FOOD FIGHT by Alice Walton

When I entered the cafeteria of the K-8 Wexler-Grant Community School, a New Haven K-8 school, at 10:15, it was crunch time. Five lunch ladies, dressed in matching red-collared shirts and hairnets, were scooping canned apricot halves into small plastic containers and covering the pans of lettuce and chopped meats with foil. When the apricots ran out, they moved onto applesauce. One of the ladies stepped forward, an unofficial spokesperson for the group. “You need to do something about this,” she said, motioning toward the food. “Why would you give kids this on a cold day? A chef salad and it’s all cold!”

A student picks a healthy lunch

The first onslaught is at 10:30 a.m.. The youngest kids at Wexler-Grant Community School rush into the cafeteria. Large and open, with patterned linoleum on the floors and plastic tables with built-in stools, it looks just like any other cafeteria. Kids play musical chairs as they vie for the best seat. From doors on either side of the cafeteria, students file through the kitchen, choosing from today’s spoils: a chef salad of iceberg lettuce with sparing amounts of shredded carrots and purple cabbage, with chopped deli meats—one lighter, one darker, both amorphous—shredded cheese, and ranch dressing to add on top.

At Wexler-Grant, salads don’t fare well at lunchtime. Today, many kids opt for the back- up option—a cheese-and-unidentified-meat sandwich. “My meat had black dots on it,” one third grader reports to me, disgusted. “That’s the spice, stupid!” his friend informs him.) Still more plates filled with dressed lettuce find their way quickly to the trash, as kids make do with canned fruit and precious cartons of chocolate milk.

But salads are not the only foods that end up in the trash according to Louise Pierce, a self-proclaimed “Cafeteria Mommy,” who has been working at Wexler-Grant for two years. Wearing red pants and a matching turtleneck, Pierce patrols the cafeteria, setting out plastic silverware and fruit cups when the tide of students ebbs. When the kids enter with shouts of “Hi, Ms. Louise!” she monitors the meal, shushing the loudest voices and checking in as they eat. If she knows anything, she knows what kids like—and what they don’t. “They waste more food than they eat. There was an eggplant parmesan sandwich that all went to waste. And an Asian chicken-broccoli stir-fry thing; it all went in the trash.”

The school lunch has been an American institution since 1946 when congress created the National School Lunch Program. Today, public and non-profit private schools from pre-school through high school are eligible to receive federal reimbursement for the cost of the dining programs, and certain foodstuffs are provided by the USDA. These reimbursements cover the cost of students who qualify for a free lunch—80% of students in New Haven public schools—but they do not add up to much. The USDA pays New Haven $2.50 for every free meal they serve. The small sum is intended to cover the cost of overhead, personnel and ingredients for a healthy, filling lunch.

A student at Wexler Grant School eats lunch

“It’s a whole giant mess the way the system works,” says Chef Timothy Cipriano, executive director of New Haven Food Service Department. “$2.50 is supposed to cover the cost, which it doesn’t.” Since the inception of the National Lunch Program, regulations have been periodically updated. Until now, this has meant intermittent recommendations to cut fat content in meals or add vitamins. In October of 2009, the National Institute of Medicine released its first new guidelines since 1995, which featured limits on calorie and sodium content in the meals and requirements for more fruits and vegetables. The new recommendations have placed stress on the system. “We can’t even afford what we serve now. If we were to implement new recommendations, we’d be losing our shirts,” Cipriano says.

Bald and big-boned, Cipriano is on a mission when it comes to lunch. Some might say he has enough to focus on without new regulations that will increase his budget deficit. But he is a force to be reckoned with, even on the national level. When we spoke, he had just returned from a trip to Washington, DC, where he was meeting with federal officials to convince the USDA to increase federal subsidies.

But Cipriano is not your typical lunch lady. Serving 12,000 meals per day is no meager task, but the chef took it on with gusto when he came to New Haven from Bloomfield, CT in July of 2008. “I never looked at it like it was a monumental task,” he explains. “New Haven’s school population is ten times bigger than Bloomfield’s, so I just multiplied it all by ten. I didn’t want to psyche myself out. I just never let it bother me.”
At Bloomfield, he was known for innovative recipes and emphasis on local food. He brought Connecticut-grown produce into the high school cafeteria; The New York Times even profiled him for his work there.

New Haven has been a different story. When he took over in 2008, Cipriano replaced Aramark, the massive food services company that had managed New Haven’s school food for years.  Food service companies like Aramark are the norm for school lunch throughout the country. “The vast majority of districts still rely on major food service companies,” says Gordon Jenkins (YC ’07) who now serves as the school lunch campaign manager at Slow Food USA, a non-profit food advocacy group based in Brookyn. “But we’re beginning to see a trend of districts heading towards cooking from scratch.”

Cipriano is spearheading that transition in New Haven. “Everything was corporate under Aramark. People were scared of upper management. I’m not going to be that bad guy.” While it’s true that the unions were sick of Aramark, he explains, the food itself was the main impetus for change. Now, instead of getting food delivered by a national chain, food services work out of a central kitchen where Cipriano can control quality and order in bulk for better prices from regional sources. He offers more fruits and vegetables, salads, mashed potatoes (from real, roasted potatoes—not a box), working tirelessly to ensure that the ingredients are regional or local when possible.

Some students throw lunch away uneaten

But Cipriano’s vision is not always popular with the uniformed children who swarm the Wexler-Grant cafeteria in three shifts over the course of the morning. Kids wonder why they can’t have chicken nuggets every day, while adults question the decisions behind the food. “We should have a hot lunch and more variety, not just salad and bread in the winter,” says “Cafeteria Mommy” Pierce. “We have a state of the art kitchen in there and we only use it to reheat food? I’ll go in there and cook.”

Beatrice has been working in the Wexler-Grant kitchen for 11 years. “They stopped people in the schools from cooking. Now we’re getting these meals—some of them I can’t even pronounce—from a central kitchen. I mean, they say the food is good and healthy but I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head in dismay. “We stopped cooking and the kids throw it away more.”

Cipriano claims the central kitchen allows him to get the most bang for New Haven’s buck; when it comes to procuring high-quality local produce, ordering in bulk is the only answer. In 2008, New Haven purchased at least 12,000 apples, 6,500 pounds of butternut squash and 400 pounds of tomatoes. Meanwhile, the $2.50 benchmark looms over each decision. “A central kitchen keeps the costs down, and I’m looking for any way to expend the government’s dollar. It also gets the attention of regional suppliers,” he explains.

Since Aramark left, quality has improved, believes ‘Cafeteria Mommy’ Pierce, but she wonders whether that improvement is here to stay. “It started off better than Aramark, but now to me, it seems to be going down.”

