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The pitfalls of Grand Strategy

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ON STRIKEFeature by Eric Boodman

24

4 small talkThree ConcertsNIKITA LALWANI

6 small talkThe Lucky OnesELEANOR MARSHALL

10 small talkA Pitch for PeaceTHERESA STEINMEYER

17 feature

Abandoning AfricaJANE DARBY MENTON

20 critTime to Evaluate?DAN STERN

28 profileThe New HumanistALEC JOYNER

37 personal essayTen Thousand TreesABIGAIL CARNEY

table of contents

Executive EditorDaniel Bethencourt

Managing EditorsMadeline Buxton

Sarah Maslin

Senior EditorsEdmund Downie

Amelia Urry

Design EditorsRyan Healey

Michelle KorteRebecca Sylvers

Design Sta!Allison Durkin

Jennifer LuAnnie Schweikert

Photography EditorSarah Eckinger

Copy EditorStephanie Heung

Editor in ChiefTapley Stephenson

PublisherGabriel Botelho

DAILY NEWSMAGAZINE

12THE KIDS IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUITS Feature by Joy Shan

Cover photo by Brianne BowenCover photo illustration by Sarah Eckinger

34INSIDE NEWTOWNCover story by Matthew Lloyd-Thomas

8WINTER GROWINGSmall Talk by Caroline Sydney

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

4 | Vol. XL, No. 3 | January 2013

THREE CONCERTS BY NIKITA LALWANI PHOTOS BY KATIE CRANDALL

Small Talk

NOV. 11, 1951On an unseasonably warm evening

in the late fall, Battell Chapel !lled with people waiting to hear the new Holtkamp organ. Its inaugural concert promised perennial favorites: a meditative chorale by Bach, some lively church sonatas by Mozart, an eerie melody by Couperin. As Yale’s organist, Luther Noss, struck the !rst chord, the notes originated from nowhere and everywhere, rolled down the nave and rose to the co"ered ceiling.

The organ was, in a word, magni!cent. From where Walter

Holtkamp sat in the pews, its pipes, arrayed in the chapel’s apse and north transept, looked like small silver skyscrapers that glinted in the soft light. They were organized by length

— larger, then smaller, then larger again. In theory, organs are simple: a collection of cylinders through which air is pushed to make sound. But you need hundreds of them to play all the notes in written music; in Battell, that’s 3,691 pipes on an organ weighing more than four and half tons. From the same instrument spring the shrill birdlike whistle of the half-inch metal pipe and the throaty muted harmonies

of the 9-foot wooden ones. Noss was playing the !nal

movement of Couperin’s “Organ Mass.” The notes, low and plaintive, spilled one into the next like an ocean whose waves overlap as they hit the shore. There was a crescendo into a higher register, and the melody resonated across the chapel, blanketing the space.

A few blocks away, across the street and past Cross Campus, another organ sat in the basement of Woolsey Hall. Built in 1928, the Newberry Memorial Organ was once believed to be the best organ in the world, with 12,617 pipes crafted from knot-free sugar pine and

The Story Behind the Battell Chapel Organ


tin-and-lead alloy. But this evening, no one was there; dust gathered on its keys. In the past decade or so, it had all but been forgotten.

SEPT. 2, 2012One organ is built as another

recedes from view. So it was with the Holtkamp organ, commissioned when the great Newberry fell out of favor.

By 1939, musicians no longer sought the Newberry’s lush romantic tones or its aesthetic grandeur. They yearned for the neobaroque, for the brighter and simpler instruments of Bach and his contemporaries. There was even talk of remodeling the Woolsey organ, though there were never enough funds to follow through. It was the perfect time for Holtkamp, a relatively obscure designer, to take center stage. His ideas were novel: let the pipes stand free and in the open, he said, and let us celebrate asymmetry in organ design. Above all, his motto:

“Let nothing impede the music.” For a time, the Holtkamp model

enjoyed the same popularity the Newberry once had. In 1985, when a Harvard musicologist uncovered 33 previously unknown Bach chorales in Yale’s libraries, it was Battell and not Woolsey that was selected to host the premiere. But the Holtkamp’s fame was short-lived. Now the instrument sits mostly alone at the top of a rickety

staircase, untouched except by the occasional Sunday visitor. Woolsey is back in favor, and newer instruments in Dwight Chapel and the Divinity School are considered more authentically baroque. Such is the way of things with organs.

On one recent Sunday morning, about 20 people straggled into Battell Chapel for morning service. The organ looked the same as it had 60 years ago, though it had changed too, almost imperceptibly. By late 1983, leaks from the roof had damaged the leather membranes that opened the valves beneath the pipes. The organ was taken apart, scrubbed, re!tted, re!nished. Now Andrew Schae"er, the Battell University Church organist, was playing a solemn prelude as the churchgoers found their seats and greeted one another. The piece was multilayered, as though a whole symphony orchestra were hidden beneath the grey labyrinth of pipes: the elegiac bassoon, the ethereal #ute, the rumbling horn.

There was, simultaneously, a party beginning on Old Campus, blasting dance music that sometimes overpowered the organ. When it was time for the congregation to sing, the pastor requested that everyone turn inward and project their voices as far as they could. The organ accompanied them, but the music felt strained, as though !ghting for dominance with Ke$ha and

Taylor Swift was too much for the instrument to bear. When the hymn ended, the thump-thump, thump-thump of the party remained.

NOV. 11, 2051Ask a Holtkamp loyalist, and

he’ll tell you to be patient. In a few decades, musicians and historians will once again #ock to the chapel, just as they did to Woolsey and just as they will to the countless other organs that have been worshipped and then forgotten.

This is the strong belief of Joseph Dzeda, one of two organ curators who visit the instrument regularly, checking that it is in tune and that all the pipes are in working order. Dzeda is one of a curious and dying breed, the type of man who revels in old history books, collects antique grandfather clocks and doesn’t like to throw things away. He refuses to acknowledge the cruel paradox of history: that it preserves some things and discards others. Things always come back, he says.

And so they shall. I would like to believe that the Holtkamp organ will once again draw a crowd large enough to !ll the chapel. The day will be warm and clear, the sky a brilliant blue and the sun an exuberant gold. People will crowd into the pews. As light streams through the stained glass, the University organist might warm up by playing the notes of a scale — ascending, descending, then ascending again. Then he will begin for real, music swelling through the chapel before a chorus of voices joins in, singing a hymn from that Sunday service in 2012:

“Behold, behold, I make all things new, beginning with you and starting from today.”

The Newberry Memorial Organ was once believed to be the best organ in the world. But this evening, no one was there; dust gathered on its keys. In the past decade or so, it had all but been forgotten.

small talk


THE LUCKY ONES BY ELEANOR MARSHALL ILLUSTRATION BY KAREN TIAN

Small Talk

When the Hassoon family left Baghdad for New Haven in late August, they carried little

from a house that Fatima Al Yasari, Amer Hassoon’s wife, described as “big” and “new” in tentative English. The other adjectives that might adorn the description are locked in Arabic characters and fading memories. She spoke with an unreadable smile, wistful and shy, from the worn armchair in the single story apartment on Fountain Street where she and Amer now live as refugees with their !ve children.

I !rst arrived in the Hassoon’s sparsely furnished living room about a month after they did, equipped with just a few Arabic phrases from an intro class at Yale. Fellow volunteer Justin Schuster and I were paired with them through the Yale Refugee Project, an organization that connects refugee families to student volunteers who can help them practice English and navigate life in New Haven.

The whole family had !led into the living room, as they would every week. Fatima and Mohammed, a three-month-old born just two weeks after their arrival, were quiet that day as Amer showed us certi!cates and letters of recommendation from his service in the U.S. Army in Iraq that praised his competence and dependability in terms he clearly understood, even if he couldn’t read them.

The situation was ostensibly tragic, but Saturday visits were fun: Amer joking about past presidents from Yale — Clinton he liked, Bush he didn’t — and later, when I tried (and failed) to !x the TV, pretending to be shocked by a cable. Before Halloween, Lana, a kindergartener, carved a pumpkin with a grin as wide as hers. Omar, a seventh grader, got excited about Spain’s

chances in the World Cup and raced Noor, a !fth grader with wide eyes and quick movements, to guess English vocabulary. We communicated often in a sort of charades.

I quickly grew attached to the Hassoons, though the language barrier and the fear of asking anything too painful kept us a peculiar sort of strangers, and it was weeks before I heard any more about their home in

Iraq.There was no other work in

Baghdad when the U.S. Army hired Amer in 2006. Working as a sort of handyman, he made friends with the American o"cers he met and acquired the English he needed to do his duties. The job turned out to both support the Hassoons and uproot them — it ended in an anti-American terrorist threat that forced them to apply to the United

Refugee resettlement in New Haven


Nations for refugee status.After visiting a friend in the army in

Portland, Oregon a few years ago, Amer had his sights set on moving to the Northwest, but refugees can’t choose their resettlement site, not even the country, unless they can demonstrate a tie to family or close friends. It was availability and chance that assigned the Hassoons to a rundown neighborhood in New Haven, a city that Amer is eager to leave. Their apartment was the best that New Haven’s refugee resettlement agency, Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS), could provide with resources spread among 200 relocated families each year, explained Deputy Director Kelly Hebrank.

IRIS is noti!ed two weeks, sometimes less, before each refugee is scheduled to arrive, and has just enough time to !nd housing and basic provisions for the refugee and his or her family. They meet them with an interpreter at the train station, and give them a tour and a hot home-cooked meal. The next day, without ceremony, the long process of resettlement begins: orientations on everything from the American legal system to domestic violence workshops, appointments for physical and mental health exams, enrollment in school, and English classes for four hours a day. After just a few weeks, refugees are referred to employment services and are expected to start work — often battling not only language barriers but also physical and mental handicaps and little job training, which proves especially limiting for women who have never worked outside the home. IRIS commits to covering basic needs like food, clothing and transport for about six months, until funding dries up.

“It’s a small amount of money for a short period of time. It’s a race against the clock for them to become self-su"cient,” Hebrank said.

This is how it goes for the lucky ones. Less than 1% of all refugees are resettled each year and the U.S.

accepts more applicants than all other countries combined, with an ever-increasing in#ux each year from the Middle East. The Hassoons are just seven of the 2.3 million Iraqi refugees who have settled in the U.S., second only to Afghanis, who make up almost a third of American resettlements.

“The American public has this image of Africans walking across the desert with belongings on their heads, but more and more are made up of urban refugees because they’re unsafe. Not all of them are coming from camps,” Hebrank said.

In fact, many Iraqis come from big, new homes like the Hassoons, leaving careers in the U.S. Army, or jobs as teachers or engineers, in exchange for safety. According to Hebrank, the in#ux was only ampli!ed by misinformation that started around 2008 that led many Iraqis to expect equally comfortable accommodations after resettlement.

“If they need a root canal [in Iraq], they can walk into an o"ce and get one without an appointment and for a relatively low cost. They don’t get why they have to wait four months here and it costs a thousand dollars,” Hebrank said.

Every week Amer asks us to stay longer and come back sooner. He is frustrated, almost to tears sometimes, at the slowness with which the English words come to him, and the di"culty of !nding the kind of intensive help he and his family need. To me, they are learning impossibly quickly. When Omar greets me with a !st bump and a “What’s up,” his accent fades a little more each week. He and Noor race a little faster to answer our questions

in English. We act out fewer and fewer words from their homework. Fatima and Amer are learning too, but their !rst priority is helping their children understand enough to access an education that would have been impossible back home. There is new growth here where there were ruins

in Baghdad, a place Amer once told me was “empty” and full of people who were “just tired.” It is not generalizable, but Fatima tells me she thinks America is “a country that helps people when they need it.”

At the end of the day, refugee resettlement is not a part of the story of American imperialism, and, in turn, it is not the fairytale of the American dream. Refugee resettlement is 10.5 million big, new houses that are lost to war and it is 10.5 million tiny apartments that are temporary homes — one for each resettled family. It is taking on jobs that lead to death threats. It is a free and fair education taught in an alphabet with di$erent letters. Refugee resettlement is separated families and new friendships, and it is a few people in vast and uncontrollable nations who help each other when they can — even though it is not enough.

It is the way Fatima learns to bake pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, and it is the !rst batch of hummus she makes in her new kitchen. It is the way Omar’s whole face lights upß as he spots us through the living room curtains and the friends Amer is o$ visiting in New York. It is the life Mohammed will live.

Refugee resettlement is not a part of the story of American imperialism, and it is not the fairytale of the American dream.

small talk


WINTER GROWING BY CAROLINE SYDNEY ILLUSTRATION BY ANNELISA LEINBACH

TABLE OF CONTENTS ILLUSTRATION BY KATE MCMILLAN

Small Talk

The pizza oven is closed for the season, and the workday planned for this wintry afternoon has

garnered a dismal turnout — four volunteers, myself included, made it up the hill to the Yale Farm. After spending what felt like an hour, but couldn’t have been more than 20 minutes yanking at weeds with mittened hands, the student managers huddled around the stove in the supply shed, preparing tea to warm us up.

But though the plots we overlook are brown and sad-looking, and clouds of frozen breath hover in the air between Yale Sustainable Food Project Lazarus Program Coordinator Zan Romano! ’09 and I, inside the hoop houses the winter crop is quietly thriving.

Romano! is a California native

who speaks at an accelerating pace as she packs in more and more facts and "gures related to the farm. Despite the fact that her job requires a signi"cant amount of time spent digging in the dirt, Romano! has impressively manicured "ngers (she later tells me that she did them that morning). People complain about winter-growing in Connecticut, Romano! says, but she insists, “It’s actually A., possible and B., in some ways less arduous, less di#cult.”

