on her campaign, said Armstrong’s commitment to ensuring that students can directly voice their concerns to administrators would make her a particularly effective YCC president.

If elected, Armstrong would be the second female YCC president in the past 16 years, she said.

YCC ELECTION 2016

Published on

This year, five sophomores face off for the role of Yale College Council President, while four vie for the position of Vice President and candidates for Finance Director and Events Director run unopposed. Polls are set to open on Thursday. Follow the News for full coverage of the race.

 
 

Presidential Candidates

Armstrong: a link to the administration

Sarah Armstrong ’18, the current Sophomore Class Council president, does not want to be the voice of the students.

“The students are already voicing what they want,” the Yale College Council presidential candidate said. “I want to be the link between the students and the administration. I don’t want the YCC to speak for people who are already speaking really well for themselves.”

Instead, Armstrong said she aims to bring leaders of various student groups into conversations with administrators and YCC representatives on issues that matter to them. That way, she said, students can voice their opinions more directly and more accurately, without having to go through any administrative body.

Brahmbhatt: focusing on connections

If elected president of the Yale College Council, Diksha Brahmbhatt ’18 will look to channel the “power of face-to-face collaborations” and facilitate partnerships both within and beyond the council.

“We need someone who deeply cares not about the title, but about connecting the community and being a face that is approachable,” Brahmbhatt said. “There is a power in everyday connections and that is what I do on a daily basis. I try to connect people with each other.”

Connecting people is a big part of what Brahmbhatt does on campus, she said. As Berkeley College’s YCC representative, Brahmbhatt has spent this year developing ways for students to engage with the New Haven community beyond community service activities. She is also a FOOT leader and part of the Civic Leadership Initiative, which aims to empower Yalies to make change in their community. She is also a Berkeley College Master’s Aide.

Helschien: reaching students with humor

In his own words, Carter Helschien ’18 is running for Yale College Council president, “all kidding aside.”

Helschien, who has spent the past two years with the YCC as a representative from Morse College and was a member of the Freshman Class Council, is running a campaign he hopes will engage more students with a student government that he said is out of touch with its constituents. Despite his unorthodox campaign slogans that claim he is “the only candidate running for Yale College Council president” and repeated promise to “make things less bad,” Helschien said he is completely serious about the issues facing students.

“The YCC only works well when you have the power of the students behind it,” he said. “[The YCC] is not working with student groups as well as it can be.”

Hochman: focused on social equality

For Joshua Hochman ’18, a combination of realism and idealism forms the basis of a YCC presidential campaign that emphasizes social issues on Yale’s campus.

Hochman, who currently serves on the YCC’s Executive Board as academics director, is running on a platform of “equity and accountability,” promoting social equality in areas such as racial equity, sexual climate and financial aid. His platform — measuring 32 pages — is divided by “what Yale should do, and what the YCC can do,” creating a set of ideas he called both visionary and realistic. Hochman further emphasized that the platform is a result of conversations he has already conducted with students and group leaders, ranging from the president of the Student Athlete Council.

Huang: putting students first

As president of the Yale College Council, Peter Huang ’18 would work to address major campus issues: faculty diversity, the student income contribution and sexual climate. But Huang said that unlike other candidates’ platforms, his has a common thread: It is ambitious but focused.

“I prioritize in my platform and still might not be able to get to everything,” Huang said. “Every other candidate does not expect to cover everything they propose.”

Indeed, Othmane Fourtassi ’19 — a member of Huang’s campaign team — said Huang offers practical solutions and is “a doer who does not overpromise.”

 

Vice Presidential Candidates

Bowman: a YCC for all

After serving as a representative for Saybrook on the Yale College Council, the treasurer for the Freshman Class Council and a member of two University committees including the Yale College Standing Committee on University Expansion, Christopher Bowman ’18 said his connections to student government and unique background knowledge on the new residential colleges set him apart from the other three candidates running for YCC vice president.

“Through serving on the steering committee for the new residential colleges, I’ve been able to see firsthand the issues that are facing Yale as it prepares for an influx of additional students,” Bowman said. “As vice president, I would have the unique background knowledge to create policies that would ensure the continued success of Yale College despite the huge changes that are on the way.”

Patiño: for one Yale

Luis Patiño III ’18 is the third in his family to be baptized with the name, and he is proud of the heritage that it represents. The Yale College Council Vice Presidential candidate said he hopes to use his family’s history as motivation to serve his fellow Yale students.

Patiño’s grandfather — the original Luis Patiño — began shining shoes at the age of seven and was later drafted into World War II; Patiño’s father was raised in an impoverished neighborhood in El Paso, Texas. On his campaign website, Patiño notes that the “III” numeral in his name reminds him of the work and struggle of the generations that preceded him, and empowers him to raise his voice on behalf of the entire Yale community.

Sullivan: a new approach to YCC

If elected vice president of the Yale College Council, Kevin Sullivan ’18 would help lead an organization he considers both great and terrible.

Sullivan, who previously served as vice president of the Sophomore Class Council and Morse College representative, said he understands the shortcomings of the YCC: its top-down hierarchy and general failure to listen to students. While on SoCo, Sullivan said executive leadership of YCC declined to support the budget for the Sophomore Brunch, a new yearly tradition introduced by him and Sarah Armstrong ’18, a YCC presidential candidate. He added that as a Morse College representative, he struggled to propose ideas he solicited from his fellow Yalies to executive leadership, which set the agendas for all meetings.

Wilson: a YCC outsider

At 5 a.m. a few days per week, Zach Wilson ’18 might be found trekking across campus, clad in his army uniform. The ROTC flight commander and double-STEM major has labeled himself the “outsider candidate” in his race against three other students for Yale College Council vice president.

Wilson decided to run for vice president primarily because of the racial discussions that arose on campus last semester. He said after having long discussions with other Yale students and attending various rallies and town hall meetings, he was inspired to bring forth the kind of change Yale students seek. Although Wilson has no previous experience on YCC or his residential college council, he said that he will be “the candidate for the people” and will use his experiences outside of YCC to push for change.

 

Events Director Candidate

Sapienza: experience and enthusiasm

Lauren Sapienza ’18 said she hopes to foster community and create new traditions while serving as Yale College Council events director. Running uncontested, Sapienza has already begun planning programming for next year.

“Yale is an incredible place, and one of the most incredible things we have here is each other,” Sapienza said. “As events director, I think I’ll have the opportunity to facilitate bonding and allow our campus and our friend groups to expand in different ways that I think can really enrich campus culture.”

 
 
 

Finance Director Candidate

Murn: increasing transparency

Zach Murn ’17, who served as the treasurer of the Freshman College Council and was a member of the Sophomore College Council, is running for the YCC finance director on a platform of increased transparency.