But are the school lunches in New Haven healthy? Nutrient content of school lunch food is closely regulated by the federal government. Schools have to meet certain criteria to receive any reimbursement for the lunch. But the rules state quotas for vitamins rather than fruits and vegetables, which can be filled by just about any fortified food. This eases the budget issue for districts that are not focused on the nutritional value of their lunches. “There are absolutely schools that make the budget work, but they serve tater tots, chicken nuggets and a lot of highly processed foods which is something we don’t want to do,” says Cipriano.

Beatrice takes a look at the salad sitting under the glass. “The board says it is healthy, but this is not good meat,” she says, indicating the chopped, pink and white cubes that are spooned onto the mix of iceberg lettuce as the children grab their salads.

“This is the healthiest thing I’ve seen them eat in a long time,” says Elizabeth Bewley, a senior in Berkeley College who volunteers in a kindergarten classroom at Wexler-Grant. But are they eating it? “That’s questionable,” she laughs.

After all, how many six year olds like salads? Adalia and Alandra, two kindergardeners, profess to like their lunch as they pick through their lettuce and meat. Another boy, taking a bite of his whole-wheat roll, expresses a common sentiment of the dining hall: “I only like this.” While some kids clear their plates, most pick at one part of the salad or another. Some prefer the cheese, some the meat, others the lettuce. Either way, the trash cans are full of unfinished or untouched food by the end of each shift.

As I move through the cafeteria, the pint-sized voices are dying to tell me that they love the pizza that appears on the menu once per week. They don’t seem to know it is made with whole grains, and if they do it doesn’t bother them. There are also more elaborate dishes that are popular too. Barbeque chicken is a clear winner, with rave reviews from everyone from kids to teachers.

What else would they like to see for lunch?
“Fried Chicken!”
“Chicken nuggets!”
“Dirty rice!”
“Chinese food!”
“At my cousin’s school in Cheshire they even get jello!”

Pleasing the palate while keeping the food healthy is a tough balance in school lunches across the country. “You can’t just offer healthy food and expect that’s what the kids will want. It’s all about taste at the end of the day,” says Slow Food’s Jenkins.

Taste can be a tricky thing, especially when cafeterias push kids out of their comfort zones. Walking past a chattering group of cafeteria staff, I hear rumors of one school that accidentally got shrimp linguine for lunch one day (“I wish we had got shrimp linguine.”) and concern about the quality of ingredients “They always say there’s vegetables in the pizza, but it’s cooked to death!” says one employee who requests that her name not be used. “Everyone knows there’s no nutritional value in that whatsoever.”

Health is hardly her biggest complaint, however. “There is no culture in the food. Look around, we’re a largely minority school and we don’t eat like that,” she says, as she watches one of the lunch ladies scoop meat onto the salad. “They’re not even thinking about the types of kids they’re serving.” Cipriano has expressed interest in tailoring menus to reflect the rich ethnic communities of New Haven, but that will happen only in the years to come, he says.
“The kids at Columbus love their salad bar. Last year at Martinez we were sampling watermelon radishes and at Barnard they were handing me sungold tomatoes, excited to show me how delicious they were,” he tells me.

Some schools have seen improvement through Cipriano's organic focus

But Wexley-Grant has seen none of their innovations, and the discontent among the staff and students is palpable. Lunches at the school are prepared in a remote kitchen, have no face and no advocate. Cipriano wants to make cafeteria food in New Haven more personal, more interesting, and more genuinely healthy. But for true success, he’ll have to figure out how to cook food that doesn’t end up in the trash at schools like Wexley-Grant.

FEAR AND CLOTHING by Kate Selker

Were the “About Us” page on the website of Harold’s Formal Wear a wedding toast, the whole room would be tearing up.

Harold's Formal Wear, in New Haven, CT

Meet Anita!!  Anita is “the face” of Harold’s.  If your mom or grandma bought their dress here at Harold’s chances are Anita sold it to them.

Alicia is the “little sister” of the family.  She’s the girl next door.  When you meet Alicia at Harold’s you’ll feel like you’ve been friends forever.

Lisa came to work at Harold’s as a teenager and never left. “There are not many jobs in the world that let you be a part of the happiest day in someone’s life.  That’s a pretty good perk!!”

Annette joined Harold’s with lots of experience dressing pretty girls…She has three daughters, Dominique, Angela, and Marissa.

When I first met Annette, she was testing out a mother-of-the-bride dress in front of the rest of the staff.  It was a two-piece ensemble with a matching blazer, maroon, shiny, and bejeweled. Annette’s not a fan of trying things on. “We all do it for Lisa,” she says of her twin sister. “We’re family.”
Lisa is older than Annette by just a few minutes but shorter by quite a few inches. Though small, she is authoritative, with perky hair and a focused gaze. She wears heels, but trades catwalk delicacy for a determined, getting–somewhere clack that sounds with every step. As a young employee years ago, Lisa became quite close with Harold himself, and has gone on to run the shop after he passed.
The women cheer and Annette scowls. She shuffles back to the dressing room and returns wearing a silver taffeta ensemble. Annette stands in the silver dress as if it were filled with mosquitoes.
“You look good in anything, Annette,” squeals Lee, another Harold’s employee.
“You ass.” Annette responds, smiles, and marches back to put on her jeans.
Lee remains beaming when her friend goes away. Though genetically unrelated to her co-workers, it’s easy to see why the Harold’s family adopted her. Her big lined eyes glow, and she has a voice that calls to mind secrets, counsel, and admiration all at once. Lee has well–styled blonde hair and wears clothes that Oprah would love. thick beaded necklaces, lots of muted tones and simple sweaters with flowing sleeves. Lee loves her job, and she’s happy to tell you why.
“I think it’s the relationship that you form with brides. You hope that they send you pictures; you become best friends. It makes you cry, there’s such a deep connection. I get teary-eyed just saying it!” Her voice trembles.
The women laugh, moaning, “She’s our crier!”
Lee is unashamed. “When I put a dress on a girl, I get the chills and teary eyes and if the mother cries, God forbid….” There are nods all around.