In the summer months, the farm runs at full throttle, with constant planting and harvesting — one crop or another is always either going in or coming out of the beds. The combination of shorter growing periods and higher yields puts a lot of pressure on the farm. On top of the extra work, there is more at

risk if the weather doesn’t cooperate or if pests cannot be controlled. Tomato blight could wipe out the whole lucrative summer crop of tomatoes, while a drought could threaten the entire harvest.

Winter-growing moves more slowly, producing smaller yields and allowing for more

control. After the majority of the farm’s beds are “put to sleep” for the winter — either covered in mulch or a cover crop that won’t be harvested, but which serves to hold the soil in place and replenish its nitrogen supply — the farm’s three hoop houses continue to yield a surprising bounty. Hoop houses are permanent metal arch-shaped structures left open most of the year, but


covered in plastic in the winter months. Each layer of plastic covering a crop

“moves” the climate 500 miles south. So, the !rst layer of plastic enclosing the hoop house in addition to the remay cloth overlay directly on the beds keeps the coldest temperature at around 20 degrees Fahrenheit — the equivalent of winter in northern Florida — without requiring any energy input aside from natural sunlight, while the considerably lower temperature outside takes care of most pests.

Because of these protective measures, the problems the farm faces are not necessarily the ones you would expect, considering the season. “Our enemy is not the cold, it’s moisture,” says Yale Farm Coordinator Jeremy Old!eld, the man in charge of the science of the whole operation. To keep mildew and mold at bay, farm workers start o" the morning by rolling up the sides of hoop houses to “vent” them, releasing any moisture accumulated overnight. They then roll them back down to trap and store enough heat to keep the crops warm through the next night.

“What you’re really looking at is this moment around 3 a.m. where everything out here is frozen and nothing in those high tunnels is frozen,” says Old!eld, gesturing at the exposed !elds below and moving his hand towards the hoop houses. He continues, personifying the nascent veggies,

“That’s allowing those guys to grow at night, and a lot of the growth that they put on is actually at night.”

Winter on the farm means salad greens and root vegetables. The hoop houses support what Old!eld describes as “a bouquet of really beautiful Asian greens and mustards.”

A few of the outdoor beds are planted with beets, carrots, leeks and onions that grow in!nitesimally each day and are harvested at intervals throughout the season in order to ensure that the farm remains consistently productive, even if not proli!c. The cold slows the growth, but rather than weakening the crop, it actually allows the produce to

develop more complexity, producing sweeter, fuller #avors that also contain more nutrients. In the case of salad greens, the color of the leaf indicates the increased level of nutrients. A vegetable grown year-round is “its full self,” says Old!eld. “The red mustard we’re selling is not just dusted with red, it’s ruby leaf.”

For the !rst time, the farm is experimenting with arti!cially heated greenhouses as well. They have rented beds to grow microgreens in Greeley Greenhouse, located across from the farm owned by the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and primarily used as a space for students to conduct research in di"erent climate conditions. Here, they are experimenting with new crops, like basil and radishes, that are rarely grown in northern winters.

CitySeed’s winter market is held just twice a month, in contrast to its popular weekly farmers market held during the rest of the year. The Yale Farm only opens their booth for one market a month. In busier seasons, every table is awash with piles of produce fresh from Connecticut farms. Since this isn’t always the case in the winter months, the Yale Farm has a little bit of an edge.

“Because they’re nice, tender, local salad greens, we can get a very good price on them,” says Romano" of the Farm’s winter produce, compared to the root-veggie leaning o"erings of the other vendors.

Throughout the season, the Yale Farm continues to produce a regular but modest output of produce and revenue. These smaller winter harvests lend themselves to partnerships with local restaurants. As the farm’s presence in New Haven has grown, so has its network of potential buyers for the winter harvests. Miya’s Sushi will often buy whatever is available, and then work it into their menu. Last year, Blue State Co"ee purchased most of the farm’s salad greens throughout the winter for salads and sandwiches sold in their co"ee shops.

Produce also stays on campus. A genetics lab has purchased two pounds

of spinach, fodder for spinachy genome analysis, every week throughout the year and will continue to do so through the winter as it pursues its research. Northern Greening, the #edgling catering company founded last April by Emma Schmidt ’15 and Hallie Meyer ’15, has partnered with the farm on a Public Health Coalition lunch this year, and will continue to do so on other events through the winter.

“We both wanted to be involved in the farm in a way that was more creating our own thing,” says Meyer. They saw a catering venture as the natural next step. Before preparing the lunch, they stopped by the farm to pick up chard, squash, carrots, garlic, leeks, beets and baby lettuces. Hours later, the girls were serving up their !rst meal of warm gingered carrot soup, roasted beets, baby lettuce salad and crostini with chard and white cheddar.

Watching Schmidt and Meyer leave the farm with ungainly armfuls of veggies, Old!eld suggested that they develop a system for a more e$cient partnership. The girls met with Old!eld late in the fall. Together, they discussed the plans for the season, allowing Schmidt and Meyer to put in requests and plan their menus around what would be available. Unlike a restaurant with a set menu, a catering company like Northern Greening has the #exibility to determine menus based on what’s available, making them a natural partner for the farm.

Just as winter is a time for slow growth for the crops on the farm, it is also a time for gradual growth of the farm itself, through partnerships that explore the #exibility of the quieter season. The respite gives the Farm caretakers a bit of time to contemplate long-term projects — for example, Romano" hopes to build more hoop house to expand the available beds for future harvests. But as with all winter developments on the farm, these plans are moving slowly.

small talk


A PITCH FOR PEACE BY THERESA STEINMEYER ILLUSTRATION BY KAREN TIAN

Small Talk

“At all times, you should be listening.” This is Micah Hendler’s ’12 advice to his

teenage choristers as they warm up their vocal cords with the English vowel sounds: “ah,” “ay,” “ee,” “oh” and “oo.” The advice is meant to improve cohesion between voices and could be given to any choir, but, to the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, it means so much more.

Con!ict around Jerusalem, an ancient metropolis that Christians, Jews and Muslims consider a holy city and a home, has existed for centuries. Religious tensions and disputes over land ownership continue to plague the region. The latest "ghting on the Gaza Strip, during eight days in November 2012, claimed six Israeli and 169 Palestinian lives.

Despite the ongoing con!ict, 30 Israeli and Palestinian teenagers meet at the Jerusalem YMCA each Monday for choir rehearsal, followed by political dialogue sessions conducted in Hebrew and Arabic. The Jerusalem Youth Chorus, founded and directed by Hendler, is in its inaugural season. These 30 students are its "rst members.

Today, they are singing a four-part a cappella arrangement of the Ysaye M. Barnwell song “Wanting Memories.” Hendler gets them started with a pitch from his pipe and gives the beat by snapping his "ngers. He asks them to practice the opening several times until they can sing it in unison.

Hendler was raised in Maryland, where he attended a Jewish school through sixth grade and

studied Hebrew. In high school, he spent summers at the Seeds of Peace International Camp for Coexistence, a three-week program in Maine that drew most of its students from the Middle East, but also included a small American delegation.

The campers sang together and discussed their perspectives on pressing political con!icts. As a “Seed,” Hendler became more open-minded about the Israeli-Palestinian con!ict and was struck by the power of music as a means of building common ground.

“Singing is the way that I am happiest, the way that I "nd friends, the way that I "nd community,” he says.

Inspired by his experience at Seeds of Peace, Hendler began to dream of starting a youth choir in the Middle East. Singing would serve as a common ground upon which Israeli and Palestinian students could bond. Upon this musical platform, they could partake in political dialogue in order to better understand each other’s perspectives and promote peacemaking.

When Hendler came to Yale, he found guidance and support for his idea from Dr. Sarah

Weiss of the Yale Music Department, who would become his academic adviser. “He was going to attempt this project against giant political odds,” says Weiss, who says she considered Hendler a “pragmatic idealist.” Still, Weiss admired Hendler’s commitment to music and the thoughtful way he was going about the project. She encouraged him to study Arabic and

helped him to plan his coursework. “Even though I was

worried about his idealism, I am not at all surprised that this is working out,” she says.

Hendler also sang with the Duke’s Men and the Whi#enpoofs, helped coordinate the International Choral Festival at Yale, and led the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life’s “Shabbat Unplugged” service. Dr. Je#rey Douma, director of the Yale Glee Club, helped Hendler hone his conducting skills.

“This is probably his destiny,” said Rabbi James Ponet, who worked with Hendler at the Slifka Center. “He loves music.”

Hendler wrote his senior thesis

“I need to make sure that the kids love the program enough to defend it, even if they are taking criticism from the community for being part of it.”


— for a double major in music and international studies — analyzing several groups’ e!orts to use music for con"ict resolution. The thesis helped him develop his own plan to found the Jerusalem Youth Chorus. In the spring of his senior year, he began an extensive networking process and sought much-needed funding. From his work in coordinating the Middle East portion of the Whi!enpoofs’ world tour the previous year, Hendler understood that founding a choir in Jerusalem would involve signi#cant groundwork, so he moved to Jerusalem in July 2012 to give himself ample time to continue his planning and networking. “I learned that I needed to expect the unexpected,” he said.

September was dedicated to auditions, and Hendler visited over a dozen schools to spread the word about his choir. Although he did not hide the choir’s peacemaking mission, Hendler encouraged students to audition with additional incentives. Participation in the choir would give students the opportunities to learn to sing and speak English, he explained. The students would be able to express themselves through concert music and music videos. Hendler also mentioned the possibility of an international tour in the summer.

Hendler was thrilled when 80 students tried out for his choir. During auditions, he evaluated students’ voice qualities and interviewed them, seeking members who would contribute positive energy to the group. Hendler also tried to gauge students’ perspectives on “the other side” to determine whether they would be open-minded about collaborating with students from the opposing political group. Prior singing experience was not required: of the 30 students selected to join the choir, only three knew how to read music.

So far, the choir has received little opposition. Only a handful of Israelis on the far political right

who Hendler consulted are skeptical

of the choir’s ability to succeed, but they have not said they are against it. Some Palestinians expressed concern to Hendler that the choir promotes “normalization” and ignores the inequality between the two societies that they believe lies at the heart of the con"ict. Still, some are supportive. “I found more support than I expected from both sides,” Hendler said.

Hendler is aware that his students may receive criticism in the future as they continue performing and drawing attention from the public. “I need to make sure that the kids love the program enough to defend it, even if they are taking criticism from the community for being part of it,” he says.

And they do love it. In rehearsal, the students applaud themselves after everything they sing. Hendler hopes that the choir will be able to tour internationally next summer. Some day, he hopes to take them to Yale.

The Jerusalem Youth Chorus sang its debut concert on Dec. 22 at the Jerusalem YMCA. On Dec.

24, the high schoolers performed again for an audience of 600. Dressed in black pants and shirts of various colors, the students stood in a close semicircle. Their eyes were focused on Hendler, who raised his arms to guide the singers through the words:

“I know a ‘please,’ a ‘thank you’ and a smile will take me far. I know that I am you and you are me and we are one. I know that who I am is numbered in each grain of sand. I know that I’ve been blessed again, and over again.”

Their con#dence was unmistakable. As the last chord faded away, the audience answered the Jerusalem Youth Chorus’ pitch for peace with loud and earnest applause.

small talk

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Vol. ##, No. # Month 20##ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

THE KIDS IN THE

GRAY FLANNEL

SUITS

BY JOY SHAN

PHOTOS BY JACOB GEIGER

AND SHARON YIN

DOES GRAND

STRATEGY LIVE UP

TO ITS REPUTATION?

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THE KIDS IN THE

GRAY FLANNEL

SUITS

America, preview your future: a classroom door swings open into a quiet hallway, and students in black business attire !le out with purpose. They hold

clipboards, laptops and leather-bound notebooks. They can speak with authority, command a wide array of knowledge and, even at this precocious stage, conduct politics with art.

For the annual “Grand Strategy” crisis simulations in December, these students, faces familiar from libraries and dining halls, assume roles of power — journalists, Cabinet o"cials and the president of the United States. The simulations mark the end of the year-long course, before a new GS class convenes in January. The latest crop of students, in particular, arrives at a time of transition in the program’s faculty. Last year witnessed not only the departure of Assistant Program Director Minh Luong after the spring semester, but also speculations about the upcoming retirement of Paul Kennedy, one of GS’s founders. Both names are absent from the 2013 instructor list. The latest turnover introduces two younger instructors, a move to recruit professors who can take over the program once the founders all retire. But, given the number of students turned away each year, GS seems to encounter little trouble keeping its image vital. Its vision has, in fact, spread to other schools — perhaps the slow origins of a new movement in higher education. It may be time, then, to assess what this vision means.

Despite the change in faculty, the newest students of GS enter an established tradition: they begin by studying the narratives of great leaders to understand the thought processes behind battles fought and governments crafted. During the summer and fall terms, they’re charged with applying such comprehensive modes of thinking to a real-world topic. Somewhere in this time, students may experience a #eeting understanding of what “grand strategy” is. But most GS students, by the time they graduate college, have little understanding of what the class set out to teach.

Should this surprise us? At the last session of GS in 2012, one student confessed before his professors and classmates that he’d completed barely any of the reading. Nobody was too surprised, new instructor Scott Boorman LAW ’78 remembers. It’s a reality of almost any class at Yale — a reason many people believe that classroom knowledge fails to transfer to life after graduation. But GS touches upon the fundamentals of what and how we learn, and the explanation for why it falls short of its lofty goal year after year may have deeper roots.

In a 2001 Atlantic Monthly cover story entitled “The Organization Kid,” journalist David Brooks — newly added to this year’s GS faculty — describes the typical student

of an elite university as having “never known anything but incredible prosperity: low unemployment and low in#ation are the normal condition; crime rates are always falling; the stock market rises.” That was Yale when GS was !rst conceived in the late ’90s. Molly Worthen ’03 PhD ’11, who wrote the biography of GS professor Charles Hill, recalls in those years a country that was “inward-looking, with


feature

only a half-conscious knowledge of something coming down the road.”