Finance director, as a member of the YCC executive board, is responsible for allocating the annual budget and securing funds. Traditionally, about two-thirds to three-fourths of the YCC budget goes to planning for Spring Fling. This year, Murn is running for the position uncontested. He is also the only rising senior seeking a board position.

 
 
 

UP CLOSE:
Yale-NUS | An island on an island

by Qi Xu
Published on April 12, 2016

SINGAPORE — On Oct. 12, 2015, in Yale-NUS’s well-lit, brand-new auditorium, Yale President Peter Salovey inserted an orange block — a miniature figurine of Yale-NUS’s buildings — into the lodge podium, signaling the inauguration of the young college’s very own campus. Salovey was joined by Singapore’s prime minister, as well as other government officials and leaders in higher education. The ceremony marked a major milestone in cementing Yale-NUS’s reputation as the country’s first liberal arts institution.

But despite the momentousness of the occasion for those tied to Yale-NUS, broader Singaporean society had, and continues to have, little knowledge of the college’s existence at all. Though Singapore’s Ministry of Education and other prominent figures in higher education often refer to Yale-NUS as Singapore’s educational experiment, many members of the public cannot locate the campus on a map, let alone describe Yale-NUS’s unique culture.

Considering the small number of colleges in Singapore, it may seem strange that taxi drivers — living maps of the city-state — have never heard of Yale-NUS. Singaporeans with an inkling of the school know it as a liberal arts college — end of story, raising questions of both the college’s isolation and ultimate viability.

How has Yale-NUS fared in its integration? Interviews with over 30 Singaporeans indicate that opinions towards Yale-NUS ranged from ignorance to indifference, from mixed hopes to hostility. Although three years might be a short time for Yale-NUS to establish its name, and the world of elite higher education remains out of reach for many everyday Singaporeans, these responses do raise questions about how well the college engages with the National University of Singapore — its neighbor — and Singapore, its host country.

But the fact that Yale-NUS is largely unknown in Singapore is ironic given its controversial reputation elsewhere. Since its inception in 2010, Yale-NUS has stumbled through criticism and controversy. Right from when former-University President Richard Levin announced his partnership in Singapore and the Yale Corporation approved the project without a faculty vote, concerned Yale faculty and higher education scholars opposed the idea, citing the seeming infeasibility of a liberal arts education offered under the auspices of authoritarian government. They also worried about Singapore’s discrimination against LGBTQ groups, as well as the lack of transparency in the Yale–Singapore deal. Charles Ellis ’59, a former member of the Yale Corporation and husband of Linda Lorimer — former University vice president for global and strategic initiatives and a main architect of Yale’s Singapore venture — had ties to the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, leading the wider community to mistrust the University’s motivation for its collaboration with Singapore.

Most importantly, critics feared that Singapore’s restriction on free speech would seep its way into Yale-NUS’s classrooms, hindering academic freedom and tarnishing the Yale brand.

While voices against Yale’s Singapore project gradually toned down as Yale-NUS went from an abstract concept to daily reality, a series of controversial episodes served to cement some critics’ doubts toward the young college even further. In 2014, Yale-NUS retracted its decision to screen Tan Pin Pin’s “To Singapore, With Love” — a film about political exiles that was banned in Singapore for undermining national security — after Tan declined to give the school permission for its screening. Later that year, NUS’s Office of Housing Services removed Yale-NUS student posters in elevators showing support for the Umbrella Revolution, a series of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. In January of this year, a speech made by Singapore’s ambassador-at-large Chan Heng Chee, who also serves on Yale-NUS’s governing board, sparked debate on campus after Chan defended Singapore’s sodomy law.

Still, some educators watched the experiment with excitement as it grew in size. The school is now home to over 500 students from every continent except Antarctica, and 14 majors ranging from life sciences to urban studies. It has been successful in recruiting star faculty from top universities and securing funding with gifts from prominent Singaporean firms, including Singapore Airlines Ltd. and Singapore Exchange Ltd. The college’s Common Curriculum — a set of courses compulsory for all students — has been celebrated as an embodiment of Yale-NUS’s mission, one which combines eastern and western education.

Yet, equally, if not more, important than how Yale-NUS’s watchers in New Haven view the partnership is what insiders — Singaporean politicians, peers at other local universities or patrons at Singapore’s signature food markets — think of the school.

“Asia is different from America,” Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in an address during the October inauguration. “Yale-NUS therefore needs a curriculum and a college ethos that respond to [its] regional context.” Lee added that the experiment will fail if Yale-NUS is “just a carbon copy” of Yale in New Haven.

In other words, the question surrounding Yale-NUS is no longer one about possibility, but sustainability.

AN ALOOF NEIGHBOR?

Yale-NUS’s $240 million campus, fully funded by the Singapore government, sets itself apart from the NUS buildings next door with its polished dorms and state-of-art facilities. Those at NUS felt physically separated from the new campus due to its steel gates, which although open most of the time, are perceived by some as a sign of “aloofness.” Before moving into its own campus, Yale-NUS had occupied a single building within the expansive NUS domain for the first two years of its existence, sharing classrooms and dining space with its much larger, research-intensive parent institution.

Tension over shared versus separate campus space grew last fall regarding NUS’s usage of distinct Yale-NUS buildings. Not long after Yale-NUS opened its campus, its students voiced concerns about their NUS peers taking over the Yale-NUS library space and leaving many Yale-NUS students unable to find seats. In response, Yale-NUS changed its library opening hours to be open to the public during the day but only accessible to Yale-NUS in the evening, a move Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis said is justified by the higher tuition fees the school charges, but that NUS students called unfair.

(Ellie Pritchett, Production & Design Staff)

Currently, every Yale-NUS student has two student IDs: one NUS ID that permits him or her to use NUS facilities and one Yale-NUS ID that allows access to Yale-NUS buildings during certain times.

“Yale-NUS seems like a very closed-off place, one isolated from the rest of NUS. People there seem to be in their own world and are very different from us,” said Samara Gang, a freshman at NUS. She added that the appearance of Yale-NUS buildings, its physical boundaries as manifest in the gates and the library trespassing issues only emphasized these differences.

Despite living right across from Yale-NUS, Gang has never been to its campus. Gang said Yale-NUS boasts a sense of elitism and gives her the impression that it only wishes to associate itself with Yale, but not its other parent, NUS.

Valerie Ng, a second-year student at NUS, said the limited interaction between the two schools probably makes people regard Yale-NUS students as “snobbish.”

An anonymous NUS student echoed similar sentiment toward the Yale-NUS “stepsibling syndrome,” and questioned why Yale-NUS included “NUS” in its name in the first place if it identifies only with its New Haven parent.

An NUS student who asked not to be identified said that rumors about Yale-NUS circulate around the NUS campus. For example, the student said, NUS students speculated that NUS cut its funding for its University Scholars Program — often regarded as NUS’s first experiment in liberal arts — due to its growing support for Yale-NUS. But, Lewis said, although the majority of Yale-NUS’s early funding came from NUS, it is the Singapore government rather than NUS that pays the money.