Allison Valentine arrives at Harold’s with her sister, Laura, and her mother, Susan. The three women wear matching Burberry jackets and dark, pressed jeans. They’re instantly chatty with the staff. The traffic was bad. It took double the time they expected. And can you believe the rain? Annette receives them smilingly, and Lee asks them if they want to meet me, standing with a notebook in the corner.  Allison skips over to stand next to me. Her face is like a little girl’s. She asks if I want to see her inspiration page? Not bothering to wait for an answer, she whips out a computer print–out hued in greens, yellows, and white, the color of Allison’s treasured sunflowers. The bridesmaids will wear emerald. But Allison, will dress in white. Pictures of Stewartesque table settings, unfrazzled wedding parties of sexy twenty-somethings, and green high heels are arranged on the page like a yearbook collage.
As Allison leads her family towards the gowns, she points to a certain silk taffeta blend.
“But it’s kind of prommish,” Laura suggests.   “So much Taffety.”
“The fabric is kinda prommy,” Allison concedes. Tthe sisters leave the garment and move onto other, better dresses in different shades of white.
After some browsing, they’re sent to the dressing room, where Annette has picked out some special gowns for Allison to try. The back room gowns are special; all priced at over eight hundred dollars, they’re accessible to patrons only at an employee’s suggestion. After a brief interview with Allison about her “vision”—“I’ll try anything,” the bride-to-be admits—Annette has come back with a wide selection.
The dressing room is so large it could fit three queen-sized beds inside. There’s a pedestal, a wall-hugging couch, and a many-faced mirror that folds in and out. The lights can be switched to “evening” or “day.” We keep it bright.
“She wants a nice shape,” Susan declares upon seeing the selection. When I first met Allison’s mother, she insisted she would play only supportive spectator to her daughters. Now, she explains to “her girls” (among whom I am now generously included) that the ideal dress would look like something Grace Kelly would wear – beautiful, elegant, classy.
Allison’s face sprouts into a grin. With an honest “I’m not shy!” she slips off all her clothes and jumps into her first gown on in front of the whole group. The dress has a deep back and a huge bottom. There’s a rosebud pinned at the fabric stretched behind her hips. “You’ve got a flower on your butt!” Laura giggles, and Allison shimmies a little. “I’ve got enough junk in my trunk already,” Allison says, rushing to unzip.
The next dress is ruched on the bottom in elegant “pick up” folds, the type of skirt Allison and Laura have taken to calling “the cupcake.” It’s bright white and regal.
“I feel holy in this dress,” Allison remarks.
“Yea, that’s too holy for you,” Laura says. The dress is unzipped.
Allison puts on more dresses. Through it, Susan struggles to restrain herself.
“I don’t love it,” she says at one gown. “I want to love it.”
The dresses keep coming and coming off. The women have stamina, moving through dresses too big to wear, “too fun” or too expensive, even dresses deemed “perfect,” yet discarded.
It has been over an hour. The Valentines, luckily, have a year before the big day. They’ll have a dress before the wedding. Allison’s got an image in her head, and she’ll find it. “When they find the right dress, their face lights up,” Lee explains.

Anita Anastasio is the shop’s oldest employee, and has been working the wedding trade for forty years. Anita is a frail woman, short, wrinkle–faced and ruddy–cheeked. Her posture is bent just slightly, as if she is hoping to hug you, but a shade too timid to try. She spends conversation nodding and clasping her hands, resting her cheek in her palm, and sighing. Gazing back at memories of when she first came to Harold’s, she speaks of the good old days. “It was different. It was quiet.” They used to have cookie tables after the wedding. They used to have special honeymoon outfits and the men wore fresh suits as they drove away. Everything was more ceremonial.
Despite these sepia memories, Anita is grounded in today’s world. When she pauses to think back forty years, the shades of wistfulness she carries are outweighed by an accurate appraisal of “girls today.” They’ve gained confidence. They simply know more about what they want —“the computer tells them so much” she explains.  Internet or not, however, love remains blind, the heart stays fickle, and Anita assures me that “the basic bride stays the same. Her enthusiasm, her excitement, her fright is there no matter what.” Anita insists that even modern-day professional women change when they become brides.  Some are giddy and irrational. Others bask in the limelight. The wedding bug spares no woman.

Anita speaks to a customer

When Anita began working at Harold’s, the average girl got married when she was twenty-one years old. Today, women tie the knot, on average, when they’re twenty-six. (Men, on average, are at least two years older than their wives.) Anita knows that probably haven’t been hostesses at a dinner party. She knows they’ve been shacked up with their fiancées since long before engagement. They’re managing their money for themselves. They are gainfully employed.  They’re less likely to comply with their mother’s vision of a perfect dress, or honor her by wearing the same one she wore.
“You can listen to the bride and take in what everyone else is saying to her, but she’ll never feel beautiful in what I think and what her mother thinks is beautiful,” she explains. To help a girl find a dress, you’ve got to let your feminine intuition take over as your inner fashion judge, because it’s her day.
Anita and her partners speak so warmly of these moments, and so warmly to me, that I half expect them to invite me over for dinner. Instead, they invite me to the Bridal Extravaganza, where they’re having the fashion show. It’s at the Woodwinds, a social events space in Branford, and Annette will be modeling. I couldn’t miss it.

The Woodwinds stands bricked and pillared, like a country club or a spa. It sits wreathed in a parking lot, dotted with three photogenic gazebos and embellished with red oaks.
I gain entrance with a postcard Lee had given me the week before:  “TWO FREE ADMISSIONS: A TWENTY DOLLAR VALUE!” The paper is soft and ragged; I’d been clutching it nervously the whole taxi ride over.
Inside, I am greeted by a giant, estrogen pumped pageant. It is as though I’ve stepped into the mind of a woman who listened to soft rock and browsed bridal catalogs all day while eating cheese. A wedding singer and a little band had set up by the door, where they treated the crowds to “I’m walking on Sunshine!” and other cheery hits. There are tables with cheddar and gouda cubes piled high next to cut vegetables. There are women everywhere. Some have the telltale “BRIDE” sticker on to let the vendors know who among them would be the most lucrative to befriend.
One vendor, carrying an armful of roses, eagerly asks me if I am a bride–to–be. I show her my ticket, but inform her that no, I am not the bride. I get no rose. I walk past the flower-seller, make my way past the cheese sculptures and fruit bowls. My stomach is queasy. No gaggle of bridesmaids linger by my side. Everyone probably thinks I am single. They probably think I don’t have friends. They probably think I was lonely.
But then there was lovely Lee, standing proudly on my right, glowing warmth at the Harold’s Bridal Booth. “Hi,” I murmured, catching her eye. “KATE!” she calls, pulling me towards her and kissing my cheek, ushering me behind the table to stand with her. Annete shuffles over, surrounded by her daughters and sporting a brown mother-of-the-bride dress she had scorned a few weeks ago in the shop. She’s excited to see me, and introduces me to her daughters.
“We’ve got to show her to Lisa!” she says, rushing me out of the Expo Room towards the dressing rooms out front, where three “brides” sit waiting on a plush bench.
One is full figured and blonde, with heavy mascara that makes her eyes, in the language of makeup, “pop.” Her ample breasts, tucked tightly in the corset of her gown, follow suit. Her two companions are taller and more simply arrayed, their faces less painted, their hair not quite so stiff with spray.  One is a redhead and maybe thirty-five, and the other is younger, with light brown locks. The three sit cramped and poofing on a plush little bench meant for two.
Passing the three, Anette, her daughters and I walk to the closet where the brides had been dressed, where Lisa herself is currently dressing up two school aged girlets in puffy white.
“Look!” Annette announces, pointing to me. Lisa’s excited to say hello, and the little girls stare.
Back in the expo room, the DJ started up “I will always love you” and the Emcee announced that it was time for the show to begin. The ladies of Harold’s were lined up, and in three sets of dress changes, they made their way down the catwalk. At first, they seemed nervous. Annette’s youngest daughters, sitting crosslegged by the front of the stage, gave her giggling grins, and her older ones stood brave in their bridesmaids gowns, doing a little hand–on–hip twirl at the end.
A shorter girl, no more than four years old, approaches the catwalk in a little white strappy frock, and immediately bursts into tears. She runs away to hugging arms, and the show goes on. The other small girl, a little bit older, makes it all the way to the catwalk and starts to strut. The crowds eat it up. She shuffles shyly in her Mary Janes, and her hair hangs down straight. Annette does a second round in the mother-of-the-bride dress, and the trio of fake brides display their gowns to the flash of cameras and the approving critique of the women below. The fashion show is a success.