In September 2001, !ve months after the article was published, this consciousness was rendered a relic of history. “9/11 was a wake-up call for people who were too young to remember the days before the Cold War,” Worthen says. Classmates joined the military. Interest in joining the CIA surged, according to a 2001 News article.

A few years earlier, Hill, Kennedy and Gaddis had begun to craft the seminar after noticing that no American civilian university taught grand strategy. What

“grand strategy” is, precisely, remains elusive (a former student warns, “It’s not worth going down that rabbit hole”). Each professor’s background colors his or her interpretation, but the common denominator is this: a term, originally used in war, to describe the connection of all ascertainable means to achieve a long-term, usually large-scale, goal. Following 9/11, “Studies in Grand Strategy,” with only a modest turnout in its inaugural year of 2000, began to grow into the dignity of its name as student interest took o".

“Students were extremely interested in understanding a world historical event and its challenge to the world order,” says Hill.

From the beginning, then, GS’s place on campus has been closely linked to the student psyche — but the demand ignited by the altered campus mentality created new problems. As the seminar’s pro!le rose, Worthen recalls, “More students began to apply because they thought it’d be this amazing pedagogical experience that’d launch them into the stratosphere” — provided that they get in. What followed is “Grand Strategy” as it has been known in recent years, the

“campus juggernaut” (as deemed by a 2012 article in The Nation) that, one year, compelled the father of an applicant to dangle a “substantial donation” before the committee if they’d admit his child, according to a 2009 Herald post. Luong, the former program director, told The

Herald that another student sent a box of chocolates to “make the selection process more pleasant.”

But GS’s purest educational intent wasn’t to assist those students purely seeking prestige. Ted Bromund GRD ’99, a former associate director of the program overseeing GS, remembers that many students would listen to the professors in class and depend on their “inherent brilliance” to give plausible and, if they were lucky, clever responses. And yet, “It was blatantly obvious that they weren’t doing the reading,” he says. The program, Bromund says, wasn’t crafted so students could practice this “skill they already have.” These incidents signaled the larger obstacle — that the class was being embraced as an end unto itself, a “box to check” in a rubric of accomplishments.

But if GS was intended not as an end point for ambitious students, how is its curriculum meant to be applied? When he faced the question of “What are you going to do?” his senior year, Conor Crawford ’12 found himself talking with Hill about his love for pedigrees and horses. Upon graduation last year, Crawford, a former YPU president, entered a fellowship created by a sheik in Dubai that will immerse him in the world of horse breeding. His ultimate goal is to alter the regulations

surrounding horse breeding in America, and choosing to embark on a transnational training fellowship is how he interprets a core aspiration of GS: to push students to see beyond set conventions of action.

The professors intend for the applications to be open-ended, but what results is unavoidably vague — after all, how does one teach what Gaddis calls in The Cold War: a New History the ability to see “beyond complexity to simplicity”? To Hill, the di#culty of tecaching grand strategy emerged most clearly one autumn, during the Marshall policy brief presentations. This section of the syllabus acts as a practicum of sorts: students are assigned broad issues, and they must research and present solutions to these problems in a seamless narrative. According to Hill, the professors once assigned religion as a topic for a brie!ng team. When the students stood up to present,

“It just froze them,” Hill remembers. “They couldn’t speak because, to them, religion was something you shouldn’t get into.” Religion was removed from the topics assigned.

“Human learning is complicated,” says Boorman, the new

instructor. “You can learn something, but it might sink in at some



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unprecedented point.” The majority of “Grand Strategy” is con!ned to a classroom — and, as Tully McLoughlin ’10 says, learning limited to a seminar table may render historical epics into a black box. “You can study people from over 2,000 years ago, how one decision was put up to one large goal,” he says. But at the time, it’s hard to say if the leader in question even knew he or she was employing grand strategy. Some professors believe that the yearlong class isn’t enough, that most undergraduates lack the life experience needed to understand grand strategy.

One particular group of students, however, enters GS with experience

that suits the war-heavy syllabus. Ryan Shaw GRD ’10, for instance, was a cavalry o"cer and troop commander before serving in Iraq. When the class discussed the uncertainty experienced in military operations, he could recount !rsthand stories from his time in service. Chris Howell, a former Special Operations member in the Australian Army, explains that the world of the military equipped him with an awareness of tactics and operations.

“But on the ground, we often don’t understand what the higher [strategic] intent is,” he says.

For students with backgrounds like Howell’s and Shaw’s, the lessons of GS

seem to cohere in a clear, applicable way, suggesting that experience may indeed be the missing element. But it may also hint that there are aspects unique to a school like Yale that are fundamentally ill-suited to something like “Grand Strategy.” In its transition to an elite university, the program found itself in a particular culture — what Brooks in 2001 called “the achievement ethos and the calm acceptance of established order that prevails among elite students today.”

Only a few decades ago, a leadership program like GS would have stirred protest simply by its mission statement. But the student climate that once regarded authority with suspicion has, since that fabled age of unrest, “swung back the other way” in its attitude towards power, says Bromund. It has resulted in a generation perhaps “a little too respectful” of authority. The one formal protest GS has ever witnessed occurred in 2009, when the !rst Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte ’60 joined the program faculty. Fernanda Lopez ’10 organized a sit-in to protest the absence of debate about the controversy of his career: uncon!rmed allegations of war crimes. During the class, the !ve protesters walked in holding banners decrying the “elephant in the room.” Lopez says the questions students asked her were “largely innocent, like, ‘What are you protesting?’” Many were indi#erent, dismissing the allegations as things that happened too long ago to matter. A male student in the seminar approached them and demanded to know who had paid for the posters, and what organization was subsidizing or !nancing them. When he saw the protesters, a News article quotes lecturer Paul Solman as saying, “This is what we used to be like in college in the ’60s.”

The shift in our generation’s view of authority also became apparent to Worthen during a seminar she once led at another school. When the class discussed the radical social activism of

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Dorothy Day, she asked the students what causes would move them to ardent protest. “They just looked at me blankly,” Worthen recalls. The broad impression was that students still wanted to change the world — only after receiving a degree and securing a job.

The pragmatism and easy acceptance of authority of our age makes two aspects of GS’s core philosophy di!cult to reconcile. One year, a student applied to intern at a government bureau overseeing national security. He was sent a list of o!ces within the organization and instructed to choose a few that interested him. The student, Hill says, wanted a comprehensive understanding of the threats to national security — so he requested, instead, a job in the director’s o!ce. The professors push students to seek vantage points like this — to assess problems from “above-the-treeline.” But this approach of “Grand Strategy” can blur the relationship between making change and holding a position of power. In today’s cultural landscape, Bromund says, advancing to these high positions is increasingly a matter of being politically correct in speech and action. But when students are too polite to talk about sensitive topics — even those as ubiquitous as religion — it hinders the ability to discuss grand strategy in a genuine way.

In years past, the syllabus has featured the story of Lucretia. In the tale, a Roman woman is raped by an enemy

and commits suicide, becoming a martyr. “The point was to demonstrate why national character is important,” says Katie Miller ’12. The class, she remembers, talked about cultural pride but drifted nowhere near other relevant topics: the role of women, or the way national pride can alienate certain people.

“Many students have wondered audibly about the story of Lucretia,” says Boorman. When he mentioned this to a colleague, the colleague

joked that the legend is knowledge a cultured person should have, placed on the syllabus so it might later serve as conversational "ller during, say, a future ambassadors’ meeting.

The quip contained some truth. At dinners with special guests, each student gives a brief introduction of themselves and their summer accomplishments. A Q-and-A session follows. “They learn to comport themselves,” Boorman notes. Students grow conversant in an array of topics, with an emphasis on current events and strategy. He reminds me that the same basic idea is true of Yale: that, at the very least, our liberal education will enable us to hold liberate conversations on subjects familiar to an educated person.

But this ability, though a nice bene"t, is not the main thrust of a Yale education. Similarly, lessons in glibness and improvising answers aren’t the true aim of a class designed to teach students how to forge large narratives. This is why, even if each student exhausted every last resource to understand grand strategy, the design of the course wouldn’t meet them halfway. The class, in trying to push its students beyond focusing on small corners of problems, ends up teaching too early the rules of being a leader, which may later hinder true grand strategic thought.

The morning of the simulation’s "rst round, a tabloid blog goes public. One headline, attached

to a photo of the press secretary, declares, “Breaking: All Statements True if Repeated a Trillion Times.”

The exercise is out-of-character role-playing, and the students assume their roles of authority with ease. I watch as someone in the “Cabinet Room” tapes notebook paper over the classroom’s window to ensure privacy. Another Cabinet member, who’d been getting torpedoed by the mock press, ends up at my side.

“You’re not using names in this, are you?” he says. “‘Cause I’m getting fucked.”

Every announcement bears the disclaimer: “This document has been prepared for the use in the 2012 Yale Grand Strategy crisis simulation exercise. It is meant for educational purposes only.”

Much of the ideological controversy surrounding GS hinges upon the two words “educational purpose.” Jim Sleeper ’69, a Yale political science lecturer outspoken in his views on GS, worries that GS’s philosophy conscripts the humanities to promote American power overseas, a “velvet glove on an iron "st.” Instead, he says, schools like Yale must constantly engage with the question of what purpose the liberal arts should serve.

But right now, it seems that GS’s problem is not in its core pedagogical intent. GS, I’m told over and over, is fundamentally connected to the Yale experience, and a concentration of its strengths and defects. Finding a way to overcome these shortcomings would mean overcoming something in the air Yale students breathe. Whether the solution to this lies in Thucydides or The Art of War remains to be seen.


The colleague joked that the Lucretia legend is placed on the syllabus so it might later serve as conversational filler during, say, a future ambassadors’ meeting.

When the Yale Divinity School introduced African language courses into Yale’s curriculum

in the late 18th century, becoming one of the !rst American universities to cast its eye towards the continent, scholars could not have anticipated how two centuries of globalization would knit the globe more closely together. Technology transformed trans-oceanic travel from a lengthy, grueling, and dangerous process into a brief plane ride. Social media opened lines of communication that 18th-century academics could never have imagined possible. The rapidly globalizing world has generated a new emphasis on a global education. Yet last November, Africanists assembled in Luce Hall with questions about Yale’s commitment to the study of Africa throughout the University. Standing before faculty and students, Kamari Clarke, the chair of Yale’s Council of African Studies, demanded, “What would it take to put African Studies back on the map?”

As one of the !rst American universities to include Africa in its mainstream curriculum, Yale has a rich legacy in the !eld. Since 1985, the Council of African Studies, a subsidiary body of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, has coordinated the study of Africa at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Council has traditionally been a small but robust part of Yale, but budget

cuts and faculty attrition have recently thrown the department into a state of uncertainty. Despite growing student demand, those who came to Yale with the intention of studying Africa have been left echoing Clarke’s question and wondering when and if the University will listen.

For over 25 years, the Council of African Studies netted signi!cant external funding, particularly from

the federal Title VI program, which was originally authorized in the National Defense of Education Act of 1958. But in May 2011, the federal government slashed funding for the Title VI and Fulbright Hays programs — which o"er students and universities !nancial support for foreign language education

— by nearly $50 million. The loss in federal funding came on the heels of an internal announcement by University President Richard Levin and Provost Peter Salovey, requesting that academic and nonacademic units in the University trim spending to reduce the $68 million budget gap remaining from Yale’s !nancial struggles in the 2008 recession, further limiting African Studies’ budget.

In the 2012-13 school year, new problems emerged with the unanticipated departure of three prominent faculty members and Africanists: Ato Onoma, Christopher Blattman, and Mike McGovern — the Council’s former director of Graduate

The fate of African StudiesBY JANE DARBY MENTONPHOTO BY JACOB GEIGER

ABANDONING AFRICA


Studies — all of whom took positions at other universities. Though Council members say these departures re#ect the natural ebb and #ow of academic opportunities, the simultaneous departure of three prominent Africanists struck a blow to Yale’s African Studies program and sharply reduced the number of Africa-based courses.

Faculty members in the Council of African Studies characterized the University’s interest in the African Studies program as tepid; prior to 2011’s federal budget cuts, the Council struggled with administrators and faculty to accrue additional University funding and encourage the hiring of Africanists across departments. Since it is a council, rather than a department, African Studies lacks its own faculty positions and, in turn, a formal appointment process, making faculty replacement more complex. To compensate for the departure of three Africanists, the council must lobby search and recruiting committees across departments to recruit Africanists to !ll


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positions. In 2011’s town hall meeting, Council member and history professor Bob Harms said, “Our cooperation with the University always came from us raking in money with Title VI.”

Frustrated by the intransigence, longtime Council chair Kamari Clarke decided to step down at the end of 2012. Though she will continue to be involved with the Council, as she has been for the past 14 years, Clarke said she felt the program had been “neglected” by the University. “There are very few places on campus that have Africa as its focus,” Clarke said. “I have done an incredible amount of work and I didn’t think that the administration was really playing their role in living out promises to help to rebuild and it’s a lot of work.”

The task of leading the Council and minimizing the gap made by his colleague’s departure now lies

with newly minted chair Christopher Udry, an Economics professor who has studied African microeconomic development. His o!ce re"ects the focus of his research — colorful posters and cloths decorate his walls, including a vibrant scene from Burkina Faso that Udry purchased when a coup stranded him in Ouagadougou and a large kente cloth from Ghana, where Udry conducts much of his research. In a frame behind his desk is a small collection of bulky iron rings, an old form of currency in Benin and a gift from a former graduate student who studied West Africa’s economic history.