Still, the anonymous student noted Yale-NUS’s inclusiveness in some respects: talks held by the college are often open to NUS as well. While NUS invites locally prominent speakers, Yale-NUS features more guests with international fame and background, the student added.

Other NUS students interviewed also called Yale-NUS “insular,” but said the same situation occurs within every residential system, even NUS’s own residential colleges.

“All small liberal arts schools are self-contained to some degree, and I think that to some degree we should be,” Yale-NUS Dean of Students Christopher Bridges said, “Part of what we are doing here is living in community. By its very nature, we are partly self-contained — in the same way that I would argue Yale, or the School of Engineering at NUS, is self-contained.”

Still, Bridges said Yale-NUS student organizations often partner with those at NUS, and students compete with their NUS peers at inter-college sports games. For example, the G Spot — Yale-NUS’s primary student club tackling issues on sexuality, gender and feminism — opened its membership to NUS students and hosted an orientation for queer-identifying students at both schools.

Lewis said the impression of Yale-NUS being self-contained also stems from the fact that NUS has 37,000 students. Many do not have the chance to meet their peers from Yale-NUS, whose student-body size is only a little over 500. Last fall, several Yale-NUS freshmen set up a club called Hyphen to bridge Yale-NUS with its neighbor and parent institution. The Dean of Students Office at Yale-NUS oversees a “Building Bridges” fund, which supports activities aimed at fostering bonds with NUS, Bridges said.

Academically, Yale-NUS students may take language classes taught at NUS, and a sizable group are pursuing a dual degree at NUS’s Faculty of Law.

Lewis said criticism from the NUS side is an inevitable process of adjustment. When NUS first opened its University Town, a residential complex with modern housing and a plethora of restaurants, its students living in old dorms outside UTown voiced similar unhappiness, he said, adding that the same issue can play out in New Haven.

Yale-NUS’s seeming aloofness is related to a perceived identity crisis as well. Those in New Haven often confuse Yale-NUS with NUS, lumping the duo together; whereas local residents in Singapore simply refer to Yale-NUS as Yale. Overshadowed by its two established parents, Yale-NUS has to assert its independence, and difference, from both Yale and NUS.

Karen Ho YNUS ’17 said Yale-NUS students have spent much time talking about how they wished to define a distinct Yale-NUS campus space to help clarify the college’s relationship with NUS and establish its unique culture. While the school has been successful in cultivating its own identity, Yale-NUS might have appeared to be more self-contained along the way, Ho added.

Isabel Perucho YNUS ’18 agreed that Yale-NUS’s relationship with NUS has been a point of contention on campus and was never “clear-cut from the start.” However, Perucho said fostering Yale-NUS’s own culture needs not come at the expense of interaction with the outside world, as no successful liberal arts college is self-contained.

A POLITICAL OUTLIER?

The question of whether Yale-NUS is self-contained goes beyond its ties with NUS to its engagement with Singaporean society more broadly. Nicknamed the “little red dot,” the small island was home to four major universities before Yale-NUS set its footprint there. One can literally travel across the country in less than two hours, and imports make up a large portion of daily essentials. Singapore’s smallness is not the only aspect that makes it stand out, as its political scene has attracted much attention as well. Although Singapore upholds voting rights, a single political party has ruled the country for the 51 years since its founding. Moreover, any mention of the country in the west invokes memory of its chewing gum ban and caning as a form of punishment.

Therefore, many are paying attention to how Yale-NUS, the country’s first and only liberal arts college, engages with its host country politically.

Yale-NUS administrators and students insist that the school does engage with Singapore’s political scene without great constraint, though members of Singapore’s opposition parties say otherwise. The most cited example of Yale-NUS’s involvement with local politics was a talk given by Chee Soon Juan last fall. Chee is the secretary-general of the Singapore Democratic Party, the country’s second-largest opposition party. In 2012, he travelled to New Haven to discuss the possible pitfalls of Yale’s Singapore project, likening it to a business venture.

Chee told the News that even though he was hosted by Yale-NUS, he had to approach the school first to ask for the opportunity. Moreover, Chee, while grateful for the chance to speak, said the event was limited its openness, as he recalled it being a closed-door event with no photography allowed.

In some ways, Chee’s talk seemed representative of a common tension at Yale-NUS: While the college tries to engage with its home country politically, there are inevitable restrictions to how much it can do so.

“I keep asking myself why. Why?” Chee said. “Have an open discussion; organize a debate for goodness’ sake.”

Kenneth Jeyaretnam, leader of Singapore’s Reform Party, another opposition party, said he was never invited to speak at Yale-NUS and has been denied a platform to speak at other Singaporean universities. Jeyaretnam joined Chee in the 2012 panel at Yale, where he condemned Yale as lending its name to an authoritarian government and “making a pact with a devil.”

According to a 2015 report by Human Rights Watch, Singapore requires local newspapers to renew their registration each year. The government restricts freedom of assembly except for in one park on the entire island, and government officials have used defamation as a way to silence critics. Political activities at Yale-NUS, with the school’s American association and commitment to freedom of speech, thus form an important lens to examine how the school engages with Singaporean society.

Chee said the litmus test for Yale-NUS’s political freedom is whether the school will make it possible for the opposition to visit not only during elections, but also to convey its ideologies at other times and recruit interested students to set up youth branches of political parties. He noted that groups similar to the Yale College Democrats and Yale College Republicans are absent at Yale-NUS. In October 2012, Yale-NUS announced such organizations would be prohibited on campus, in accordance with the nation’s laws.

“If Yale, why not Yale-NUS? The only reason I can think of is that Yale-NUS is in Singapore and has to abide by its rules and regulations,” Chee said. “Where do we get the idea that politics is wrong for university students?”

Chee added that he hasn’t heard any conversation coming from Yale-NUS students asking the “why” question. For Chee and Yale-NUS’s critics in New Haven, the fact that no Yale-NUS student challenged the restriction is troubling. Accepting the government’s rules is a dominant attitude in Singapore’s political culture, and some worried that this culture has begun to find its way into Yale’s Singapore project.

(Ellie Pritchett, Production & Design Staff)

Ai Huy Luu YNUS ’19, who is from Singapore, said though Yale-NUS students cannot set up branches of political parties nor campaign for them on campus, hosting forums is still a good way to engage broader society in political issues. Before Singapore’s parliamentary election last September, Yale-NUS’s International Relations and Political Association hosted a debate among various political parties. Also before the election, a group of juniors at Yale-NUS developed Electionaire, a web survey that allows users to see which Singaporean party best aligns with their political stances. Luu added that because protests are generally banned in Singapore, much dissent has gone online and many of her peers have used online platforms to voice their opinions.

Lewis agreed, noting that some Yale-NUS students contribute to online outlets with more critical stands toward the government.