Two weeks later, I’m standing with Lee in a $1,700 Paloma Blanca wedding dress. The Harold’s staff has wanted to see me in their gowns from the beginning and, despite apprehensions, I finally say okay.
Lee had informed me that we’d start with dresses I like, and then move on to dresses she thought I’d find a little more daring. She had pegged me as a low–key gown girl, and the first two on the rack were ivory silk a–lines, mild on the scale of froof. (An a–line dress consists of a fitted top that hugs a girl at the bellybutton and hourglasses outward at the bust, as well as a bottom that poofs to the base of a cone, like the lower rungs of the letter “a,” from the waist down.) Before I put on either, I have to step into a set of constrictive little lace and wire delights, created to sculpt my waist to hip ratio into something worthy of a fertility sculpture.  Properly confined, I put on the Palmona Blanca Silk dress. Lee tells me to step on a pedestal so the dress can hang at its full length. The dress puddles out glamorously at my feet. The top of my very first a–line is covered in floral lace and embellished with small pearly beads. An ivory ribbon rests right above the hip.  Lee catches me grinning. I catch myself grinning. Lee insists she snap a photo, and I pose.
Next, I try on the San Patrick  a–line, which also has me smiling. It’s got a side–ruched top, and it’s off–white with a set of tiny buttons that cover up the zipper. The buttons are so tiny, Lee informs me, that they use crochet hooks to clasp them on the Big Day.
The third dress isn’t quite the charm. The thick halter top cuts me off at the shoulder, and the dress clings to my waist, hips, and upper thighs, pulling in tight at my knees so they’re forced to touch, before trumpeting out for the calves. It reminds me of a “Chinese Finger trap,” the little tube toys that suck tighter and tighter the more you try to escape. Curve after copious curve, the gown is fit for an octopus queen, but not for me.

"fit for a Victorian princess"

My final dress is fit for a Victorian princess, and I don’t mind one bit. Before I can put on the dress, I’ve got to change slips; I transfer into a set of hoops that pop out wide enough to hide at least one Great Dane, and Lee buttons me up in the dress. It’s a gentle, coral pink–white, decked in rivulets of silver jewels, and blossoming out from the thin strapped top into a willow tree’s graceful dome. Lee tops me with a tiara and plays with my hair until the little crown stands up on its own. I’d never wear it in real life, but the women of Harold’s don’t care. They just want me to feel beautiful.

Harold’s may be made for marriage, but this store is a sorority. It’s about women and daughters and granddaughters and the closest of friends. Saturday is the busiest day at Harold’s, but by 4:30 one weekend in October, half an hour before closing, the shop has quieted down, and just the employees and I remain. Meghan, Annette and Lisa’s niece, is here at Harold’s for the first time since I’ve started observing the shop. It’s her 18th birthday. “Hey Lee!” Lisa calls down towards the storage section of the shop. “Call the girls!” Waiting for the seamstresses, Annette, Lee, and Lisa cluster by the counter, surrounding Meghan. Lee munches on a block of cheese.  Somebody brings out cake in a Stop & Shop plastic container.
“I stayed up all night to make this!” Annette jokes.
The women work together to top it with a white and green candle shaped like the number “18.” It has two wicks and they set the flame with a little white lighter.  They wait, and soon Lisa and Connie, the two squat seamstresses, forty-year-vets of the store, waddle in. With the gang all there, it’s finally time to blow out the candles.
In utter un-melodic sweetness, the women begin to sing. The birthday song is stripped of all delicate harmony, and each member of the Harold’s family is singing her own personal rendition just slightly out of sync with her neighbors. They finish, though, one by one, and Meghan, amongst them, stands while they clap. She blows out the candles and gets them all.

Photos credited to Harold’s New Haven

If These Stone Walls Could Talk

by Cora Lewis

Architecture tells stories.

Before books, buildings, the silent stonework of buildings conveyed elaborate narratives sans words. In churches and cathedrals, sculptures, carvings, and stained glass windows told religious parables to those who couldn’t read or gain access to books. Who needs bound pages when you could have dappled light illuminating characters rendered in marble or limestone? Victor Hugo wrote that before the invention of the printing press, men who were born to be poets became architects. After Gutenberg made the mass production of the written word possible, men who were born to be poets could just be… well, poets.

But James Gamble Rogers, the architect of Yale’s Harkness Tower, Sterling Memorial Library, the Law School, and many other campus landmarks, was something else: a poet-architect. “Every door, every nook, every cranny tells its own story,” says Yale School of Architecture Dean Robert A. M. Stern of the buildings. “Students have come to fiercely and passionately embrace his charms and storytelling and wit.”

Harkness Tower, for example, boasts four grotesque birdlike figures that represent the misshapen, malleable freshmen who come to Yale to be formed into successful graduates. Above them are four statues representing professions that Yale students generally pursued: law, business, medicine, and the ministry. Some conventions, it seems, really are set in stone.