Udry, who was soccer teammates with one of the professors who left, lamented the “idiosyncratic” departure of his three

colleagues, though he said that turnover and movement of prominent academics from one university to another is natural and even healthy for a major research institution. Udry acknowledged that the replacement process has proven di!cult, but he cited rapidly expanding #elds such as global health, human rights law and philosophy, and his own #eld, economics, as areas of the University that are placing a renewed emphasis on Africa.

His predecessor faced similar di!culties. Prior to the economic downturn, Clarke said she sought donors to endow faculty positions in African Studies, but the economic state of the University complicated the process. In light of larger budgetary issues, she said, “African Studies just fell to the wayside.”

When students a!liated with the Council blue-booked this year, they found their course

options limited, compelling them to seek more innovative approaches to African Studies. Clarke said that many students have designed independent projects to enhance their study where the University does not have a designated class. Still, Clarke expressed frustration that the University has placed the onus of its internationalizing e$orts on countries such as India, Singapore, and China, while only passively emphasizing African studies. “The larger problem was a political one … political will and priority,” she said. “If we are going to say we are truly an international university, our curriculum needs to re"ect that.”

There are currently three students

in their second year of the two-year graduate program and eight in their #rst year. Though all are Africanists, students’ interests vary in subject and region — from dance to human rights, South Africa to Egypt, and everything in between.

For #rst-year students like Helinna Ayalew GRD ’14, Yale’s appeal has not been tarnished by recent changes. Ayalew, who is studying violent con"ict in the horn of Africa, expressed mostly positive sentiments about the program’s small size, open curriculum, and University resources. But she said the struggles facing the program have been unnerving. The loss of faculty a$ected the courses that #rst-years could take, as many core African Studies courses, including Ato Onoma’s “Identities,” were no longer available. “It was kind of an unpleasant surprise; we all got accepted, then a bunch of people for various reasons decided to leave,” Ayalew said.

Still, Ayalew sees a positive side to the challenges. These limitations have also compelled her to take advantage of other parts of the University such as the Political Science department and law school. “We can really learn from each other, bounce ideas o$ each other,” she said. “I engage with perspectives I wouldn’t think of at all.”

Yet while #rst-year students came into an already altered program, the changes had a di$erent e$ect

on the smaller class of second-year students, many of whom took classes from the departed faculty members. Klara Wojtkowska GRD ’13 is a violinist by training who grew up in both the United States and Poland. Wojtkowska spent a year traveling the world on a Watson Fellowship after graduation from music school, and her travels brought her to South Africa, where she found a large population of Polish people. Though she began researching the Polish diaspora, she soon found herself drawn to South African theater performances and ultimately chose to pursue a graduate degree in African

“The larger problem was a political one … political will and priority. If we are going to say we are truly an international university, our curriculum needs to reflect that.”

Theater. Similar to Ayalew, Wojtkowska was drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of Yale’s program, particularly the opportunity to take theater classes. All of the second-year students, including Wojtkowska, received full funding for their studies at Yale, which Wojtkowska cited as a factor that helped her overcome doubts about attending graduate school in a !eld so di"erent from her prior education.

Like many of her peers who lack a clear-cut path of study within the existing African Studies courses, Wojtkowska has pieced together her concentration on Zimbabwean theater from across the University, drawing on Yale’s Theater Studies department and courses taught by council members, such as those on African language. One of Wojtkowska’s favorite courses at Yale was Ato Onoma’s “Identities.” As someone raised in di"erent countries, the course, which examined the way that people self-organize, helped her grapple with di#cult parts of her own identity. Onoma helped guide her thesis research, putting her into contact with other people in the !eld. Of the recent changes to the Council, Onoma’s departure was the biggest blow to Wojtkowska’s education.

Though Wojtkowska has had a largely positive experience in the Council, she noted that it has become more di#cult for students in the program to !nd people whose interests align with their own, and !nancial constraints might hamper students’ ability for hands-on research abroad. The class below her, though signi!cantly larger, had fewer resources, both !nancial and personal, to help them in their own academic path.

Justin Scott GRD ’13, another second-year student who took Onoma’s course, expressed concern about the direction of the program. Scott, who, like Wojtkowska, received full funding for his years at Yale, is conducting research on how social media networking tools are used in Africa. Some of his work examines the phenomenon of “couch sur!ng,” a topic he chose after a summer

doing research in Nigeria. Scott, who came to the Council

intending to focus on development economics, described his time in Nigeria as transformative. Through Yale’s program, he studied two African languages, including Yoruba, which allowed him to connect with the people and culture on a deeper level. Of course, it was not always smooth. “One time I was accidently referring to my penis when I was trying to refer to a car,” he laughingly confessed. “But the Yoruba I did know broke down barriers right away … I think people respected the fact that I took the time to learn their language, that I wasn’t asking them questions without taking the time to learn about their culture and who they were.”

Earlier this semester budgetary constraints forced the Council to eliminate Igbo, one of the languages spoken in Nigeria. Though the Council has strategized alternative ways to o"er the language, including Skype courses with other universities, Scott said he felt losing another language would be a huge blow to the program. He remained positive about his personal experiences with the Council, but raised concerns about Yale’s lack of focus on a !eld of study that is becoming increasingly relevant. “The marginalization of Africa writ large in terms of how we talk about the world is kind of echoed here,” Scott said. “I don’t understand how a university with $16 billion can’t !nd the money to fund projects which, I think, are quite important.”

Prior to the !nancial crisis, former chair Kamari Clarke said the Council was preparing to expand

and meet the growing demand for more courses on Africa. However, !nancial considerations sidelined these plans, and the Council has yet to recover.

Council chair Christopher Udry remains optimistic. “One of the biggest changes that has happened since I’ve been here is that there are a lot more people in aggregate interested in topics having to do with Africa,” Udry said. Research conducted by Council members remains at the top of its !eld

— Rod McIntosh from Yale’s Peabody Museum was a principal excavator of Jenne-Jeno, the oldest city in sub-Saharan Africa; History professor Daniel Magaziner wrote the de!nitive work on the intellectual history of South Africa; Kamari Clarke recently received a $260,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study human rights and justice in countries formerly ruled by warlords.

But despite these successes, the future of Yale’s Council on African Studies remains uncertain. For those involved with the Council, the study of Africa is fundamentally intertwined with Yale’s mission to internationalize its curriculum, and Council members and students have sought innovative ways to continue the caliber of its program and support student interest in the face of di#culties. “The continent is relevant and as we progress into what I assume will be a very di#cult century

… the entire landscape of how people live, where they live, is all going to be shifting,” Scott said. “To exclude Africa academically in any way is, I think, shooting yourself in the foot.”


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“I don’t understand how a university with $16 billion can’t find the money to fund projects which, I think, are quite important.”

T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E

T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E


“Our current system is an embarrassment and must be improved.”

These were the words of Charles Bailyn, the then-chairman of Yale College’s Teaching and Learning Committee, as they were written in a November 2002 Yale Daily News column. The embarrassing “system” to which Bailyn referred was Yale College’s student course evaluation program, and the News column was his position paper in support of reform.

In 2002 and prior, on the last

meeting of each class, a professor would distribute paper surveys — “Yale College Course Improvement Forms,” they were called — asking students for their opinions of the course. Invariably, though, the majority of the students’ responses would be hurried and haphazard — scribbles and snap judgments made by college kids eager to !nish their semester. It was all so bad, Bailyn said, that an “otherwise routine” accreditation visit had ended in “pointed” criticism of the student course evaluation program.

In the face of the evaluations’ criticism and ine"ectiveness, in the 1997–’98 school year Bailyn’s committee launched a search for alternatives. And by 2002, they had found a solution:

an online course evaluation program that would ask students to review their class experiences before they could access their semester grade. The system would give students more time to re#ect and assess. Response rate to the evaluations would increase, testing showed, as would the quality of the written comments. As an added bonus, with easier distribution, students would be able to review course evaluations from prior years before !nalizing their schedules.

At a faculty meeting in November 2002, the online course evaluation plan passed with unanimous approval by a faculty optimistic and con!dent about its returns. Evaluation response rates reached 86 percent in the !rst semester,

T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E

T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E T I M E T O E V A L U A T E

TIME TO EVALUATE

BY DAN STERNILLUSTRATION BY

ELISE WILCOX

ARE COURSE EVALS DUE FOR A RETHINK?

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and Bailyn was back in the News, lauding its early success: “I’m very pleased that students took this as seriously as they did,” he said.

We’re now over 10 years removed from that faculty meeting, and though we are still using that

same online course evaluation system, professors are no longer optimistic nor con!dent about the returns. Given that students are still required to face the forms before viewing their grades, the response rate remains as high as anyone could have promised — 95 percent, this past fall — but professors have found that students are actually writing less online than they did on the old forms.

“Frankly, I wish that students took a little more time with the written comments,” history professor John Gaddis said. “It seems like part of the focus of these online evaluations is numerical — having students rate the courses as ‘Excellent’ or ‘Very Good’ — but I don’t really have any use for those numbers. In the older system, if you wanted to make a comment, there was really no option but to write out your thoughts or suggestions; now, when you read the written comments, it just says, ‘Best course ever!’ or ‘Awesome!’”

Professor Holly Rushmeier, chair of the Department of Computer Science, goes so far as to say that, in her experience, “the quantitative elements actually distract from the comments.”

And just how brief are these student comments? Of nine students interviewed for this article, just one reported taking more than 10 minutes to complete the eight-question surveys. Five students reported taking as little time as two minutes or less on each.

A random sampling of 250 student evaluations suggests most Yalies share a similar approach. Eight of the nine interviewed students reported spending the most time on the question,

“How would you summarize [course name] for a fellow student? Would you recommend [course name] to another student? Why or why not?”

But of the sampling of 250 responses to that question, less than one-third contained more than 50 words, and just 19 responses contained more than 100 words.

It’s no surprise, then, that many professors no longer agree with Bailyn’s 2003 pleasure in “how seriously” the students took the change. As English professor Lawrence Manley said,

“Students just don’t put enough time into the forms for them to be helpful.”

It may be that the course suppliers — the professors — aren’t !nding the online evaluations informative,

but, as it turns out, the consumers — Yale students — are. All nine students interviewed characterized the evaluations as at least somewhat helpful to them, and all reported consulting evaluations when making decisions during shopping period.

But does student satisfaction with the course evaluations mean that they’re working? In other words, if students are happily using the ratings and comments to craft ideal schedules — a feature that wasn’t even possible when paper evals were submitted to professors in manila envelopes — is the new online system doing its job, after all?

According to Gabriel Olszewski, the University registrar, to answer that question means to clarify the intended audience of the evaluations. The Registrar’s O"ce, Olszewski says, administers the system and distributes the evaluations, but doesn’t tell students who’s reading them.

“The students that I’ve talked to,” Olszewski said, “have their own interests at heart — to give information that would help other students make better decisions about courses. That

might be a very di#erent perspective on the evaluations than a faculty member has, or a very di#erent perspective than a department has.” And maybe it is this di#erence, he suggests, that lies behind some of the problems with the current evaluation system.

Dean of Yale College Mary Miller, for one, acknowledges this idea, but holds strong that a primary service of course evaluations is still to teachers, and to the placement of teaching at the center of the undergraduate experience.

“The idea of the course evaluations as they were [10 years ago] was to have students give their feedback on what we could do to improve the courses

— what the best parts were, what the worst parts were, other ideas,” Miller said. “It’s become less explicit with the online evaluations … [but] the deans and departments are all activists for the importance of our undergraduate teaching, and for everyone being a part of that.”

Bailyn expressed something similar in an interview with the News in 2006, stating that the most important role of evaluations was to give students a way to communicate directly with their instructors.

But has this basic goal of course

evaluations — so obviously the purpose of the old paper forms — been forgotten by the students?

Professor Murray Biggs, who has been critical of the system since its introduction, thinks so: “The course evaluations are now really for the bene!t — or not — of the students, and it’s the students who should comment on their value.”

Maybe the words of one such student, Tess McCann ’15, best capture the disconnect: “Does anyone else —

“Does anyone else — other than students — read the course evals? Seriously, I don’t even know.”

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other than the students — read the course evals? Seriously — I don’t even know.”

For teachers and departments, the course evaluation system is supposed to be used in service

of improving students’ experiences in courses. One way to gauge the success of the system, then, is to look at whether or not courses based on students’ evaluations are actually improving from year to year.

Course evaluations ask students to report their overall assessment of a course on a !ve-point scale (where 1=poor, 2=below average, 3=good, 4=very good, and 5=excellent). With a large enough sample size, improvement

of a course can be tracked by its change in average score over successive years. This is an unscienti!c process, but it can give a rough idea of whether or not a particular course is, in the students’ eyes, getting better each time it’s o"ered.

Evidence suggests that most courses are not. Of a random sampling of 30 courses, none had average student ratings improve by more than 3 percent between the 2009 and 2011 o"erings of the course. This isn’t conclusive of anything, but it does suggest that student opinions of classes aren’t improving with repeated o"erings of the course — at least not on a university-wide scale.

These 30 courses are just a sampling, but work done by brothers Harry Yu ’14 and Peter Xu ’14 can give us a better

macro-picture. Yu and Xu, developers of a new statistics-based “blue-booking” site called YalePlus Bluebook, have analyzed the totality of the available evaluations. Their data shows that the average assessment rating of Yale courses has shown no trend over the past three years — increasing and decreasing only in negligible amounts. Not only are repeat courses not improving from year to year; the quality of the curriculum, as a whole, isn’t either.

One partial explanation would seem to come from a 2007 letter from Bailyn to the News. He argued that many introductory courses would

“receive bad evaluations despite outstanding teaching performances.” But in fact, evaluations reveal that the same content can be met with wildly di"erent reactions when taught by two di"erent professors. If a teacher gets better, a course can, with the same content, get higher student marks. But, with students providing limited speci!c feedback and few suggestions on their evaluations, courses aren’t measurably improving.