And, beyond straight politics, Yale-NUS students have also found ways to engage with cultural and social issues relevant to Singaporean society.

The G Spot, for example, has worked with local NGOs on gender equality and the empowerment of the transgender community. It was the first student organization to receive a Student Initiative Award from AWARE, Singapore’s leading gender-equality advocacy group.

Despite students’ effort to branch out, Luu said she understands why so many Singaporeans are unfamiliar with Yale-NUS. The college is still a niche institution and liberal arts remains largely a foreign concept on the island, Luu added.

But Bridges, who moved to Singapore in January, said he has the opposite impression and felt as if “the entire nation is watching Yale-NUS.” He cited the fact that many local newspapers closely follow happenings at Yale-NUS. For example, The Straits Times, Singapore’s most widely circulated newspaper, has an entire webpage titled “Latest: Yale-NUS.”

AN INCONSISTENT ROLE?

Even in the face of Singapore’s relative political restrictions, academic institutions like Yale-NUS are afforded a degree of leeway. A widely held view is that Singapore’s government does not actively enforce its strict and conceivably discriminatory laws on paper. As a result, there is room for Yale-NUS students to freely express themselves within the physical boundaries of the school. In fact, Yale-NUS includes free expression as the school’s “cornerstone” in its Policies and Procedures.

(Ellie Pritchett, Production & Design Staff)

But despite the school’s desire to be as integrated into Singaporean society as possible, some suggest that a degree of isolation is necessary to uphold a commitment to freedom of speech. Whether Yale-NUS needs to be self-contained to carry out its mission is a point of disagreement on campus among students.

“Students feel as free on our campus as they do in New Haven,” Lewis told the News. “It’s true that one segment of political freedom is somewhat more restricted here, but people interact in the same ways, debate same issues and express their views freely.”

For many outside Yale-NUS, however, such political freedom is not guaranteed, and there arises the question of whether Yale-NUS needs to be self-contained, at least politically, to live up to its promise of free expression.

Yale-NUS’s commitment to freedom of speech makes it a “safe haven” for people with dissenting political views, Thu Truong YNUS ’18 said.

Truong added that students defend same-sex marriage and freedom of speech on campus but do not aggressively take these views to the streets. The school needs to be somewhat self-contained in order to guard its values, Truong said.

Only two of 15 Yale-NUS interviewed said the discrepancy between a campus culture and a societal environment made them modify their behaviors when stepping outside campus.

“There are things I would say here and be less strong about when I’m outside,” another anonymous Yale-NUS student said. “It’s not self-censorship but an unconscious response to the environment I’m in.”

Still, Chee challenged the statement, arguing that it ultimately boils down to self-censorship, a huge part of Singaporean culture.

In a 2014 interview with the News, Salovey said when Yale set out its plan in Singapore, the administration was aware of Singapore’s more restrictive laws about political speech as compared to those in U.S. He added that the University ultimately decided that the risks “were worth it,” when balanced against the chance to create a new liberal arts experience in Asia. Salovey told The Indian Express in 2015 that a vigorous liberal arts training, with its inherent discussion and dissent, is the best preparation for Singapore’s not-too-distant future of fuller democracy.

An anonymous Yale-NUS student said the campus environment is indeed more tolerant compared to elsewhere in Singaporean society, making people less afraid of speaking their minds. The student added that it is necessary that such open exercises of freedom of speech stay within the walls of the school if Yale-NUS is to preserve and live up to its values.

“It’s simply not practical to remove the bubble,” the student said. “For example, according to the terms in their Student’s Pass, international students cannot engage in political activities in the country, but they happen to be ones most vocal about political issues.”

For international students, who make up around 40 percent of the Yale-NUS student body, student visas may pose more restrictions.

“You shall not take part in any political or other related activities during your stay in Singapore,” the Terms & Conditions of Singapore’s Student’s Pass states. Generally, every international student pursuing full-time studies in Singapore require a Student’s Pass to legally stay in the country.

Though the document does not specify what “political or other related activities” entail, Lewis said its primary meaning includes joining a political party or attending protests.

In the same way that the U.S. puts limits on foreigners’ contribution to election campaigns, Singapore has its restrictions on internationals’ political involvement, Lewis said, adding that Singaporeans make up the majority of Yale-NUS’s student body and are free to join political parties or participate in campaigns. International students tend to engage more with social matters that intersect with politics, Lewis said.

All eight Yale-NUS international students interviewed said they do not feel restricted by the term on their Student’s Pass.

Carmen Denia YNUS ’17, a student from the Philippines who has spent eight years in Singapore, said that while the term of the Student’s Pass restricts protests, such activities are now allowed in Singapore anyway, and therefore the term does not present international students with additional barriers. She added that the law does not bar her from attending talks or speaking to ministers, for example.

Peter Lewis YNUS ’18, who hails from Arizona, said he felt comfortable speaking his mind and had been allowed to attend political rallies, suggesting a Yale-NUS bubble is not necessary.

“We are guests in this country and the Singapore government provides us with this fantastic education,” he said. “I appreciate it without any feeling that I have to change anything. At the end of the day, I am an American living in this country. I don’t feel the restriction is unjust.”

Julianne Thomson YNUS ’18, who is also American, said she thought about the term before attending Yale-NUS and did not consider it an issue. Thomson said it would have been a problem if some particular issues compelled her to cross the boundary. If that happens, the Student’s Pass will not be a factor holding her back, she added, though she said she could not envision what issues would prompt her to break the rule in the first place.

“I will only know a boundary if I cross over it, and I will keep going if I don’t. Now I feel free to do whatever,” Thomson said.

Moreover, roughly 15 students interviewed, including those from western countries such as the U.S., said the western conception of an authoritarian Singapore is outdated.

Many Americans’ negative perception of Singapore still dwell in the 1990s, when then-U.S. President Bill Clinton LAW ’73 intervened in the case of Michael Fay, a 18-year-old American who was subjected to caning for theft and vandalism, Patrick Wu YNUS ’19, a student from Georgia, said. Wu added that the news coverage of the episode led to the problematic view of Singapore that still exists today.

Paul Jerusalem YNUS ’19 said the rules are strict in Singapore and those who think of the country as “draconian” and a “police state” may have derived their opinion from existing codes of laws. However, the idiosyncrasy of Singapore is that many laws are there simply to reflect the historically traditional fabric of the society, and as long as one’s actions do not hurt someone else, the government does not “police every single thing,” he added.

Luu, a Singaporean student, agreed, saying that Singapore may seem authoritarian on the surface, but there is a lot of leeway as long as one does not openly dispute the status quo nor undermine the state. She added that Singapore gives freedom to academic space. For example, there are university courses taught about queer issues, as well as courses that argue against some of the tenets of government ministries.

