Yale Club of Sacramento Newsletter March 2021
Yale Day of Service is On!... Probably
Our Yale Day of Service coordinators Sarah Citrin and Julia Lauper are hard at work organizing a Day of Service project perfectly suited for these times. You can do it at home, you are working with other Yalies, and it serves the public good! Stay tuned for more information!
If you want to help Sarah and Julia organize the event, please email them: sarahcitrin@gmail.com or julia.lauper@gmail.com. Otherwise, we will have signups once the project is confirmed.
Local Yalie's Art Featured on Yale Alumni Magazine Cover
Carmichael artist Steven M. Johnson '60, whose drawing is featured in our masthead, recently had one of his drawings on the cover of the Yale Alumni Magazine. From 1978-1995 Steven was a Sacramento Bee artist and had a weekly cartoon panel for six years, A Step Ahead. In 1995, Steven and his wife moved to Southern California where he was a futurist working for Honda . After moving back to Carmichael in late 2012, Steven has continued his side career as an inventor-cartoonist. You can see and order more of his drawings at his website patentdepending.com.
Yale Alumni Association Update by Bill Kahrl
Ever since Clarence asked me to serve as your YAA representative, I've been swept up in more quarterly presidential webinars, faculty panel discussions and alumni convocations than I ever expected. Here is a quick summary of some of the highlights of the year so far as well as a few of the issues on campus that don't get mentioned in the alumni magazine.
COVID. The pandemic has held center stage all year. Sophomores returned in January. Yale sports did not. 1778 students are currently on campus and since mid-February they have been allowed to leave their residential colleges. Everyone is tested twice a week and there have been no major outbreaks.
With movement and classroom access still limited, undergraduates are relying more on Teaching Fellows and Academic Strategies programs whereas grad students are taking writing classes online. Library access has been limited to digital resources.
Yale takes pride in the leadership that its faculty, medical and public health experts have provided at the federal, state and local levels to meet the crisis, including the development of an instant saliva test.
DOJ As expected the incoming Biden Administration dropped the Department of Justice's lawsuit alleging anti-Asian-American discrimination in Yale's admission practices -- the same claims raised in related litigation at Harvard. President Salovey hailed the decision as an affirmation of Yale's 40 years of compliance with federal guidelines and he made it clear Yale will go back to those same practices without inquiring into the substance of the concerns alleged by the Asian-American community.
Facilities and Faculty. It's not just the two new residential colleges. Construction is under way all over Yale. The new Schwarzman Center reconstruction and renewal of Commons is complete and will open soon. Likewise the Hall of Graduate Studies has been completely renovated to house the consolidation of a wide range of humanities programs. On Science Hill, Kline Tower is being gutted and remodeled to house data research and mathematics. New facilities for physics and engineering are being planned. And President Salovey is putting special emphasis on expanding Yale's expertise in the quantum sciences.
Despite the current hiring freeze, President Salovey has acknowledged that Yale has been hiring four or five new science faculty each year and will continue to do so. According to reports in the Yale Daily News, this relates to issues raised in a 2019 report from the Senate of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In this report on Research and Scholarly Excellence, FAS expressed concern that Yale was losing its competitive edge, that some departments no longer rank among the best and that the university has been losing faculty positions for promising young scholars at the same time that peer institutions are increasing these opportunities.
Diversity and Inclusion. Yale has come in for media criticism over President Salovey's emphasis on expanding expenditures to promote diversity and inclusion at many levels of Yale's operations. He committed $50 million to this purpose in the wake of the student attacks on faculty at Silliman College several years ago and this year the Corporation committed another $85 million toward fulfilling the president's stated goal of ensuring that everyone on campus feels that Yale is "their kind of place." Despite complaints about bureaucratic bloat, President Salovey in his third quarterly webinar reported that the problem they are running into is not recruitment of new people in this area so much as retaining the ones already on staff.
You can find out more about these initiatives by signing up for YAA's Impact 2 Series on Advancing, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion which begins March 15. YAA promises an expansive program of panels, lectures and workshops on criminal justice reform healthcare inequities environmental justice and much more. The workshops appear to move beyond scholarship and analysis to encourage specific objectives and political action. Contact: SIGS@yale.edu.
Women at Yale. Sometimes YAA stumbles into controversies where none should exist. Last fall, YAA sponsored a convocation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of women's admission to the college as well as 150 years of women attending the university. Many distinguished graduates attended and members of those first three undergraduate classes contributed their reminiscences in video compilations as well as essays about their experience. So far so good. Two of the 141 women who wrote essays asked to keep their submissions anonymous. But when the books were published, YAA had deleted the names of all the women. After centuries of women being suppressed, pushed into the background, or having their work appropriated by others, this unexpected anonymization produced the reaction you might expect. YAA now says it will produce two versions of the book, one with no names for public distribution and one with the authors identified that will be kept under wraps at Sterling.
Think that's exciting? Brace for more storms to come when the university releases its committee reports on the divestiture of fossil fuel investments and Yale's involvement in slavery. No word yet on when they will land.
Alumni Fellow Election. The administration customarily picks the people it wants to run for Alumni Fellow in secret and YAA has erected numerous barriers to prevent any independent candidacies. This year, however, two candidates qualified for the ballot by petition -- Maggie Thomas and Victor Ashe . Thomas had to withdraw when she was appointed to the White House staff. YAA won't reveal the name(s) of their own chosen candidates until the voting actually begins in mid-April. But since Ashe and Thomas together collected nearly two-thirds as many signatures as all the votes cast in the last election, there may be a hint of change in the wind. Be sure to vote.. If you don't get a ballot one in the middle of April, contact alumnifellowelection@yale.edu.
Questions? Comments? Complaints? Encouragement? Call me at 916-663-0785.
Harvard Club Invitation
The Sacramento Harvard Club is inviting the Yale Club to a very exciting virtual speaker event. On Wednesday, April 14th, from 5:00-6:30 p.m., Harvard Professor Michael Sandel will be discussing his book The Tyranny of Merit. A thought provoking and compelling book, it is sure to stir up a lot of discussion. The ticket price of $25 includes a signed hard copy of his book that will be mailed to each attendee. You can sign up here.
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