Looking to get the speci!c feedback that the online system isn’t giving them, some professors are turning

to alternative forms of course evaluation.Physics professors Richard Casten

and Sidney Cahn have developed one innovative approach. They don’t just rely on the scarce suggestions from the online evaluations: rather, they supplement them with conversational evaluations at the mid-term.

“On the forms, lots of students write too little,” Casten said. “More helpful for us is what we do about halfway through the semester, when we ask for two or three students from each section of the lab to meet with us after class and give us their impressions of the course

— of what’s good, what’s bad, what can be improved.”

Casten says that he informs the students that their feedback should be candid, and that nothing they say will count against their grade in the course.

THE LEMON TREEWhy do I come here, at night,when the shadows are darkest?

The shade of the lemon tree is as black as water,but I can see moonlight shiningon the rock wall and the apple orchard,

and on the yard and !eld imprinted by my hands,which sweated,and tossed lupine seeds into the chopped earth.

Shrugging away dirt, #owers sprout in the yard,and, in the !eld, vegetables.Both are translucent,but the vegetables are taller.

The well beyond the rock wallis black, narrow and deep.Inside, the darkness of compressed matter.

When I drop the rope, the bucket falls:in the spring, a short distance,in August, forever.

I will stay here until morning doves begin rootingfor half-rotten apples, the sky in the east is gray —until each tomato plant is visible in its row,unrolling fresh tendrils,tied to a stick with white string.

— Nikola Champlin

In fact, he tells them, they should focus more on what’s gone wrong than what’s gone right. Students make “tons of suggestions,” he says, such as “more demos, shorter labs and a better idea of what might be put on the exam.” And after hearing their students’ suggestions, the !rst time they had one of these meetings, Casten and Cahn decided to implement many of them.

The result? The numerical student assessments for their physics labs have improved by almost 10 percent — more than double the improvement of any of the evaluations sampled in the random study.

Paul Wasserman ’14, too, has experience with classes that have had alternative forms of student course evaluation. Wasserman recalls feeling in one class that the professor “wasn’t doing enough to draw upon the readings.” So when, in the middle of the course, that professor asked the students what could be improved, Wasserman made a concrete, implementable suggestion. “For the rest of the semester, the class drew more on the readings: it was a change that really helped — made it feel like it was worthwhile to read the books.” It’s unclear to Wasserman, though, whether he would have made that suggestion on a course evaluation form: “I probably spend two minutes

— maybe three — on one of those evaluations,” he said.

But are there also ways that the course evaluations could be improved even within the framework of our current online model?

One proposal would be the elimination of what Olszewski calls

“grade-shielding,” the policy of hiding grades until students have either completed or speci!cally “declined to complete” the evaluations.

Grade-shielding has its disadvantages — namely that, as Manley notes, “most students are just eager to see their grades, and so don’t spend much time individualizing their responses or being speci!c.” But there are also ostensible bene!ts of grade-shielding: the policy,

Olszewski says, was conceived of as a way to raise low response rates. And on that metric, it’s done its job: response rates have stayed consistently high.

Is that wholly a good thing, though? The concerns about response quality have been detailed above; they bear out the predictions of Biggs, whose 2002 letter to the News noted that, with fewer returns, “the students who respond are those with something to say and wanting to say it.”

And, in some cases, the quantity of responses can be counterproductive.

“For the big lecture courses, there are so many responses that it’s hard to read them all,” Gaddis said.

Another idea might be to amend or add to the questions that the current forms are asking. At Stanford University, course evaluations ask students to rate their teachers from 1–5 by dozens of very speci!c criteria. Then, when teachers receive their evaluations, they can see just where they rank in categories such as “setting clear objectives for the course” and “explaining clearly how students would be evaluated.” After all the data is mined and forwarded to faculty, Stanford’s Center for Teaching

and Learning releases a bulletin o"ering advice for teachers looking to implement teaching changes in response to their evaluations.

Stanford’s system doesn’t necessitate longer comments or more e"ort on the students’ end. Instead, it focuses on setting out smart, numerically scored metrics for evaluation more useful than the reductive “overall assessment of the course.” Yale’s questions, by comparison, seem vague and underdeveloped.

After 10 years, we can say that our current system isn’t “an embarrassment,” as Charles Bailyn called the old one: students are using the online course evaluations to their own bene!t, aggregating reviews to help with course selection. But the written comments are still hurried, still haphazard — the snap judgments, once made by college kids eager to !nish their semester, are now made by college kids eager to see their grades. If we want feedback that helps teachers as much as students, then Yale’s course evaluation system may need still to “be improved.”

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SHOPPING LIST

Jeans on the chair, phone unplugged, my little house to keep.

Coming home from that place he likes, he says, To the left a bit; leave your shirt on.Through the window, the maple leavesslick and oily. The streetlights #icker on. I watch him raise the camera, adjust things.

Depth of !eld, rule of thirds: he sets me in the lower corner. Finds his leading line.

I will not be the kind who thinks in bed.In the morning light enters — delicate thing —to rest on his neck, that collarbone, or merelypass through him …

— Samuel Huber


The night before her !nal physics exam, Amy Bernier-Desmarais was arrested for the third time. At eight o’clock

on May 23, 2012, she had met up with 500 other protesters on the lawn in front of the Parliament Building in Québec City. They

spent half an hour under those white stone walls, regrouping and talking about possible routes. Then they began to march through the cobbled streets of Old Québec, singing, chanting, banging on drums and waving signs. It was a friendly

BY ERIC BOODMANPHOTOS BY JÉRÉMIE DUBÉ-LAVIGNE

WHY QUÉBÉCOIS STUDENTS TOOK TO THE STREETSON STRIKE

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protest — there were students who could not have been over 15, parents pushing toddlers in strollers. But at the corner of St-Vallier, the protesters at the back heard the sounds of engines and boots. They were being followed by the riot squad.

To most of us, Old Québec is a tourist attraction, a network of cobbled streets for pleasant strolls and ice cream cones. But Amy and her friends had come to see it di!erently. To them, it was a battle"eld, full of tricks and traps, a place you had to know how to escape. “We decided that the protest should "nish in the Upper City, because it’s easier to get away than it is in the narrow streets of the Lower City,” she told me.

The protesters quickened their pace. This too was a tactic: they wanted to make it harder for the riot police to encircle them. They were practically running now. The parents with young children had slipped away, not wanting their toddlers pelted with rubber bullets or tear-gassed. The rest of the protesters continued marching towards the Upper City, turning onto the commercial strip of Rue St-Jean.

Afterwards, they would regret that decision. “It’s very closed o!,” Amy said of the street. Very quickly, they found themselves trapped between two walls of riot shields blocking the street in both directions. Behind each shield was a member of the riot police, anonymous beneath a visor and layers of black padding, truncheon at the ready.

To most American college students, this situation sounds completely foreign. Yet for students in the

Canadian province of Québec, Amy’s experience was a regular occurrence this past spring and summer. Hundreds of protests took over the streets of Montreal, Canada’s second-largest city, and smaller protests erupted on campuses throughout the province. Some were peaceful family-friendly a!airs, like the marches Amy attended in Québec City, but there were also nightly protests that got violent: Molotov

cocktails were thrown, bank windows were shattered with bricks, students were beaten up by the police. There were nude protests, feminist protests, protests in which everyone banged on pots and pans. Banks and o#ce towers were blockaded, picket lines formed around schools. So many people donned the red-felt square — the symbol of the student movement — that there was a shortage of red felt.

We are talking about protests of more than 250,000 people. We are talking about 3,000 protesters arrested in the span of a few months. And we are talking about over 300,000 postsecondary students on strike, out of 485,000.

At the root of all this was a rise in the price of education. Since 2007, a tuition freeze had meant that universities couldn’t charge more than CA$2,168 a year (Canadian dollars and U.S. dollars are roughly equivalent). Now, the Québécois government wanted to raise that amount by almost 75 percent, a proposed hike that would take e!ect over the next "ve years, increasing tuition to CA$3,793 by 2017.

To those of us who are paying up to $50,000 a year to attend private American universities, an additional CA$1,600 may seem negligible. It is exactly this mentality that Québécois student activists want to avoid. They view every tuition hike as an attack on the Québécois ideal, born in the ’60s, of a European-style social democracy — and as a step towards the student debt crisis in the United States. As Amy put it, “The government announced that there would be a tuition hike, and we didn’t agree. Education is not a piece of merchandise. It shouldn’t have a price.

Knowledge is something to be shared.”

Amy is the least threatening person I know. She’s "ve feet tall and can often be found with her Girl

Scout troop watching birds and insects. Her ukulele is seldom far behind, tucked under one arm or strapped to her back in a ukulele case that is more duct tape than case. Like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, her instrument has political writing on it: “Pour La Gratuité Scolaire” (“For Free School”) along with the dates of each of her arrests in permanent marker. But it has none of Guthrie’s abrasiveness — Guthrie’s instrument threatened to “kill facists”; Amy’s just asks for free school. Her voice too is unthreatening: high-pitched, with a tinkle of a laugh.

But she can’t laugh away the fact that her arrests were traumatic. The police kept the protesters trapped in a small perimeter downtown for two hours, from 10:00 p.m. until midnight, as they arrested them one by one. Some of the protesters, prohibited from leaving “the mousetrap,” had to urinate squatting by a church wall. Once the protesters

were identi"ed and handcu!ed with plastic ties, they were loaded onto buses and driven out to the Colisée Pepsi, a stadium to the northwest of the Québec City center. To kill time, each bus driver went for a spin, exploring the outer reaches of Québec City with their vehicle full of handcu!ed protesters. It was 3:00 a.m. before the protesters were "nally charged with a "ne of CA$494 each and dropped o! on deserted suburban streets.

By now, Amy had been arrested three times, incurred CA$1,482 in "nes, failed a physics exam, and become a

By now, Amy had been arrested three times, incurred CA$1,482 in fines, failed a physics exam, and become a familiar face at the police station.

WHY QUÉBÉCOIS STUDENTS TOOK TO THE STREETS

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familiar face at the police station. She had developed a fear of the police (six months later, she still ducks out of sight whenever a cruiser appears). But on June 19, she was back at City Hall, protesting again.

Amy is just one among a group of my friends whose lives became inextricably linked to the student

movement last year. I was a freshman at Yale, keeping intermittent contact with my friends back home in Montreal and in Québec City. When I heard whispers of a student strike, I didn’t think much of it — strikes of all kinds are a part of life in Québec. But I took notice when, in March 2012, a mild-mannered friend told me he had begun to support vandalism as a means of political expression. I had a wild image of my opera-going friend, his faced covered with a balaclava, heaving bricks through the glass walls of a bank. He assured me that he himself was breaking nothing, but I remained shocked that he supported those who were.

“I didn’t support vandalism at the beginning,” he explained, the connection on my cellphone crackling as I paced in the Vanderbilt courtyard. “But given that nothing else has worked … At least now, the government is willing to negotiate.” He had been spending every day of the previous few weeks picketing in front of Université de Montréal. I had been spending every day running from class to class, too busy reading poetry to read the newspaper.

I couldn’t help dwelling on this discrepancy. We had gone to the same high school, read the same books, had similar upbringings. Back then, we had both taken a polite interest in politics, but the nuts and bolts of political change didn’t bother us much. So how was it that he was now obsessed with student politics while I was immersed in Proust?

To the English-speaking, non-Québécois reader, Québécois student politics can be a quagmire

of comical acronyms and strange

misnomers. It is good to know, for example, that the Liberal Party of Québec is not all that liberal — in fact, it can be quite conservative. Also good to know is that, although some households came to view the ASSÉ, the FEUQ and the FECQ as dirty words, they have nothing to do with your behind or what you do in bed. Rather, they are province-wide student associations; the ASSÉ is the most radical, preaching strikes and economic disruption, while the FEUQ and the FECQ prefer lobbying. Most postsecondary student unions in the province of Québec are member organizations of either the ASSÉ or the FEUQ/FECQ.

I learned these distinctions from Jérémie Bédard-Wien, an old friend who is now a spokesman for the ASSÉ. He is a tall, handsome fellow who looks unmistakably like a European intellectual, with thick-rimmed glasses, wispy hair and an angular chin darkened with the hint of a beard. Although he grew up speaking French, his English is impeccable, which comes in handy because being an ASSÉ spokesman means being careful with words. In our interviews, he reminded me that he could only express ideas and opinions that the group has settled on as a whole.

Jérémie met me on a typically dismal

day at the beginning of January in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, the working-class neighborhood of Montreal where the ASSÉ has its o!ce on the third "oor of an old textile factory. Down a hallway, past artists’ studios and unmarked doors, what looks like a "ock of red butter"ies (but is actually a mass of red-felt squares) hangs over the entrance to the ASSÉ’s headquarters.

Inside, seated underneath a poster for a “dishonorary doctorate” awarded to Québec’s minister of education, I ask Jérémie how the student movement swept up Québec this past year. Part of the credit, Jérémie tells me, goes to the students of the ’60s.

During that time, the province was reinventing itself, and reinventing its education system. In 1967, the government opened CEGEPs — postsecondary schools for either pre-university or technical programs. “They were created with a clear goal in mind,” says Jérémie, “which was increasing accessibility to higher education.” But a year after the creation of CEGEPs, students faced a vacuum: there weren’t enough seats in university classrooms for all the students who would soon be pouring out of CEGEPs, and private university tuition was too expensive. So the students went on strike.

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That !rst student strike in 1968 sparked the creation of a network of public universities across the province, and an improvement in the province’s scholarship system.