Still, Chee said fear and self-censorship are a big part of the Singapore culture, and the problem is not so much about the government saying “no,” but rather about individuals submitting to fear. He warned that if Yale-NUS were not careful enough, it will be swallowed up in the culture without realizing it.

DEBUNKING THE “LIBERAL” MYTH

Although the term “liberal” in “liberal arts” is derived from the Latin word “liberalis,” meaning freedom, many today mistake it to mean the opposite of conservative, especially in the political sense. Because of its American brand and its selling point as a liberal-arts experiment, Yale-NUS is often subjected to this misconception from many outsiders.

Declan Low, a fourth-year student at NUS who studied at Yale for one year, said Yale-NUS engages with more controversial topics that Singaporeans usually abstain from, such as LGBTQ advocacy. This difference is responsible for impressions of Yale-NUS as more liberal leaning, he said.

And due to Yale-NUS’s small student body, people unfamiliar with the college often associate a few vocal, liberal student voices with the entire school. A post on NUS Confessions, a popular Facebook page where members of the public can submit anonymous posts, angrily accused several Yale-NUS students of complaining about how illiberal Singapore was while riding public transit.

And most recently, after a few Yale-NUS students called for Ambassador Chan’s removal from the school’s governing board because she defended the country’s sodomy law, Bilahari Kausikan, another Singaporean ambassador-at-large, lamented the “hopefully noisy minority” liberals of Yale-NUS on Facebook.

While Kausikan made sure not to label the entire Yale-NUS community as liberal, he thought establishing the school was the wrong move.

“I think it was a mistake to have let Yale establish a campus in Singapore. Some sections of the American academy have been behaving in insane ways and their particular band of insanity should not be allowed to be imported into Singapore,” Kausikan wrote in the post.

However defensive or xenophobic these comments seem to many at Yale-NUS, they ultimately speak to a larger issue — how easily Yale-NUS can be wrongly labeled as a habitat for liberals within a conservative social fabric. The fact is, Yale-NUS is home to a significant percentage of Singaporean Christian students who tend to identify with more conservative political and social views. For this particular group, misconceptions surrounding their school can be problematic.

An anonymous student said the student body consists of a few liberal advocates but also a considerable conservative, but silent, population.

According to the student, the liberal voice at Yale-NUS is very powerful but not wholly representative of the student body.

Denia, a Christian herself, said the misconception about Yale-NUS can be hard for her sometimes, especially when outsiders treat Yale-NUS as a “hotbed for atheists and political revolts.”

Whether cautioning Yale-NUS against a liberal frenzy, calling for more interaction with its neighbor or expressing hopes for its greater political freedom, various parts of Singaporean society harbor different expectations for this young college. Ignorance of Yale-NUS’s existence or skewed impressions of its culture persist despite the college’s efforts to engage with its host country. And even among Yale-NUS’s 500 students, opinions remain divided on whether a degree of self-containedness is necessary to cultivating Yale-NUS’s unique culture and uphold its commitment to free expression.

As the college’s polished campus stands tall, tucked in a corner of Singapore, Yale-NUS continues to figure out in which direction to head, how to assert its presence and how to make an impact on this Southeast Asian island.

 

UP CLOSE:
Under Salovey, Yale Corporation gains influence

by David Shimer
Published on April 7, 2016

It is near midnight on Nov. 12, 2015, and 200 students are marching on University President Peter Salovey’s house in the cold. Advocating for a more diverse and inclusive campus, they present Salovey with a set of demands. Their list includes, among other things, renaming Calhoun College, eliminating the title of master and naming the two new residential colleges after people of color. Just five days later, Salovey responds to campus concerns with a series of initiatives, one inviting the community to listening sessions with the Yale Corporation on naming. But the three issues remained unresolved.

For more than seven months, the 17 members of the Yale Corporation, including Salovey, who chairs each of the body’s meetings, have been deliberating whether to rename Calhoun and eliminate the title of master. They have not yet announced a decision. The Corporation has also been debating what to name the two new residential colleges. This decision has not been reached either.

In November, student activists demanded that Salovey address these issues within days. But for such unusual and significant items, who makes the actual decision: the president or the Corporation as a whole?

To the surprise of former University leaders dating back 60 years, the answer now seems to be the Corporation.

Interviews with Corporation members, former University President Richard Levin and various current and former administrators reveal that past presidents did not see the Corporation as a body that could or should make these types of decisions. Rather, they viewed the Corporation as a feedback mechanism that always accepted presidential recommendations — including on nonroutine issues like these three.

“The Corporation simply never would have controlled these decisions,” said former University Secretary John Wilkinson ’60 GRD ’63, who served in the position under former University Presidents Bartlett Giamatti and Benno Schmidt in the 1980s. “[Giamatti] would have pulled out his hair and just started screaming if he were just another member of the Corporation on something this big. He would have had a fit.”

But Salovey has taken a different approach.

He told the News that upon his ascension to the presidency in 2013, Corporation members expressed a desire to become more involved in difficult decisions — a request he says fits his “collaborative leadership style.” As the Corporation prepares to meet this weekend, he said it is impossible to tell exactly when these three issues will be settled, but that the aim is for them to be resolved by the end of the academic year. When making certain far-reaching decisions, he said he sees himself as just another member of the Corporation and would like the body to reach a consensus at its own pace.

“For nonroutine decisions that have broad and long-term implications, I think consensus, if it can be reached, is a better approach than simply asking for a vote on the president’s recommendation,” Salovey said. “So rather than the usual process of coming with a specific recommendation and asking the Corporation to endorse it, in the case of the naming of the new colleges, Calhoun College and the title of master, we’ll instead lay out options for them to consider.”

In the months that the Yale community has waited for these issues to be resolved, both Harvard and Princeton have decided to eliminate the title of master and settled their own naming debates relatively quickly.

And in these months, the implications of Salovey’s consensus-based approach have become clearer: Some praise it for encouraging thoughtfulness and fostering prudence early in his tenure; others lament that the model has prolonged the decision-making process, distributed accountability across the Corporation and inhibited student access to those with power.

POWER WITHOUT PRECEDENT

In justifying the Corporation’s control over the three naming issues, Woodbridge Hall administrators often point out that the Corporation named the first residential colleges in the 1930s and that the title of master is included in the University’s bylaws, which can only be altered by the Corporation. To Salovey, the long-term implications of these decisions necessitate extended conversations within the Corporation without the guidance, or restriction, of an overriding administrative recommendation. His aim is for a consensus to emerge.

But former University leaders paint a picture of a historically different type of decision-making process for nonroutine issues — one in which Corporation members served as advisers and always followed the recommendations of the president.

“It was not about consensus,” Levin said of his relationship with the Corporation. “While there is a healthy relationship between the president and the Corporation, the body is a sounding board for the ideas of the president, dean and officers. They give feedback, but they rarely actually decide the issue.”

(Amanda Hu, Production & Design Staff)

Levin added that after consulting with individual Corporation members, he would submit recommendations that were virtually never rebuked.