A hallway in Sterling Memorial Library leading to the Manuscripts and Archives room contains twelve carvings of students, one between each window, memorializing the lifestyle of high scholarship. One boy drowses over his books, while another drinks an overflowing mug of beer beneath a picture of a curvaceous woman. A student listens to a radio, books neglected, while another reads, in large type, “U. R. A. JOKE.” The final stone student, however, sits on a globe, triumphantly clutching his diploma. He is the successful Yale graduate, on top of the world.

The mood of Roger’s architecture may be lighthearted, but his work was ambitious and artistically serious. “The level of detail – the scholarship and invention and wit – that went into the design of those buildings… was something that had never been seen at Yale’s campus,” said Stern. “It celebrates the entire history of the university. It’s filled with tributes or references to where Yale was located, where its founders came from, who the great professors were and so on.”

According to Judith Schiff, the chief research archivist for the Sterling Memorial Library, each stained glass window in the library corresponds to the purpose of its room. Even the faculty lunch room, now sparsely furnished with a fridge and a microwave, has beautiful stained glass windows with motifs of food from Mother Goose rhymes: Little Jack Horner, the “Queen of Hearts who made some tarts,” and Jack Sprat “who could eat no fat.” “It’s not the beautiful place it once was. It’s become more utilitarian,” said Schiff of the lunchroom, whose windows no longer get the attention they deserve.

In a library room intended for natural sciences seminars, a fire-breathing dragon keeps company with birds, fish, reptiles, and serpents. In one meant for the study of mathematics, a glass James Watt tinkers with a tea kettle in one window, while Benjamin Franklin flies his kite in a lightning storm. Huckleberry Finn is up to no good in a stained glass medallion in a room for American literature, while Moby Dick swishes his tail in another.

The Law School, too, is rich in embellishment. Take, for example, the carving at the gothic entrance at 127 Wall Street, depicting a lawyer with the head of a parrot and his client with the body of a goat. In the panels found over the doors at this entrance, two scenes with darkly humorous implications confront the already offended law student: In the scene to the left, a stone courtroom is filled with clamoring lawyers doing their best to convince a sleeping judge of their cases. To the right, an earnest professor lectures to a classroom of snoozing students. All that’s missing are cartoon Zs floating up to the ceiling.

Elsewhere, over an entrance to the Law School on High Street, a student slumbers, surrounded by books. Next to him are an owl, a friendly-looking mouse, and some cobwebs. The slacker, it appears, was an endless source of inspiration for Rogers. On a stone cornice at the east end of the north wall of the Law School courtyard, and with seemingly with little explanation, is a stone figure of a snail. Wigs and Woolstacks, a 1934 pamphlet on the facility’s architecture, helpfully explains that the gastropod—what else?— “represents the speed with which the law works.”

Snails and slackers aren’t the only noteworthy figures immortalized in stone. Ask Dean Stern where to stop on an architectural tour of the Law School, and he’ll send you to his own favorite detail: a portrait of its architect embedded in the building’s stone wall. Perhaps Stern, who is designing Yale’s two new colleges, has ambitions of his own portrait being incorporated into the university’s architectural narrative. He wouldn’t say straight out. It seems, however, visitors to colleges 13 and 14 should be on the lookout for a little stone Stern.

“Consider the hint dropped,” he said.

ONLINE PHOTO ARCHIVE, taken from the Yale Digital Collection:

York Street Entrance to Sterling Memorial Library

James Gamble Roger's turrets for Sterling Library

Construction of Sterling Memorial Library, 1929

"Pledging of the Books" Carving

Subject to Change

by Max Ehrenfreund

The future of Yale College is spelled out in capital letters on a chart hanging on the plywood wall of Turner Construction Company’s field office. Above it is a colorful schematic of the Prospect-Sachem-Canal Street triangle where Turner will build Yale’s two new residential colleges after razing all the buildings currently on the site. In this office, information about Yale is presented without the prim typographic elegance characteristic of University documents, but no clarity is lost. “PHASE II ABATEMENT AND DEMOLITION” is scheduled for completion in 2012. In November of that year, construction of the new colleges will begin. And, at the bottom of the chart, in red letters, the date July 2015 is listed beside “CONSTRUCTION OF NEW COLLEGES COMPLETE.”

But since Yale’s endowment fell sharply in the fall of last year, the administration has been forced to postpone the project indefinitely, and University officials have insisted that there is no way to predict when Yale will be in a financial position to begin construction. No one connected to the project is willing to guarantee that the chart in Turner Construction’s portable predicts anything with certainty. The project manager there, who said he was not allowed to speak with reporters, described the timeline as a best-case scenario. The Office of Public Affairs would not confirm even the Turner project manager’s guarded assessment. A one-sentence email from Yale spokesperson Gila Reinstein explained, “There is no specific targeted completion date for the new residential colleges at this point.”

That may be the school’s official position, but on August 29, the Yale Daily News reported that President Richard Levin mentioned 2015 or 2016 as probable dates for the opening of the new colleges. Perhaps he and his advisors have a better idea of the timeline than they’re letting on. Despite the apparent uncertainty surrounding Yale’s fiscal position, alumni contributions have allowed Yale to begin the initial stages of the project. Gift money was used to complete the planning and design of the colleges and is now paying for the process of demolishing the buildings currently standing on the site.

Asked why Yale had decided to begin demolition right away even though construction might not begin for some time, Deputy Provost J. Lloyd Suttle wrote in an email, “We want to make sure that we are ready to begin construction as soon as gifts to cover the cost of construction are received.  Keep in mind that before we can begin construction, we will not only have to remove the existing buildings, but we will also have to expand and relocate a number of underground utilities, particularly steam and chilled water pipes.”

Not all were convinced by this explanation. When the Yale Daily News reported that demolition had begun, one online reader commented, “I don’t understand. Building for those egregious new colleges won’t even begin for several years. It shouldn’t take that long to do the utilities work, as they claim. Why is Yale rushing ahead to demolish the whole area so quickly? Are they worried that public opinion will finally get traction and circumvent their plans to take over the whole city?”

Provost Suttle’s explanation also does not agree with numbers from the Office of Development. Although design and demolition at the site have been funded by alumni contributions, the Office of Development’s $500 million fundraising goal will also go towards the increased expenses from faculty hiring and expansion of other programs made necessary by a larger student body. Fundraising, says Vice President of Development Inge Reichenbach, will ultimately need to be supplemented by endowment returns and probably by cash from selling bonds.

Since fundraising for the construction won’t materialize right away, it makes sense that Yale claims to be uncertain when construction will move forward. After all, the timing of the University’s decision to build will have to depend on the state of the global economy, the success of fundraising and how quickly Yale can recruit additional faculty. Finally, Woodbridge Hall will have to make a strategic assessment of just how important the new colleges are in the long term and determine what, if anything, the University should give up in order to see them come to fruition. “I don’t think anyone has a crystal ball to give you the specifics,” said Tom Conroy, Deputy Director of the Office of Public Affairs.