Despite the power of this historical precedent, when the ASSÉ went on strike in 2007 to protest the hike that brought tuition to its current level, they failed. “The preparation wasn’t done, the demands were too ambitious,” Jérémie explained. Goaded by the memory of that failure, the ASSÉ vowed they would be ready for the next time.

Fast forward to 2010. The not-so-Liberal government announces that there will be another tuition hike. They don’t give any numbers, but they say it will begin in the fall of 2012. “So we had two years to react,” Jérémie said. “This was a gift from God.”

Over the next two years, Jérémie spent less and less time thinking about his schoolwork, focusing instead on organizing a general strike. That meant crisscrossing the province to visit as many schools as possible. It meant standing at campus gates and pavilion doors, speaking with students before classes, after classes, at breaks and during lunch hours.

“We had to talk to every student on every single campus,” Jérémie said. He handed out the ASSÉ’s newspaper — “Ultimatum” — to each student, using it as an excuse to strike up a conversation. He asked them what they thought about the tuition hike, and addressed their fears of going on strike. He talked about his own hopes and fears for the education system. He walked them through the ASSÉ’s strategy for the next few months.

“We start with very small actions,” said Jérémie. “Calling up your member of parliament, signing petitions, sending letters. Over time, you build that up. You go on demonstrations, and they get progressively larger. You go on one-day strikes, which become three-day strikes. It’s building up towards our goal, in terms of tactics — the general strike.”

The more conservative student federations were also working against

the tuition hike. At !rst the FEUQ and the FECQ were opposed to a general strike, but before long, they joined the ASSÉ in calling for one. On November 10, 2011, 30,000 members of the three organizations marched to the o"ces of Liberal Premier Jean Charest to demand that the proposed hike be canceled.

“This is something that is lost in the current age of Internet politics — actually talking to people,” said Jérémie. He feels that this year’s general strike and protest movement, while building on Québec’s history of student politics, grew out of the thousands of one-on-one conversations he and other activists had on campuses from Abitibi to Matane.

Once activists ignited the spark with their newspapers and conversations, a di#erent force helped fan the $ames: the sense of belonging that comes with being part of a mass movement. This is not to say that the protesters did not believe in the cause. Rather, trying to prevent the tuition hike made people band together who, under most circumstances, would not be caught dead in the same room. Young anarchists mingled with the old guard of Québécois sovereigntists; Liberal families marched beside ardent communists. The movement was unmistakably multifarious: some people thought tuition should stay frozen, while others opted to get rid of it altogether. Others viewed tuition as the tip of the iceberg, and were protesting against corruption in the provincial government. But they all agreed to oppose the tuition hike. By marching together, chanting slogans and banging drums, they created an electric feeling of community that ran through the city of Montreal.

I could see this mix of history, campaigning and community euphoria at work one evening last June in

northeastern Montreal. It was rainy out, but at 8 p.m., residents began to emerge from their apartments and congregate on the street corners. All of them held some kind of kitchenware — spoons, forks, bowls, pots, cymbal-like pan-tops,

and gong-like woks — and they were creating a neighborhood symphony of clangs and crashes. Music students were playing a complex Afro-Cuban beat on a mailbox. An old lady banged her teapot slowly, making it ring like a seaside bell. There was a toddler with a frying pan, and his father, slapping together two metal spatulas.

This was one of the famous “pot-and-pan protests,” which emerged as a response to a law passed by the Liberal government to crack down on protests. The mood was undeniably festive. Between clangs, one woman told me that it brought her back to her student days in the ’60s. “It is so nice to see young people involved in politics,” she said in her heavy Québécois accent.

I was banging away at my own saucepan, but I couldn’t help worrying that I shouldn’t be there at all. I had just spent freshman year at one of the most elitist universities around, reading Wordsworth and Flaubert, far from the militant missives of my friends and unsure what to think of them. I liked the idea of making university education accessible to everyone, but had my choice of school already spoken louder than whatever noise I could make with my spoon and pan?

By the time the newly elected government canceled the tuition hike in September 2012 and the protests in Québec began to die down, Amy had failed two classes and been arrested four times. Other friends had risked their semesters to picket outside schools. Jérémie had come close to dropping out in his e#ort to mobilize the province’s students. That was not the kind of education I was getting during my !rst year at Yale. For a second, I wondered how high the price of a college education would soar in the U.S. before students refused to pay. What would it take for a mass protest movement to catch on? But then I looked up at the drummers and bangers and clangers around me, and lost myself in the noise.


On a sunny weekday afternoon last October, Gary Tomlinson, the new director of Yale’s

Whitney Humanities Center, was singing Verdi in Stoeckel Hall. This was not a performance, exactly; Tomlinson is an opera expert, not an opera singer, and he was sitting at an upright piano in a second-story classroom, squinting at sheet music over his glasses. The students in his “Opera” seminar took notes, and a young Violetta quavered, paused, on the projector screen.

As Tomlinson played and sang, in a capable tenor that occasionally !ipped upward into a surprisingly strong falsetto, he paused every few moments to translate “La Traviata”’s Italian or to ask

Socratic questions: “Anyone remember when, precisely, we hear that melody again? And why does it come back?” A student answered the "rst question, but not the second. “It comes back” — Tomlinson jumped up from the piano — “to motivate the repetition of the cabaletta, remember that?” He crossed the room to stand right in front of the students, moving his tall, wiry frame with the spry energy of an Irish jigger, or a Monty Python-era John Cleese. “Its repetition is motivated by the hearing of ‘Alfredo!’ He interjects right in the middle of her double aria! Whether it’s heard in her imagination or otherwise. But it also comes back.” Smiling and gesticulating forcefully, he pressed on.

The students’ pens !ew across their notebooks, hurrying to catch up.

There were only "ve pens, though, and apart from me, only "ve students in the room that afternoon to witness Tomlinson’s pedagogical show. The enrollment number for “The History of Opera” was well below expectations, as many such numbers have been for traditional humanities courses, at Yale and elsewhere, over the past decade. Tomlinson knows this, but he is not in the least a traditional humanist, and as he steps into his new role at the Whitney, he is working to demonstrate that the humanities are not only more vital than ever: they are growing.

THENEW

HUMANISTBY ALEC JOYNER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NATALIE WOLFF


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Tomlinson’s ideas about the humanities have emerged over the course of an unusually varied

academic career. Nominally, he’s a musicologist — “unimpeachable,” in the words of Dudley Andrew, chair of Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature, “in Renaissance, and post-Renaissance, music.” In practice, though, he has become much more than a scholar of the Western musical canon.

As his career has progressed, Tomlinson’s home turf has sprawled ever outward: his research, exploring topics such as Renaissance ideas about music and magic, or the role of music in encounters between European and indigenous American civilizations, has taken him well beyond the customary preoccupations and methods of musicology. This year, with his assumption of the directorship of the Whitney, he !nds himself presiding over an institution whose mandate — facilitating interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations, and championing humanistic scholarship — corresponds closely to his penchant for broad intellectual investigation.

I !rst met Tomlinson as a student in the class he taught last spring — a class very di"erent from the one I visited in October. Called “Music and Human Evolution,” it was last year’s iteration of the Whitney’s Shulman Seminar in Science and the Humanities, and it asked a seemingly basic question: why and how have human beings developed the capacity to make music?

The simplest questions, of course, are often the most complicated, and the hardest to resolve. Whereas “Opera” covered about 500 years, “Music and Human Evolution” covered about 500,000. And though Tomlinson knows the answers to countless little questions about the history of opera, he didn’t have an answer to the one big one about the evolution of music so much as he had a radical way of thinking about it: a tour across disciplines from archaeology to cognitive science, with only occasional references to harmonic music theory or

standard accounts of music history.In the online student evaluations of

the class, the word “fascinating” appears several times, but so does “frustrating,” not to mention “speculative” and “(too) interdisciplinary.” Tomlinson himself, however, views the seminar’s trajectory as one of real achievement; for him, it was “tremendously fertile and exciting,” precisely the kind of compendious intellectual journey that humanities scholars can take when they put their notions of disciplinary boundaries — and their notions of what “interdisciplinary” even means — aside.

“We’re in a period when whole new disciplines — whole new ways of thinking about whole ranges of knowledge — are emerging,” he told me. “What would it be like if Yale University had a ‘Department of Emergence Studies’? This would cut across so many areas, right? What would it be like for there to be a ‘Department of Scalar Studies’? These would be neodisciplines rather than just interdisciplines.” He stopped himself, and expressed his doubts about neodisciplines being embraced at Yale, especially within humanities departments. But then again, he said, “the Whitney Humanities Center might be the sort of place that can help.”

As an undergraduate in the early 1970s at Dartmouth College, Tomlinson was a biochemistry

major. It was only in his third year, after !nding himself “riveted” by a music history class, that he switched over to music. (He !rst tried to double-major, naturally.) From Dartmouth he went on to a doctoral program in music history at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked just as closely with William Bouwsma, a historian, and Louise Clubb, a scholar of comparative literature, as he did with anyone you could call a musicologist.

Over his many years at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was hired straight out of Berkeley and where he was eventually appointed Annenberg

Professor in the Humanities and chair of the Department of Music, he continued to push back against the narrow traditionalism of what he calls “internalist chronology” — “this composer did this, and this composer was in#uenced by the !rst one” — and against what he refers to as “the silo mentality” of academic departments: high walls hiding “hermetically sealed mysteries that you have to be initiates in order to understand.” His work led to a 1988 MacArthur “genius” grant, three more books and a role in the planning of the interdisciplinary Penn Humanities Forum in the late 1990s.

In early 2010 — just as he was about to assume the directorship of the Penn Forum, in fact — Yale’s Humanities Program came calling. His credentials in musicology were plenty strong, but the fact that “he asks some of the biggest questions,” as Andrew, the Comparative Literature chair, put it, is what attracted Yale’s attention. He, in turn, was attracted to Yale by the Whitney: a silo for silo-haters and an older, more established cousin to the Penn Forum. And at Penn, by 2010, he had reached a point where his life, as he put it, “needed a new cast of characters.”

That fall, he arrived at Yale as a visiting professor. Before his !rst year was up, he was granted tenure, and one afternoon last spring, late in his second year, he found himself face to face with Richard Levin.

“Rick saw me at a lecture and said, ‘Can I meet with you sometime soon?’ And I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to meet with you.’ And I went in curious as to what this is about, and he said, ‘Would you like to run the Whitney Humanities Center?’”

The Whitney Humanities Center was founded in February 1981, after the reallocation of a

donation from John Hay Whitney ’26 that was originally intended for two new residential colleges; the money was used in part to !nance Yale’s acquisition of the Trinity Parish Church House


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on Wall Street, which has remained the Whitney’s home to this day. Peter Brooks, the Whitney’s founding director and now a Sterling Professor Emeritus of comparative literature, said at a Whitney event last year that A. Bartlett Giamatti, University president from 1978 to 1986, felt a humanities center would address “concerns like departmentalization, the lack of an intellectual community and the University becoming increasingly atomized and privatized.” “My own thinking,” Brooks added, “was most in!uenced by a remark that Yale was an exceptional place for students, but did little for faculty.”

Brooks served as director from 1981 to 1991, and again from 1996 to 2001, and under his leadership, the Whitney became a hub of interdepartmental interactions among the faculty members appointed to its two-year fellowships. Very few Whitney programs, though, made any attempt to engage undergraduates. It was only with the arrival in 2001 of María Rosa Menocal, a scholar of medieval literature and culture, that the Whitney committed to a true expansion of its o"erings, targeting students as well as a much wider range of faculty members.

Menocal transformed the Whitney. She turned the fellows lounge into an art gallery, out#tted the auditorium for state-of-the-art 35 mm #lm projection, and, perhaps most importantly, made the Whitney the new home of Directed Studies and the humanities major.

Over the later years of her tenure, Menocal also oversaw the creation of what has become the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities. The annual Shulman Seminar, which features an associated series of public guest lectures, was established #rst, in 2007. The new Franke Program, directed by biology and ornithology professor Richard Prum, has taken in the Shulman Seminar, and added “University Seminars” for the faculty and events for the public, such as a lecture last November by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

When Menocal, early last year, told the University administration that she would be stepping down, they made a rare decision to give an important administrative position to a newcomer to Yale. Tomlinson is still, as he put it to me, “in the midst of a steep learning curve.” Given his relatively limited knowledge of Yale’s academic and social culture at the faculty and the student level, and given all of Menocal’s radical expansions, his contribution as director will likely have less to do with attracting whole new populations to the Whitney, and more to do with changing the nature of the conversations the Whitney allows and encourages people at Yale to have. Prum

praised Tomlinson’s ability to make his colleagues consider “the philosophy and the history and the nature” of their disciplines, and Andrew said he thinks Tomlinson, as the Whitney’s director, “will bring in deeper debates about what the humanities are.”

“What I see as my role,” Tomlinson told me, “is to marshal conversations that can begin to uncover some of the unspoken premises about the humanities — the ways in which they’re wrong, the ways in which they’re shallow, and the truths that they bring to the table, too. We need to get down to those foundations, and we need to think about them, hard.”

It will be a challenge for Tomlinson, in his new role, to engage as much of the Yale community as possible

in the kinds of re!ective conversations that he #nds so important, but it will be even harder to share and spread his own intellectual values and beliefs. He has risen to a position more in!uential than any he has previously held, but if he wants to “marshal” open dialogue, he will have to take care not to dominate every conversation.

Tomlinson’s interviews with me gave him a rare chance to wax philosophical, and he spent a great deal of time explaining the “set of methods and experiences and approaches that are,” he believes, “distinctive of the humanities.” Among other ideas, he described “Verstehen,” or “understanding,” a concept associated with the German sociologist Max Weber: “a broad and deep and fuzzy kind of knowledge opposed to some more empirical kind.” Ideas like Verstehen tend to get Tomlinson excited, and when he got to “fuzzy knowledge,” his mouth seemed barely able to keep up with the rapid machinations of his mind.