Wilkinson and Sam Chauncey ’57 — who served as special assistant to former University President Kingman Brewster between 1963 and 1972 and secretary of the Corporation from 1973 to 1982 — went one step further. According to them, the University presidents under whom they served would have actively controlled the three issues the Corporation is currently deliberating.

“Consensus was absolutely never the way it worked,” Chauncey said. “It isn’t like Brewster or Levin or Schmidt or Giamatti would walk in with some background research and say, ‘We have this problem — I don’t know what the hell to do about it so let’s figure it out …’ Trustees are there to receive a recommendation, to talk about it, to make honest criticism and to have a vote.”

Granted, the nature of the presidency has evolved over the past few decades. As demonstrated by campus controversies in November, the University sits on a national stage, within which the president can face pressures from both within and without. Still, Salovey said if he were to attend Corporation meetings without recommendations, he would come prepared with broader options for consideration.

Chauncey and Wilkinson said the various presidents under whom they served would have made recommendations on Calhoun, master and the residential colleges to which the Corporation would have undoubtedly adhered.

“I never saw a recommendation turned down,” Wilkinson said.

Chauncey explained that when Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges were named in the early 1960s, then-University President Alfred Whitney Griswold submitted these two names to the Corporation, which readily approved both. On the contrary, Salovey said in February that he submitted roughly two dozen name possibilities for the new colleges to the Corporation for discussion.

William Nordhaus ’63 GRD ’73, an economics professor who served as provost from 1986 to 1988 and a vice president from 1991 to 1992, said that during the time he had access to Corporation meetings as a high-ranking officer, presidential recommendations almost always guided the body. In his experience, the president is the chief executive officer of the University and controls major decisions, while the role of the Corporation is to dissect those decisions before approving them.

However, this historically unilateral presidential approach prompted disbelief and opposition from current Woodbridge Hall administrators and Corporation members, many of whom said such a model would undermine the Corporation’s role in University governance.

Chauncey said that even though the title of master is in the University’s bylaws, Brewster would have publicly announced whether he wanted the title altered and the Corporation would have fallen in line at its next meeting.

But Corporation Fellow Charles Goodyear IV ’80, who has served with both Levin and Salovey, argued that the Corporation “owns these [three] decisions.”

“That is not the way governance works,” he said. “If the president said we’re naming a college after Adolf Hitler before we met, would the Corporation say he’s a strong president so we agree with him? Absolutely not … The people of the Corporation historically are not shrinking violets, and if they are the ones who had accountability for the decisions, they will own it … We aren’t going to be patsies … I wouldn’t want to be a part of that board.”

Still, Wilkinson said during his time, the value of the Corporation stemmed not from its decision-making power, but from its ability and responsibility to ask the president probing questions about his recommendations.

Yet this former model of dominant presidential recommendations guiding the University seems to have faded, at least for these three decisions.

“It depends on the issue, and [Salovey] is great at this: He loves to listen, and he does that extremely well. If there is a strong view from Corporation members, it is unlikely that [Salovey] is going to stand up and say ‘I am going to do something completely different,’” Goodyear told the News in October.

SALOVEY’S MODEL

(Tresa Joseph, Production & Design Editor)

Under Salovey, the Corporation has gained a degree of influence through its increased involvement in nonroutine decisions and the pace at which they are made. Salovey said while he is sensitive to members of the Yale community who would like matters to be settled more quickly, the reverberations of these decisions will be felt for generations and necessitate patience.

“In my opinion, a weighty matter before the Corporation is not best decided by simply putting it up to a vote and seeing if there is a majority — I think it’s best decided when there has been a full and thorough vetting of that issue where everyone has been heard, and then, a consensus emerges,” Salovey said.

Secretary and Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews and Vice President for Development and Alumni Affairs Joan O’Neill said rather than submit official recommendations on these three issues, Woodbridge Hall is looking to frame the Corporation’s conversations as it works toward a consensus. They explained that Woodbridge Hall administrators are providing the Corporation with background information on the three issues, drawing from listening sessions and surveys presented to the Yale community.

Seeking to contextualize this shift in the decision-making process, Salovey said that, for routine issues, Corporation decisions are still directed by recommendations from him and other University administrators and that the Corporation’s jurisdiction over the naming of the two new residential colleges was decided under Levin. In explanation, Levin said he did not attempt to determine the names before retiring and that Corporation members are the stewards of the long-term health of Yale, thereby justifying their involvement.

Corporation members — who technically are not authorized to speak publicly on Corporation matters — agreed that Salovey has emphasized collaboration.

“Salovey is, I don’t want to say a consensus builder because that suggests a kind of softness — not at all — but he really wants an opportunity for people to weigh in,” Senior Fellow of the Corporation Margaret Marshall LAW ’75 said.

Salovey, Woodbridge Hall administrators and Corporation members all said it is important to remember that Levin was president for two decades while Salovey is less than three years into the role, which perhaps explains his more inclusive approach.

Donna Dubinsky ’77 — who has served on the Corporation since 2006 — said Salovey is more focused on hearing the perspective of the Corporation than Levin was.

By the end of his tenure, Goodyear said Levin grew “very confident” and was deeply familiar with the perspectives of various Corporation members.

A source who attends all Corporation meetings said by the end of his tenure, Levin became complacent and less focused on obtaining broad alignment. Several individuals interviewed went so far as to say Levin grew “dictatorial” in his approach to the Corporation and faculty-related issues, raising the possibility that Salovey’s style is being judged in a relative, not absolute, context.

“Salovey is, I don’t want to say a consensus builder because that suggests a kind of softness — not at all — but he really wants an opportunity for people to weigh in.”

—Margaret Marshall LAW ’75, Senior Corporation Fellow

For now, Goodyear said Salovey appears more focused on collaboration, which may be due in part to his academic background.

“He is a consensus guy; he is a psychologist; and he is very adept at [emotional intelligence]. That’s his style, but maybe 20 years from now he’ll come in and say ‘This is what we’re doing,’” Goodyear said. “But I do think [Salovey] is much more likely to canvass the Corporation.”

Indeed, Wilkinson said Salovey’s expertise suggests that the Corporation has not seized power from him or that he lacks the courage to make decisions. Rather, it suggests that Salovey is sharing influence willingly, Wilkinson said.

Dubinsky said Salovey approaches the Corporation with the mind of a psychologist, while Levin did so through the lens of an economist, enabling Levin to identify tradeoffs and constraints and guide the University through particularly difficult periods. She added that Salovey’s collaborative style fits Yale’s current needs and that the University is fortunate to have “the right guy at the right time.”

In choosing a president to replace Levin, the Corporation chose Salovey, a world-renowned psychologist who had previously served as provost and dean of Yale College.

Goodyear, who led the presidential search, said a desire to move away from the characteristics of the Levin era did not factor into the selection process.