For some, the possibility that the school began demolishing buildings without a clear plan for funding the project is even more alarming. Joel Muraoka (ES ’81), for one, was “furious they didn’t set the money aside in bonds or something before the demolition was undertaken.” He added that he did not intend to make a donation to support the new colleges, because “the way the funding was handled was negligent and now other people are being asked to pay for the mistake. Sounds like the bank bailouts.”

But Vice President Reichenbach says that, in general, alumni have responded generously in support of expansion. Since June 2008, when the Yale Corporation formally approved the expansion of Yale College, alumni have contributed $168 million. Those contributions come during a difficult period for fundraising following the economic crisis in the fall of 2008. “You couldn’t even get an appointment in those days to discuss a donation with an alumnus,” says Reichenbach. Only recently have donors become more willing to open their wallets.

In her ninth-floor office across the Green from Phelps Gate, Reichenbach gestures out the window toward the buildings on top of Science Hill. “I feel like I can see the whole campus from here,” she says. Once construction is finished, she will probably be able to see the brick towers of the new colleges rising behind the greenish dome of the Rotunda as well. It is a clear October day, and New Haven is lit up with sunlight and autumn color. From here, it’s hard not to have quixotic thoughts aboutYale’s future.

Reichenbach is certainly optimistic. Alumni, she says, are excited about the new residential colleges for many of the same reasons current students love the existing twelve. “It’s not just housing,” she explains, choosing her words thoughtfully. “It’s the intensity of relationships and friendships, the education that takes place when people are thrown together and start talking. It opens up minds and views.”

Yale’s online giving catalogue gives some idea of how that fundraising goal will be reached. Although the new colleges themselves will not be named for donors, prices have been set for most of the smaller spaces within the college. A dining hall is five million dollars; a library is two. Each college will have its own TV Lounge, at a quarter of a million apiece. A Servery will cost you the same.

But as exorbitant as the online catalogue of rooms may seem, the Development Office’s methods have proven effective. On the site map in their field office, several buildings are marked with bold black X’s. A solid red square in the nose of the triangular site represents 86 Prospect Street, a medium-sized house sitting at the intersection of Trumbull and Prospect.

Or at least it was until October 28. That morning at 86 Prospect, a large backhoe sat on its treads amid a heap of lumber in a deep pit, loading debris into an idling dump truck.

Professor Amy Hungerford, Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English Department, thinks it is a positive sign that no promises have been made. She would see cause for alarm if Yale clung too tenaciously to “definitive statements about what’s staying and what’s going and what’s getting built.” Hungerford is cautiously optimistic about construction, even though her department, like most others, is already struggling with a constrained budget.

She notes that the economic situation has created a strategic opportunity. It is probable not only that building costs are much lower now than they were two years ago, but also that they may increase again before the endowment regains value and fundraising goals are met.

Furthermore, while budget cuts are always difficult, Professor Hungerford sees a chance for Yale to reassess its priorities. “A recession like this is an opportunity to look at the intellectual landscape – what fields seem less important now than they did twenty years ago. That’s a necessary process, and a really hard process,” she says. Perhaps, she suggests, there are programs the University could afford to eliminate or scale back in order to allow construction to begin sooner, to take advantage of low building costs.

Professor Christopher Udry, chairman of the Economics Department, looks forward eagerly to the construction of the new residential colleges. “The university getting bigger means on balance a better educational environment for students and a better research environment for faculty.” But unlike Hungerford, Udry thinks that Yale isn’t ready to start building yet. “They cannot go ahead and build the colleges until they push forward with faculty expansion and curricular development,” he insists. He says his department would need five years to hire enough new faculty to accommodate an expanded student body. It is expected that demand for economics courses will increase by more than ten percent, since international students, whose numbers continue to grow, tend to be more interested than American students in the social sciences, especially economics. But he expects the administration will cooperate in helping his department expand.

Jonathan Dach (JE ’08) has always been a committed supporter of expansion. While he was a student, Dach was a member of the study group directed by President Levin to explore how the plan for the expansion of Yale College could be best implemented. But he agrees with Udry. “In the midst of cutting other operating expenses, dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on gothic mansions for our students is bad PR for the nation as well as for faculty. The University should wait,” he says.

But if faculty are upbeat about the project, students seem to be either opposed or apathetic. A Yale Daily News poll in February 2008 found that only about a quarter of students supported expansion in principle, even fewer liked the idea of building the new colleges at the Prospect-Sachem site. “Everyone thinks that their Yale is the best,” Dach explains. “There is reluctance on the behalf of current students to innovate or change what works so well for them.” Time will tell whether students’ skepticism is misinformed or well-placed.

Asked to explain the difference in opinion between students and faculty on the question of expansion, Hungerford says, “I think it’s because students are here for four years. For us, Yale is subject to change. We see things that seem so close to the hearts of students – four years later, they’re gone.”

The story of Hammond Hall is a demonstration of the University’s capacity to evolve and change over time. During September and October, preservationist groups such as the New Haven Urban Design League particularly objected to the demolition of Hammond Hall, both because of its architectural significance and its age: it has stood on Mansfield Street since 1904.

The Hall was in Alderman Greg Morehead’s ward, Ward 22. Regarding objections to its demolition, Morehead said he thought most residents liked the idea of the new residential colleges. Then he added, “Yale has been good about trying to do whatever it is the residents want, because they want to be a friendly neighbor. But when it comes to Yale, things are still going to get done, no matter what.”

Events bore out his prediction. On the evening of October 30, a ruined façade is all that remains of Hammond Hall after a day of demolition. Birds fly in and out of the empty windows, and the sun sets just inside the main double doors, which had been burst open by a flood of rubble. Large blocks of brick and cement lay on the porch on the sidewalk, as if Hammond Hall had built been of Legos and someone had been interrupted in the middle of taking them apart.

Perhaps in another hundred years, this spot will be covered in the debris of the fourteenth college. No matter how important the new colleges seem to us and to President Levin, all the controversy and hope that surrounds them today will one day be forgotten and discarded, as was Hammond Hall, in favor of something newer.

The Game Theory of Love

by Laura Zax

Boys are like deodorant.

This unlikely equation came to me while I stood, as bumblingly confused as a pre-teen at a middle school dance, amid cosmetics and candy at the local drugstore. I was struggling to choose a new anti-perspirant.  The one I applied daily had ceased to make my underarms feel powder-fresh, and the rows and rows of deodorizing product that cluttered the shelves of aisle nine offered the elusive promise of product perfection.