“Now there are many people who see the fuzziness as, of course, the disaster of the humanities. Humanists don’t see it as a disaster; they see it as an opportunity, an opportunity to dig more deeply into interpretive understanding. ... An interpretive, uh uh, fuzzy, um, uh ... ‘thick descriptive’ approach to interpreting the past is something di"erent than most social sciences approaches would be. ‘Thick description’ is a famous, a famous phrase...”

And on he went. In the same

“My role is to marshal conversations ... about the humanities — the ways in which they’re shallow, and the truths that they bring to the table, too. We need to get down to those foundations, and we need to think about them, hard.”


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conversation, though, he recognized that waxing philosophical isn’t in the Whitney director’s job description. “It’s not my role to talk and talk,” he said. “It’s my role to bring people together to talk in productive ways.”

With the Whitney fellows, this is hardly a challenge; the main di!culty he faces at their meetings is treading an acceptable line between passive facilitator and active participant. At a lunch I attended, scholars as diverse as Tamar Gendler, chair of the Department of Philosophy; Fred Strebeigh, a senior lecturer in the Department of English; and Claudine Ang, an assistant professor in humanities at Yale-NUS College, listened to Joel Baden, assistant professor of Old Testament at the Divinity School, give a talk on the representation of human disability in the Bible. When Baden "nished, they peppered him with questions: Gendler asked about infant mortality rates in the era of the Bible’s composition; Strebeigh asked about the utility of literary-critical techniques in biblical study. Tomlinson sat to one side; he looked pleased, but also a bit reticent. He looked, in short, like a newly promoted boss, content but uncertain as to how to act around his former peers.

In time, that dilemma will likely fade. The larger problem Tomlinson faces is the matter of getting students, especially undergraduates, to consider the kinds of questions the fellows discuss every week, and the even larger problem is the matter of getting students to show up at the Whitney in the "rst place. Somewhat distressingly for him, it is not a matter of programming so much as one of simple geography: many undergraduates don’t care to make the walk to 53 Wall St., and many more don’t even know where the Whitney is. Menocal brought in Directed Studies, art exhibits, events with big-name guests, and movies in 35 mm most nights of the week. She built it; it’s now up to Tomlinson to get students to come.

This semester is one of great opportunity and great uncertainty for Tomlinson, coming as it does

on the heels of great upheaval. In mid-October, soon after the commencement of his directorial duties and soon before the announcement that Peter Salovey would be the next University President, María Rosa Menocal died of melanoma at the age of 59. Menocal had directed the Whitney for over a decade and taught at Yale for 16 years, and her passing, as Tomlinson put it, “cast a pall” over the Whitney sta# and fellows; it leaves him without a valued colleague and adviser, and it leaves the Yale humanities community at large without one of its most experienced and engaged leaders.

Tomlinson is teaching another seminar this semester. He is calling it “Science and Human Sciences”; if it seems like he is deliberately avoiding a title like “Science and Humanities,” or, alternatively, “Everything,” he can be forgiven — he wants very badly to attract a substantial and talented crop of students. “Music and Human Evolution” had an enrollment of only 11, and this course won’t have the bene"t of the Shulman bells and whistles. It will be a test of sorts as to whether Tomlinson’s new, broad, science-friendly brand of humanities class — humanistic in approach more strictly than in subject — raises more excitement in the consciousness of our pragmatic generation than did the oldfangled likes

of “Opera.”“The humanities,” he said to me,

“can be reduced to, oh, ‘understanding what it means to be human.’ But one has to remember that that is a grossly reductive statement about what the humanities are up to, and one also has to remember that if one takes seriously what it is to be human, it’s a lifelong project.” A humanities education, he believes, prepares students not only to be scholars, but to be “citizens in the world, who gauge the di#erences that they come up against in subtle and nuanced ways [and] act morally in the midst of the choices that they make.”

He paused after saying this, and looked up. “What could be more important, "nally?” he said. “What could be more pragmatic?”

Putting your humanities center in the middle of your university’s campus might be more pragmatic, but, after all, though Tomlinson has moved many people with his mind and his tongue, he isn’t capable of moving buildings (or silos for that matter). His secular church is where it is, and he’s there to stay, waiting for a congregation that’s not afraid to get fuzzy.


SEPT. 22I’ve always been a tree admirer, lover,

protector, kisser, crier. The !rst time I drank too much, I cried for hours about the Earth and its need for trees. Yet despite this fervor, I had never studied tree species alongside my geologist brother, never helped my father plant on our 10-acre !eld in our corn farm town that is so small it has no speed limit, never learned how to thin unnatural new-growth forests like my master-gardener mother so they’d be healthy and not choked with too many trees that grew all at once. Somehow I didn’t plant a tree until New Haven. I had never felt a need to curate nature back home, where there was so much of it.

I am a new intern for the Urban Resources Initiative, a program that partners with the city to help plant 10,000 trees in New Haven by 2015, the philosophy being that the planting of trees strengthens the community when members of the community plant them. This season, 10 of us, mostly School of Forestry & Environmental Studies students, will be working with a team of either high schoolers or ex-o"enders.

Today I wake up at half past six. Once I reach the planting site, I meet the six high schoolers I’ll be working with for the next two months. I also meet my work partner, Gina Blankenship, an FES student who in the past worked for a company called Lumberjack, lived in South America, and hiked alone for months through the Minnesota wilderness as a tree surveyor. Each week, we’ll be teaching the high schoolers a lesson on urban forestry. Today we focus on how urban trees reduce crime rates, improve personal happiness (and mental health), strengthen relationships with neighbors, better air quality and respiratory health, bolster property values and save cities hundreds of

thousands of dollars through storm-water management. I’m a little nervous that despite only learning how to plant trees last week, I’ll now be teaching it. It goes well though. At the end of each tree we stand around it and chant, “Trees need people, people need trees!” Gina and I both realize that it’s sappy, but also that it’s true.

SEPT. 29We !nish a beautiful hole, our third

of the day, only to have a homeowner come out yelling that the American linden is supposed to go in front of the right corner of the house, not under the left where its growth would clearly be blocked by the beautiful tree in his front yard — he’d already had a tree there that had died. We needed to !ll the hole and dig a new one. It’s worth noting here that URI trees are a free service for homeowners, paid for by the city, Yale and other donors. However, he becomes gracious and even tips us, once we, without so much as a complaint, dig an entirely new hole and plant the tree.

OCT. 6 We learn how to pickax when a root

mass is impassable. Roots can be wide, as wide as a big tree’s branches, and they’re also extremely strong, even once the tree has been removed and the central stump has been ground up by the city. This means that you can dig down a foot or so, and still hit a whole mess of roots. We try to wait at least three years after a tree has been taken out, so the roots can begin decomposing, but the three years have not always passed. I would much rather dig a hole through concrete or asphalt than a root system; you can take a sledgehammer or a pickax to those materials and they break up easily. You can take turns pickaxing a root system for an hour and have nothing but a

swelling purple bruise on the ball of your hand and a few massive pieces of root you’ve removed to show for it.

It is so hot so that we all have layers of sweat between our hands and the rubber of our gloves, and all of our four planting sites have webs of unbreakable roots. My supervisor and I are digging deliriously when a beautiful woman in white pants and yellow sandals waltzes over from across the street balancing a jug of sweet iced tea and a tray of cups. We, with faces and clothes coated in dirt, fall at her feet in gratitude.

The fourth tree is unplantable, and we have to load it onto the truck at the end of the day. But by the end — after a freak thunderstorm hits, and we unload these 300-pound trees as well as the buckets and buckets of rock and root as we get continually more dripping wet and muddy — by the end, I walk into my suite smiling.

OCT. 13I realize I like waking up early, the

solitary 30-minute walk to the URI o#ce all the way at the top of Science Hill. I even decide to stop washing my work pants. I tell my suite mates that this was some pact I’d made with one of my coworkers, but really it seems a shame to wash the dirt o" when the very next week I’ll always be sitting in a freshly dug hole, legs wedged between a wall of dirt and a tree we are pulling and twisting into perfect uprightness.

OCT. 20 This day is admittedly particularly

di#cult, with two of our team members missing and a mess of roots several feet wide and hours of pickaxing strong. At the end of it, one of the high schoolers (we’ll call him Peter) says, “I hate trees.” I wonder if I am missing something. The thing is, the whole point of the program

TEN THOUSAND TREES BY ABIGAIL CARNEY PHOTO BY KATHERINE ROMANS

Personal Essay


personal essay

is that he’s supposed to love trees now. It’s been a hard day, but a good day, too. We planted three trees even with two of our team missing. We planted the third tree so quickly and smoothly that I felt we might’ve been an Olympic team of synchronized swimmers. Gina and I laugh, and tell him, “No, you don’t hate trees.” I’m a little worried that I’ve been too idealistic about the all-importance of having nature everywhere.

OCT. 27In the previous weekly Wednesday

team meeting, we were informed that a third member of a team won’t be making it today, and maybe not for the rest of the season due to disciplinary issues. Today we are blessed with the addition of a high school student from another team now that we are down to two from our original !ve. We !nish our trees early and walk over to a nearby park where we look at and talk about trees, the one all crooked and bent backwards, the one tapped for a maple sugar line, the one almost hiding the crouching deer.

NOV. 3We practice for next week, our last

one, when the high schoolers will lead eighth-graders in tree planting, passing on the skills they’ve perfected to the New Haven community. Gina and I pretend to be clueless eighth-graders to practice. Remembering some of Peter’s complaints, Gina starts jokingly whining about how planting trees was hard and she didn’t want to do it anymore, and I cut in that I was bored and that I was hungry, and look at my nails! Peter smiles knowingly and tells us that you have to keep going even when you don’t want to, that you need to get the tree in the ground. I realize that he isn’t entirely humoring us. Despite the occasional tree-hating comment, he’d shown up every day and worked harder as the season went on, even though he was the youngest kid on the team and probably weighed about 80 pounds.

NOV. 10Peter’s tree is somehow the one that

doesn’t get dropped in the hole straight,

and so we all have to sit around it and pull and pull at the rope and burlap and wire basket, and tilt it, and shovel dirt in, and then the tree is too high, and still not straight, so we pull at it some more. It’s frustrating, but eventually there is a Cornelian dogwood in the ground. That afternoon we and the other high school crews go back to the o"ce to re#ect on the season and eat pizza. When the session leader asks Peter what he’s learned that season, he says, “Nothing.” I laugh. Maybe he really didn’t learn anything. But today he taught others how to plant, and then planted a tree on a street where most of the trees were dead or dying, a street where none of the houses had spigots or nice vegetable gardens. Maybe Peter is sometimes a tree hater, but that’s probably better than being a tree lover who doesn’t know what that means. He’s probably more impressive than someone who’s always taken trees for granted.

INSIDENEWTOWN

BY MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMASPHOTOS BY BRIANNE BOWEN


To get to Newtown, Connecticut, drive on Interstate 95 to Bridgeport

and take Exit 27A onto Route 25, then go straight for 20 miles. The three-lane highway cuts through the deep New England woods before narrowing to two lanes. The speed limit goes from 55 to 40 and the road narrows to one lane, dipping and turning through the Connecticut hills as it squeezes its tra!c past dark ponds, liquor stores and volunteer "re engines.

After passing through Trumbull and Monroe, the road comes to a hill that rises steeply for a quarter mile. At the top, in the middle of the road between the Episcopal Church and a public library is a #agpole "rst raised in 1876 and rising at least 75 feet above the road.

On the left, just past the #agpole, is the Newtown General Store, founded in 1847. The store provides the town with sandwiches, co$ee, homemade jams and knickknacks. It is where teenagers go for lunch and where lifelong residents spot each other while buying their morning co$ee. Inside the general store are two tables by the windows and two behind the counter, which is an enormous square covered in cookies and candies. At the back is a place to order sandwiches, some of which are named after places in town — the Queen Street, the Sandy Hook.

Just to the right of the general store is Edmond Town Hall, constructed in the 1930s, made of brick with marble columns in the center. Across the street from the town hall is the Honan Funeral Home.

At the #agpole, a left turn takes the road down a steep hill and past The Newtown Bee, the town paper owned by the same family since its founding in 1877. The road continues past two shopping centers and the St. Rose of Lima Church, rounds a corner and

passes a sign welcoming visitors to Sandy Hook, a neighborhood and commercial area. It rolls by the Sandy Hook Diner and the Toy Tree before intersecting Washington Avenue. Continuing straight, up over a slight rise, a small one-story "rehouse stands across from a wooden sign welcoming visitors to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

On Dec. 14, the drive into Newtown changed.

The #agpole by the public library was pulled down to half-mast. Two large electronic signs parked at the bottom of a hill, facing tra!c in both directions, #ashed, “Thanks to our heroes, God bless our angels,” 24 hours a day. Trumbull, Monroe and Newtown residents lit luminaries and placed them in their front yards, in town greens or just along the road. Sometimes they lit 26, sometimes 27, rarely 28.

Parents and teachers asked each other and themselves how to talk to kids about the 20 six- and seven-year-olds laying slain by three, four, seven, 11 hollow-point bullets on the #oor of a classroom in Fair"eld County.

A vigil at Newtown High School came two days after the shooting. The night before, President Obama announced he would attend, and any news channels yet to descend upon Newtown packed their bags and drove those 20 miles on Route 25.

Waiting in line for the vigil in the cold mist outside of Newtown

High School on that Sunday night, Tamara and Christopher Spalvieri recounted the previous two days. Media trucks parked on their front lawn and knocked on their door in search of an interview while their ninth-grade son was home alone. “It’s overwhelming,” Tamara said.