Yet Salovey said upon his ascension to the presidency, Corporation members expressed a desire to become more involved in addressing complex issues from the start.

“Both through a combination of my style and the desire of Corporation members when I interviewed each of them … we are willing to have a more freewheeling discussion in the Corporation room on important issues that might not involve their reacting to specific recommendations,” Salovey said.

As chair of Corporation meetings, Salovey said he has and will continue to express his opinions on current naming issues. And interviews with Corporation members suggest his opinions do carry significant weight because he is the president of the University. But there is an important distinction between Salovey sharing his point of view with the Corporation and submitting a recommendation for the body to ultimately abide by. And even Salovey emphasized that, for unusual matters, while he is not afraid of making recommendations, it is not his prerogative to dictate what the body decides or to formulate a timeline for the Corporation’s decision-making.

“As president of the University, I can organize the discussion; I can provide materials in advance; I can express an opinion,” Salovey said. “But I think it would be a mistake to push for answers before the group is ready.”

MORE TIME, LESS ACCOUNTABILITY

This year has been the first real test of Salovey’s leadership style. The naming of the two new residential colleges, the potential renaming of Calhoun and the potential elimination of the title of master are arguably the most far-reaching and complex decisions Salovey has faced since assuming the presidency.

“I have been on the Corporation for 10 years, and very few things we have grappled with have been at this level,” Dubinsky said.

The Corporation’s increased influence over these major decisions has had sizable consequences. It is unclear to the Yale community who is to be held accountable on these issues, several former administrators and students said. Meanwhile, as the Corporation’s official agenda has grown in scope, the frequency with which the body meets has not increased — inevitably slowing decision-making.

Goodyear, Chauncey and Wilkinson all said Salovey’s approach has both stalled the process and made it more unpredictable. Even Salovey agreed.

“There is no doubt that striving toward a consensus takes more time than simply putting matters up to a vote,” Salovey said. “I’ve been wrong more often than right when I’ve hazarded a guess about when issues will be decided. It is very difficult to predict when [these] issues are going to be decided by them.”

Thirty-eight of 40 students surveyed said the University should be moving more quickly to resolve these three issues.

“It’s time to put these things to rest,” Jacob Bennett ’16 said.

Salovey said that he agrees the naming debates have received much attention — both inside and outside the Corporation — and that the time has come, or will come soon, to “move on.”

Unlike ongoing efforts to choose the names and masters of the two new residential colleges, Wilkinson pointed out that Stiles and Morse had both matters settled years before they opened through the influence of administrative recommendations. He also lamented that under Salovey, individuals who are physically detached from campus increasingly control major University decisions.

“The consensus model is not going to work very well when you’re talking about a multibillion-dollar Corporation,” Wilkinson said. “Corporations like this need a firm hand and firm leadership. What worries me is that Corporation members, no matter how good they are, are only guests of the University.”

In addition, the Corporation only has a small amount of time to discuss naming issues at each meeting. Each board meeting spans just three days, and the body’s confidential agenda includes many items outside of naming issues and the title of master.

“Corporations like this need a firm hand and firm leadership. What worries me is that Corporation members, no matter how good they are, are only guests of the University.”

—John Wilkinson ’60 GRD ’63, former University Secretary

With the Corporation focusing on these three decisions across several meetings, Nordhaus expressed concern from the outside that the body may be neglecting its more traditional responsibilities.

“Someone told me they’re not looking at investments because they’re spending all their time on the new colleges,” Nordhaus said. “I worry about that. Someone told me they’re spending time looking at different schools’ actions, and I worry about that. But I don’t see the agenda.”

One high-ranking administrator who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject said University employees expected decisions to be made more efficiently under Salovey because he rose to prominence within Yale, and thus understands the inner workings of the University. Instead, the administrator said, decision-making has slowed not only for these three issues, but also in areas like capital campaign planning and the development of broader University strategy.

Chauncey said Salovey’s model of consensus management risks robbing Yale of a true leader by distributing accountability throughout the Corporation, adding that other presidents would not have allowed such an increase in the body’s influence.

“Every other president would have resigned by now,” Chancey said. “But if a president doesn’t want to make a mistake, the trustees will keep filling the vacuum … It is my belief that an institution like Yale can only progress if there is someone who is willing to take the responsibility of leadership by making recommendations, including those that might run the risk of getting him or her fired.”

Salovey said that while he is willing to risk making errors, Corporation members have made their desire to be involved “quite clear.”

Indeed, Goodyear said once these three issues are settled, he expects them to be presented to the Yale community as Corporation decisions instead of presidential decisions. That is not the case for typical issues, he said, which represent the vast majority of decisions and are “owned” by the president and his administration. Senior Advisor to the President Martha Highsmith said examples of issues guided by administrative recommendations include the construction of new buildings, increases in the Yale College term bill, the hiring of an officer and the naming of a professor to an endowed chair.

It is, of course, too early to say that decisions made by consensus will be more or less effective than those produced by administrative recommendations, as these three issues are the first to truly test Salovey’s approach. While student memory largely extends only to Salovey’s inauguration, University faculty and administrators are still assessing his style in comparison to past presidents.

Wilkinson said one benefit of Salovey’s model is that full discussion and deliberation will prevent “knee-jerk reactions.” He cited the actions of Harvard and Princeton concerning the title of master.

Dean of the School of Management Edward Snyder noted that while the recommendation-based approach of previous presidents is commonly accepted in research on boards of governance, a more involved, consensus-based approach is as well.

Stephen Schwarzman ’69 — the chairman and CEO of The Blackstone Group who donated $150 million to the University in May — said in his experiences with boards of governance, recommendation-based and consensus-based models each have merit.

“In my experience, both can work,” Schwarzman said.

PEERS MOVE FASTER

By relying on consensus for nonroutine decisions, Salovey has ensured that Yale will not move as quickly, or impulsively, as Harvard and Princeton. Both universities decided to eliminate the title of master in the fall as college campuses across the nation were enveloped by conversations about racism and discrimination, and, in the past few weeks, each has addressed a naming issue of its own: Princeton will not rename buildings honoring former president Woodrow Wilson, and Harvard will change its law school seal, which featured the crest of an 18th-century slaveholding family. In comparison, Yale lags behind.

Unlike Yale, Harvard and Princeton formed special committees that recommended how to settle their respective naming issues. Similar to the approach of former Yale presidents, the Harvard Corporation and Princeton’s Board of Trustees readily approved those recommendations rather than formulate their own. Able to meet more frequently, these committees made decisions relatively quickly.

At Princeton, the 40-person board of trustees was responsible for determining whether to rename buildings honoring Wilson because of his racist legacy. Instead of the entire board settling the issue, however, a trustee committee of 10 put together a formal recommendation.