Deodorants come in as many permutations of fragrance, substance, and brand as boys come in shapes, sizes, and summer break plans.  I faced the burdensome boon of overwhelming variety.  Did I want powder or gel? Stick or roll on? Did I want a brown-haired boy or a blonde?  A baseball player or a bookish intellectual?  Maybe I didn’t even want a guy at all. Penelope Cruz is pretty smoking…

Please don’t hold such indecision against me. I’m the child of an educator, a lawyer, and the global rise of mass consumer culture. I am, to some extent, the product of products.  Like so many other American twenty-somethings, my daily life has been characterized by a staggering amount of choice and the corresponding promise of the perfect one. Gone are the days of, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”  The shoe also needs to go with the new pants you just bought.  The shoe needs to make your cankles look less cankle-y.  It needs to be cheap but not too cheap, stylish but not too stylish.  In other words, the shoe needs to fit perfectly in order to be worth wearing. American consumer culture has guaranteed us perfectly personalized products, and we expect no less of our romantic partners.

If dating in the 21^st century is like shopping, Facebook is Amazon.com—a one-stop online shop for all romantic needs.   View Facebook photos to see if a crush is aesthetically appealing.  Check a crush’s relationship status to see if he or she is in stock.  Place an order with a message or a wall post.  Track your order’s progress on his or her mini-feed.

I’m among the last candidates for someone who’d come to consider love a consumer transaction. A hippie born too late,  I had a peace sign on my retainer, doodled daisy chains in the margins of my homework, and really, truly believed that all you need is love.

But something happened.

I never asked to consider love a commodity, but it’s hard not to.  Everything is marketable in the 21^st century.  These days, businessmen sell property rights to stars so distant they’ve likely already supernovaed, and crazy eBay sellers auction off ghosts—that’s right, ghosts, which, even if they do exist, are impossible to ship.  Love is among the less outrageous commodities on the market.  When even the country’s political leaders (frequently, constantly) pay for romance, the notion that people approach love in the same way that a shopper approaches the deodorant aisle is to be expected.

The economy, it seems, is the bottom line.  So, it’s no surprise that the vocabulary of economics has crept into the language of love, that economic theories can explain today’s romantics.  We speak of “emotional investments” and of singles being “on the market.”  Econ 101’s law of diminishing returns explains that the divorce rate and hookup culture is an example of portfolio diversification.  Even the Beatles’ final proclamation of love—Paul’s assurance that, “In the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”—can be charted with a simple supply and demand curve.

The problem is, the capitalist economy as Adam Smith envisioned it is characterized by qualities that should be antithetical to romance.  Please follow along in your textbooks:

1. The ideal market is impersonal.

True for the market economy, but not so much for the make-out economy.  Still, random hook-up culture permeates college campuses, where the exchange of such basic biographical information as a first name does not necessarily have to precede Frenching.

2. The ideal market economy is efficient.

That’s okay if you’re interested in sales, not sex.  But sex aside, efficiency as an overriding principle for romance is counterintuitive. A quickie’s quick, after all, but the satisfaction’s transient. Passion should be love’s modus operandi. And taking the scenic route, spending time rather than saving it, or any number of other inefficiencies characterize passion.

3. The ideal market economy is transparent.

Public dealing is absolutely fundamental to a functional financial economy.  Privacy, on the other hand, ought to dictate interpersonal exchanges. Still, an acquaintance of mine recently got a divorce, and her Facebook friends discovered the news when their mini feeds alerted them that she was “no longer listed as in a relationship.”  A broken-heart icon appeared next to the announcement.

Economic perfection is for stocks and bonds, not studs and broads, studs and studs, or broads and broads. The perfect financial market is an imperfect romantic market.  In fact, the whole notion of perfection—of what classical economists call a theoretical ideal and modern lovers call a romantic fantasy—is precisely what inhibits so many of us from deriving satisfaction from relationships.

So, modern love isn’t that different from the love of yore and the love of lore after all.  No, not because girls still go for professors and boys still go for freshman—though that pattern is likely to be perennial.  The more important similarity is that modern lovers, like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, are questing after a quixotic ideal, elusive as the perfectly rational cunsumer.  The generation that first sat in theaters to watch Disney’s Cinderella surely felt the burden of finding Prince Charming.  The perfection of a fairy-tale ending has always been true love’s promise.  But perfection has also always been—and always will be—unachievable at any price.

The hope of “happily ever after” is as tempting and as unattainable as the thought of discovering the peerless anti-perspirant.  What we have yet to appreciate is that it’s also undesirable.  My parents, who will soon be celebrating their 29^th anniversary, know more about love than even the most Petrarchan twenty-something.  Not every minute of their marriage has been happy. Still, when I’m at home for the ever-rarer family dinner, and my dad asks me with a dimpled smile “Doesn’t Mom look beautiful tonight?” I understand.  More than I ever could when faced with the limitless choices Rite Aid presents me, I understand the value of imperfection. This sort of value can’t be measured in GDP or GNP or in any other P, for that matter.  Its worth is too nuanced for even the most thorough economist to model, for even the most conscious consumer to appraise.

It’s also not something a twenty-one-year old can swallow.  Until I learn the lesson for myself, I, like the generation that I help form and that helps form me, will continue to shop around in the hope of finding that perfect someone. But, just between you and me: I don’t buy it.

Making the Grade

by Sarah Mich

Redell Armstrong (GRD ’10) wants to talk on a Saturday morning, so we schedule an earlybird meeting: 9:30 a.m.. Any other day of the week, Armstrong would have been awake for three hours already. Today, he comes a few minutes late—on Saturdays, he doesn’t have to answer to thirty impatient middle-schoolers.

Armstrong arrived in New Haven this summer afterfive years spent teaching social studies in Harlem at a school where chalk and paper were in short supply. He has a jolly demeanor, even as he talks about the grievous social and racial inequities that drew him to teaching in the first place. And since beginning the Yale Master’s Program in Education Studies earlier this year, he has become part of a growing cadre of Yale students eager to foster learning and strengthen the partnership between the University and New Haven’s public schools.

But despite the verve and camaraderie of a Yale-based band of educators, New Haven public schools retain their share of persisting problems. Retention rates are low, and racial inequities still exist. Many students who go to school just two blocks away from Yale see the University as aloof or altogether inaccessible. New Haven public schools are home to over 20,000 students, over a quarter of whom live below the poverty threshold, and many of whom never complete high school. Since starting to student teach in September, Armstrong has found that many of the difficulties he encountered in Harlem plague New Haven as well. “The city is still working out how to retain students, and we have far to go in learning to effectively teach youths of color. Smaller issues, like the traditional parent-teacher conferences, are problematic, too; many parents are working two or three jobs and can’t make it over to the school. We need to come up with solutions within that culture, not outside of it.”