They lived six blocks from the school, and their children, now in middle school and ninth grade, had attended Sandy Hook. They knew school psychologist Mary Sherlach, who died with principal Dawn Hochsprung while running toward the gunman, and Victoria Soto, who died shielding her students from the bullets. They remembered Sandy Hook as a community school that hosted Halloween parties and a harvest festival.

Christopher told me he’d been trying to pray all day, but had been prevented by a bomb threat at their church, St. Rose of Lima, by someone taking advantage of the in#ux of mourners.

The town was saturated with media, but their thoughts already ran to when the media would leave. It seemed that part of them wanted the media gone so they could grieve away from the cameras, but another part

worried that once the media left, Newtown would be forgotten.

Tom Mahoney, a lifelong resident of Sandy Hook whose grandson previously attended the school and who volunteered there every Monday, stood next to the Spalvieris. He knew all of those killed.

They seemed in a daze, tossed suddenly into at once a deeply

At the back is a place to order sandwiches, some of which are named after places in town – the Queen Street, the Sandy Hook.

“IT’S OVERWHELMING”

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personal tragedy and a national debate. All three, in suggesting a ban on semi-automatic weapons, were more certain about the right way forward for the nation than their community. As for the future of Newtown, they were unsure.

“We’ll come though it,” Tom said. “But it’s not quite going to be the same anymore.”

Few spoke in the general store that week. A sign on the old co!ee machine informed residents that the co!ee was free, donated each day by a di!erent American — on Dec. 19 the donor was the Floor Supply and Equipment Co. from Gardena, Calif., while a large basket of candy next to the register was donated by a woman named Theresa from Newman, Ga. Teenagers from the high school and home from college sat at the tables and looked out the window, unable to stomach the Sandy Hook sandwich as they looked at the lines outside the Honan Funeral Home across the street. Customers took complimentary copies of The Newtown Bee, in which a front-page editorial suggested the town was already on its way to healing and would refuse to allow the tragedy to de"ne it.

The people of Newtown, narcotized by grief, walked through the store slowly. Beyond quiet words of reassurance and hugs, they seemed unsure of what to do with themselves. “This is the "rst time I’ve been out of the house,” one woman told a shopkeeper six days after the shooting. For a week, beyond attending funerals, there was little to be done.

In the following days, the circle around Newtown in which the #ags still hung limply at half-mast grew ever smaller. People, more people all the time, came to leave things at the memorials that sprung up throughout the town in the "rst week. On the Saturday eight days after the shooting, men and women from New York, New Jersey and the rest of Connecticut, o! work and for the "rst time able to make the drive to that oft-forgotten corner of Fair"eld County, left notes, candles, "gurines of the Madonna, wooden crosses carved with their own hands and teddy bears. Thousands of teddy bears of every variety. Some had names. Some came in boxes. Some were pink and small, others white and large.

A group of students from Red Lake, Minn., where in 2005 a student killed nine at his high school, came to provide support. Eight years ago, students from Columbine had come to them as well. A woman handed out slices of homemade apple pie in front of the town hall. Therapy dogs came, too. It rained incessantly, and the town hall struggled to shake the smell of wet golden retriever.

At the memorial closest to the school six days after the shooting, at night and long after the out-of-towners had headed home, a mother and her "ve-year-old son wandered through the Christmas trees donated anonymously and now covered in notes and ornaments. The multicolored lights strung over the "rehouse, lighted before Christmas became a time of mourning, provided a somber light. While the mother looked down at the names of the boys and girls her son had gone to school with, the boy, dressed in a "re"ghter out"t, swung around the poles of the tents that sheltered the memorial from a coming storm. After "ve minutes, the mother reached over to the boy, took his hand and began the walk up the hill.

“So bad people go to hell, right?” he asked her. “And good people go to heaven?”

“That’s right.”Ideas normally reserved for "fth-graders,

or even adults, have been thrust upon those in "rst grade.

Wind and rain slapped the half-masted #ag at the top of the hill on the morning of Friday, Dec. 21, one week after the shooting. At 8 a.m. it seemed the sun was yet to rise. A media team of four from Boston ran into the general store, pants and hair drenched, to get co!ee and breakfast while waiting for Governor Malloy to arrive for a moment of silence. The woman at the register said the co!ee was still free. When the cameraman tried to pay and said uncomfortably, “But we’re not from here,” the woman replied almost in a whisper, “Don’t worry.” Neither looked the other in the eye.

The cameraman brought the co!ee and four egg and bacon sandwiches to a table by the window. The three male technicians, wearing jeans, #annel and waterproof jackets, and the female reporter, wearing a pantsuit under a red windbreaker, said

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nothing to each other as they chewed on the sandwiches. They looked out across the street through the rain to the Honan Funeral Home, where in the days past boys who will not need to shave for 10 years lined up to say goodbye to their friends.

An hour later the governor arrived and greeted families in the dimly lit lobby of the town hall. Some families cried openly, others stood stoic. By then, most had buried their dead. Then at 9:30 a.m., the governor, along with Newtown First Selectwoman Pat Llodra and the families. stepped outside and into the glare of cameras on the sidewalk. As the wind and rain battered the families, the bells of Trinity Episcopal Church rang 27 times, and the nation hurried to the task of forgetting.

Later that morning, Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s top lobbyist, told the nation, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” But Shannon Doherty, a lifelong Newtown resident who attended Sandy Hook told me three days later, “He’s not talking to us. We’re not his audience.”

As I spoke to Shannon just inside the door of his store – Wishing Well Gifts, which he owns with his wife Tamara — the sun was setting outside and the !oodlights around the memorial were beginning to turn on. He looked out the window while speaking, subject to the same daze that still hovered over the town. He told me about why 26 were dead, most of their bodies destroyed by at least three bullets. The AR-15 Bushmaster, which Adam Lanza used that day to kill 26, is essentially the same gun as the M-16, which was designed in 1963 to kill as many humans as quickly as possible in the jungles of Vietnam.

Shannon paused for a moment, stood back, looked at the ground and shook his head before speaking again. The rounds were hollow-point bullets, which are prohibited internationally from military use but are widely available for American civilians. When a hollow-point bullet hits the body, especially when "red from a Bushmaster at supersonic speeds, it mushrooms, tearing

everything in its path to shreds. When six-year-old Noah Pozner was shot 11 times with hollow-point bullets, there was nothing left.

“Enough of this bullshit,” Shannon said. Mental health care is an important discussion, he noted, but “in the meantime can we stop killing babies? Ban the fucking Bushmaster.”

When Shannon said the word “babies,” I was reminded of everything I had learned about the slain children: Benjamin Wheeler’s love of lighthouses, Jack Pinto’s obsession with the Giants, the fact that Noah Pozner loved tacos so much he wanted to become a taco factory manager. Maybe it is this innocence that will prompt us to change, the notion that the dead led short lives free of hatred, free of despair; the size of the co#ns at 20 premature funerals; the fact that those co#ns held victims whose last days had been spent not worrying about paying the mortgage, but rather thinking about frogs, dance recitals and tacos.

Tamara Doherty told me that the days following the shooting felt like Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray movie in which he relives the same day over and over. It feels like Groundhog Day not just for the people of Newtown, but for the people of this country who nevertheless refuse to be angry for longer than two weeks that the same scene has been replayed in Newtown as in Aurora, Colo.; Blacksburg, Va.; Littleton, Colo.; Tucson, Ariz. and hundreds of other towns across America. It feels like Groundhog Day because we keep killing each other and we keep forgetting.

One week after the shooting, on the evening of Friday, Dec. 21, 2,500 Newtown residents gathered on the "elds of the abandoned campus of Fair"eld Hills Hospital to light candles and remember. Unlike previous vigils, reporters were nowhere to be seen. After that morning’s moment of silence, the media vans parked at the town hall had headed back down Route 25.

The people of Newtown welcomed the disappearance of media vans from their front yards and reporters from the Starbucks

“CAN WE STOP KILLING BABIES?”

“ALL OF A SUDDEN YOU START GETTING PANIC ATTACKS”

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on Church Hill Road, but did so cautiously. “We want the media out,” Sarah Farris, a college student who organized the Friday night vigil, said. “But we don’t want to be forgotten. We don’t want to be alone.”

Yet more than one month later, the embrace of a nation has lifted because of mere inattentiveness, while Newtown is still there.

The way forward is uncertain. Newtown residents all stress the resilience of this community of 28,000. But according to Neil Rattan, a Connecticut clinical psychologist specializing in trauma, as a town attempts to re-establish order there is a quiescent period of “building feelings of desperation.” Withdrawal and isolation, as well as increased drug and alcohol use — symptoms of broader emotional chaos — begin to surface within family units in the weeks after a tragedy. Children close to the incident act out more and perform worse in school.

For those closest to the tragedy — the ones most likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder — symptoms are unlikely to appear for as long as two years after the traumatic event. But the onset of the symptoms is not slow at all — “It’s the kind of thing that can come on you pretty quickly,” Rattan says. “All of a sudden you’re having panic attacks. All of a sudden you have moderate to severe depression.” Anything can trigger the emergence of symptoms: a commercial, a classroom.

The necessary counseling for Newtown is made all the more complicated by the ages of the survivors. Counseling is built upon the idea of meshing cognition and emotion, a capability 6-year olds lack. Therefore, Rattan says, parents and teachers should not push surviving children to talk about the tragedy, but should instead wait for them to open up, gradually providing more therapeutic opportunities and delving deeper into the horrors of December 14 as they grow older.

According to Rattan, the only way to make any dent in the trauma endured by teachers, janitors, !rst responders and students is to develop a highly organized counseling system that not only provides long-term counseling, but also trains teachers and parents how to e"ectively talk to the surviving children as they mature. The system needs to include mental health professionals willing to make a long-term commitment to the town. “This is not the job for newcomers,” Rattan says.

The 10 minutes of gun!re and ensuing hours of uncertainty — as parents waited in that !rehouse for their children and children waited for their friends — will replay perpetually and compulsively in the minds of the people of Sandy Hook for the better part of a century, ingraining December 14, 2012 into the fabric of Newtown’s identity.

On a door of a house on Church Hill Road, right before the road bends into Sandy Hook, a sign in late December read “12/14, Never Forget,” not unlike the signs that hung on doors in this part of New England in the weeks after September 11. As the weeks wear on, Sandy Hook, Newtown and perhaps this nation will be faced with a question: Is December 14 Newtown’s September 11? September 11 changed the way we perceive our nation and ourselves. To Americans who lived through it, things were one way when we woke up on that clear Tuesday morning and fundamentally di"erent when we woke up the next. And so the people of Newtown are faced with what is at heart the same question that this nation, 11 years ago, answered so unambiguously: Is the Newtown, Connecticut of December 15 the same place as the Newtown, Connecticut of December 13?

When Pat Llodra told the 2,500 assembled in the cold at that Friday night vigil, “We will prevail,” what she meant to tell them was that the answer to this question was “Yes.”

THE BEACHCOMBERS

To Dennis Johnson

The beachcomberstake themselveslike serious trains

to Los Angeles Palo Alto SantaMonica’s legsworn down by the sandlike the dense chunksof green bottle you lappedup on her shores,

glass smoked as the windowsof the damp buildingyou locked yourself infor some odd number of years.

You called it a supermarketAnd a search for creamed corn.The empty refrigeratordepresses us,you complained to your underwear.

You lounged with the produce.The women are not peaches but skinholds them together when theythreaten to burst.

The diamonds in their glassesscrape down our throats.We name your wife MexicoWe name your hat Divorce.Our voices run hoarseand you leave for somebetter planet.

I will call you my sweating astronautI will call you, Goodbye!I will keep calling if you’ll keep the suit on.

— Sophia Weissmann

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The people of Newtown, the suburban mothers, fathers and children, have shown tremendous resilience — in their returns to work, to school and to the daily business of living — and will continue to do so. “This is a town of 28,000,” Audrey Petschek, a Newtown resident of 20 years, said at the memorial by the school one afternoon. “But it feels like a town of 4,000.” That part of Newtown will refuse to change. But while The Newtown Bee asserted that the shooting would not come to de!ne this rural community, and while the people of Newtown, in these !rst weeks, have remained con!dent in the town’s ability to heal, the fact remains that to this town, Dec. 14 will become what Sept. 11 is to this nation: a demarcation, a moment after which nothing is the same as it was before.

The "owers, candles and teddy bears, for the most part, have been taken away and will be

ground apart, and their fragments eventually poured into the foundation of a permanent memorial. The "ags have been brought back up.

The children of Newtown have gone back to school, although Sandy Hook Elementary now occupies what was once Chalk Hill School in Monroe. On the !rst day, their faces beamed through foggy bus windows as they pulled into the new school and, for the !rst time in weeks, a sense of normalcy.

The general store is noisier now and the co#ee is no longer free. Neighbors still o#er words of reassurance but speak louder. Teenagers, eating Queen Street and Sandy Hook sandwiches,

no longer stare across the street to the funeral home. Instead they look at each other and, albeit with a slight hesitancy, allow themselves to laugh. But every now and then they look out the window across the street, and the Honan Funeral Home, with its white sideboards, green shutters and neatly trimmed lawn still stands there.

Someday Newtown will look the same as it did before December 14, save for a memorial nestled beside that !rehouse deep in the Connecticut woods. The last teddy bear will have disappeared from the town’s intersections. The children who settled into desks at Sandy Hook Elementary at 9:30 on that December morning will eventually look out from the tables at the Newtown General Store. That will be when the truest and most permanent memorial to those lives, untouched by malice save for 10 minutes, will be most acutely needed: change in our laws, change in our culture and change in ourselves.

The flowers, candles and teddy bears, for the most part, have been taken away and will be ground apart, and their fragments eventually poured into the foundation of a permanent memorial.

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