Princeton’s Assistant Vice President for Communications Daniel Day said forming a special committee enabled Princeton to reach a decision faster. The committee had nine meetings between early December 2015 and late March before submitting its recommendation to the entire board, he said.

In that same period, the Yale Corporation has met twice.

(Amanda Hu, Production & Design Staff)

Harvard also adopted a specialized approach. Rather than ask its Corporation to decide whether to alter the law school seal, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow charged a committee of faculty, students and an alumnus with doing so in late November. On March 4, the committee recommended to the Harvard Corporation that the symbol be eliminated. The body accepted the recommendation just 10 days later, resolving the issue in under four months.

“The Corporation agrees with your judgment and the recommendation of the committee that the Law School should have the opportunity to retire its existing shield and propose a new one,” wrote Faust and Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow William F. Lee in a March 14 letter to Minow.

Liana Henderson-Semel, a Harvard freshman, said she appreciates the speed with which Harvard responded to concerns about the law school seal and title of master. A recommendations-based approach seems more effective than one based on consensus, she said, because issues this sensitive should be resolved quickly.

Kyle McFadden, a Harvard sophomore, said allowing select members within the Harvard community to formulate recommendations that are ultimately carried out ensures that the direction of the university is determined by those in tune with campus climate.

“If the Harvard Corporation were asked to decide these issues independently, I believe a violation of Harvard’s spirit of community would occur,” McFadden said.

Though Harvard and Princeton have moved at a faster pace than Yale, it seems that their presidents — both of whom publicly endorsed the committees’ recommendations — were less involved in decision-making than Salovey has been on Yale’s three issues.

“The president had no role in the Wilson decision,” Day said. “He was involved in deciding to accept the recommendation, but he was not a formal member of the committee. He wasn’t appointed. The board appointed 10 members, and he was not one chosen.”

But Woodbridge Hall administrators insist that the pace at which Harvard and Princeton have moved should not, and will not, impact Yale’s decision-making timeline.

Despite its relatively infrequent meeting schedule and the progress of Harvard and Princeton, Highsmith said the Yale Corporation has not held any special sessions independent of scheduled meetings to discuss the naming issues.

Salovey said while forming subcommittees can be an effective approach, especially in terms of speed, Yale remains committed to a different course.

“Yale has to be Yale and needs to make its decisions in a way that is consistent with our culture,” Salovey said. “I am completely admiring the efficiency with which Princeton and Harvard made their decisions and announcements. But I think we are just on a different path at Yale, with a larger set of interrelated issues arousing stronger feelings.”

Thirty-four of 40 students surveyed said the University should learn from Harvard and Princeton’s approach to addressing naming issues. But roughly half of those surveyed, such as Sithara Rasheed GRD ’16, emphasized that Yale could absorb the best practices of its peers while crafting an approach of its own.

“We don’t have to behave exactly as they did, but the administration should be engaging with our peers on how to address these issues and learning from them,” Rasheed said.

“Yale has to be Yale and needs to make its decisions in a way that is consistent with our culture.”

—University President Peter Salovey

Snyder said the contrast in progress between Yale and its peers has highlighted a potential downside of Salovey’s more collaborative approach.

“The cost, of course, is a sense of difficulty in reaching a decision, and that cost side is underscored in people’s minds when they see other institutions moving more quickly — at some point you do need decisions,” Snyder said.

A BROADER APPROACH

Salovey’s view of the Corporation may be part of a broader approach to the presidency. He said his professional background undoubtedly influences his leadership style.

“My work as a practicing psychologist certainly allows me to be comfortable with processes that involve a lot of listening with the dynamics of a group, with trying to lead a group toward a consensus,” Salovey said.

In 2013, he established a University-wide cabinet to solicit feedback from vice presidents and professional school deans, demonstrating a penchant for increased collaboration early on.

While discussing the role of the cabinet in response to campus unrest in November, Dean of the School of Health Paul Cleary emphasized that Salovey is highly committed to conversation and inclusion.

A previous investigation by the News found that the cabinet, originally meant to bring University leaders together, was largely excluded from the development of “Toward a Better Yale” initiatives last semester. Under pressure from the Yale community and the national media, Salovey responded to student concerns in just under two weeks.

Perhaps willing to take a more independent approach when under extreme pressure, Salovey’s actions in November suggest he prefers, but does not exclusively require, widespread collaboration.

One of the initiatives established in November involved listening sessions between two Corporation members, including Marshall, and the Yale community to discuss naming issues. On the surface, their establishment made sense: the Corporation controls these issues, and listening sessions fit a larger theme of collaboration. Salovey said there was no hidden message behind the sessions. Rather, he wanted to expand the numbers of University governors who heard directly from the Yale community.

On Nov. 12, students marched on University President Peter Salovey's house, demanding change. (Kaifeng Wu, Photography Editor)

But one problem with these sessions, Wilkinson said, is that they effectively undermined Salovey’s authority. Giamatti would have never proposed such an initiative and would have actively opposed it, he added.

“[Giamatti] would have insisted the senior fellow [who hosted the session] resign,” Wilkinson said.

Chauncey explained that past presidents encouraged trustees to dine with students and hear their points of view face to face. But Corporation members never represented the administration publicly in a policy-making role, he said

Had the senior fellow hosted a conversation about naming issues in the law school auditorium under Brewster, Chauncey said the president would have quit immediately.

“The idea that a trustee was going out with the purpose of bringing back a recommendation would have been unacceptable,” he said. “There were times where trustees would do something like that on their own, and Brewster would say, ‘It’s either you or me.’ Griswold would have done the same thing; Giamatti would have done the same thing; I would have thought Levin was even tougher.”

Indeed, these sessions shed light on one potential issue resulting from consensus management: Students no longer have one clear leader to turn to  or hold accountable.

Noticing the influence Corporation members held over these three decisions, activists told the News last semester that they wanted to speak to those with real power.

“[Salovey] understands he has a responsibility to fix things and is on our side, but the problem is he doesn’t have as much power as students think he does,” said Karleh Wilson ‘16, a member of Next Yale, during the height of campus protests last semester. “He needs the support of other people who have more power — the people who pull the strings he can’t pull.”

It has thus become unclear, to some students, whether they should approach Salovey or the Corporation to weigh in on highly charged issues. The presidency and historic precedent that comes with it suggest the trail ends with Salovey, but his consensus-based approach and collaborative nature suggest that, in this instance, he is just one of 17 Corporation members with a seat at the table.

Regardless of process, Salovey strongly emphasized that he is accountable for all decisions.

“Let me be clear: I consider myself the leader of this institution,” Salovey said. “I will own all decisions, whether I made them alone or I made them in collaboration with the Corporation or if they came out of a formal vote. I would be uncomfortable with any kind of notion that I hide behind Corporation decisions. Rather, on nonroutine, long-range decision-making, I would rather use a more collaborative process, but that does not mean I take any less ownership of the outcome.”

FCK