Jack Gillette, the director of Yale’s Teacher’s Program, has a waiting room for his office at 35 Broadway Street. It’s a luxurious fixture, even at Yale. The couch outside is just within reach of a coffee table topped with colorful educational books. It looks and feels like a non-menacing doctor’s office, and appropriately so. Gillette, after all, is the doctor of public education at Yale, and involvement in the New Haven public schools is still in clinical trials.

Though today Yale boasts a new Master’s program in education, a revamped undergraduate teacher preparation course, and an expanded office of New Haven and State Affairs, the university’s engagement with its surrounding public school system is in its infancy. The programs that have come to define the university’s partnership with New Haven public education—the Public School Internship program, Community Health Educators, and other Dwight Hall student outreach programs—are all less than two decades old. When Gillette arrived in New Haven thirty years ago for his first teaching job at Hillhouse High School, Yale’s relationship with the New Haven education system was minimal at best. “You wouldn’t have thought Yale was in the same town,” Gillette said. “I never saw a Yale student in my ten years at Hillhouse—volunteering or otherwise.” Nine years ago, Gillette decided to return to Yale and change things from within as Yale’s Director of Teacher Preparation and Education Studies.

Claudia Merson, the Director of Public School Partnerships for Yale, works on similar issues from her office at New Haven and State Affairs. “It takes a village to raise a child, but in urban America it takes a traffic cop to manage the villagers. That’s my job—to take these great gifts and the passion of Yale students and steer them to public schools so that they can do the most good.”

Since President Levin took office, she says, the boundaries between Yale and New Haven have become noticeably blurrier. Thousands of New Haven students visit Yale each year: the athletic teams hold camps for over 350 kids every summer, and the Peabody Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery offer frequent events for class visits.

For Gillette and his teacher training methods, this growing collaboration has required Yale’s education programs to adopt a carefully tailored approach to the particular culture of the New Haven public school system. He wants to ensure that Yale students were ready to face both the difficulties and the excitement of teaching in an urban environment.

“You could probably go out tomorrow and teach at Hopkins,” he told me. “The students there probably learn in very similar ways that you do. You’re smart and you could figure it out. But,” Gillette said, leaning forward as if telling me a secret, “if you go to Career High School, you have a moral and ethical responsibility to generate learning for all kind of folk who might be entirely different in their learning approaches and have entirely different histories of education—and that is a surprisingly difficult thing to do.”

As his students entered classrooms of their own and encountered these difficulties, Gillette wanted to be able to continue working with them, pinpointing problems and making sure that the training program was effective. Yet the undergraduate students he worked with in the Teacher Preparation Program rarely taught in New Haven after commencement. A Master’s Program, he reasoned, would put more talent into the New Haven public schools and provide feedback about the quality of instruction in the Yale education program itself.

In 2005, Gillette went to Yale’s administration with a plan for a new two-year Master’s program in Education Studies. President Levin backed the proposal and sixty members of the graduate faculty approved it with a standing ovation.

The program admitted its first class that year, a group of five candidates who would be trained in both theory and experiential learning, all within the context of urban education. “We wanted to structure a program where each of those elements complimented the other,” Gillette said. Every week, he and his colleagues observe each candidate in the classroom during the required student teaching component of the program. “We videotape, we audiotape, and we reflect. The analytic theories are there to help us try to unpack what we see.”

According to Gilette, problems in the classroom arise in any number of ways, and each candidate in the program needs to learn to decipher their causes and potential solutions. “A student was reflecting on a situation today and told me: ‘You say it could be racial dynamic, you say it could be instructional dynamic, you say it could be because they’re teenagers—which is it?’ I say, ‘That’s your job to figure out.’”

Armstrong, as a student, has enjoyed the challenge of this approach, particularly in contrast with the direct teaching style that defined his years in Harlem. “There, I was considered the source of information. My students were vessels I filled with that information. But in the Master’s Program, there is constant engagement. The philosophy is that we all—the students, teachers, and our Yale professors—are working together to arrive at the answer.”

But learning how to implement them are two different things, and the pleasant appearance of New Haven Schools can make this implementation seem deceptively easy. To first-year New Haven teachers accustomed, as Yale students, to seeing the shiny exterior and frosted glass windows of places like Cooperative Arts and Humanities High, the existence of real urban problems can sometimes come as a shock.

“The schools don’t look that hard,” Gillette said. “They’re beautiful buildings, and the tone is not a bad tone. It doesn’t feel edgy. If you go to PS302 in the Bronx, there’s a kind of alignment based on the look and the feel. You’re prepared for a certain set of difficulties. In New Haven, though, you have a different set of expectations and new teachers can get lulled into thinking, ‘It can’t be that hard.’ It is.”

Despite Armstrong’s appreciation for the Graduate Program, the hallowed halls of Yale where takes his theory-based classes every week feel very distant from the students he teaches. “Sure, they aspire to leap out of their community and be associated with the University in one way or another, but they can’t picture themselves as students. A lot of them think, ‘If I could just obtain a job at Yale University, then I’d be set just like my parents, or like my uncle or like my aunt.’” The contrast is significant, he said, between the way his students perceive themselves and the image they have of Yale students. “I don’t think they see that people of color do attend Yale, or at least not in large numbers. They see that the majority are white and they start looking in other places.”

For Yale students, too, working in the New Haven public schools means entering a world that is at once familiar and surprising.

Minh Tran, who graduated from Yale last spring spent two summers teaching in New Haven schools before he began working full-time at Elm City College Prep earlier this year. Even during those summers, he said, his relationship with New Haven was always from the perspective of a Yale student. “The interface with the city was always Yale-specific. The U.S. Grant teaching program I did freshman year, for example, was run out of Dwight Hall, and Old Campus was where we discussed everything at the end of the day. Even with all of the opportunities you have as an undergraduate to interact with the public schools, you’re still sheltered from the realities of what it means to be a New Haven resident.”

The apartment Tran moved into after graduation is only a block away from Old Campus, but since starting work this year he has begun to see New Haven—the city— as home. “Before, I carried that Yale-ness with me, and it prevented me from seeing what I would have if I hadn’t automatically been treated as a Yalie. As a New Havenite, though, I’m privy to the realities of students who are struggling or whose families are struggling. The challenges and joys of New Haven smack me in the face every morning, as I walk into a room where home lives are so evident inside the classroom.”

As we wrap up our talk, TFA alum Matt Matera offers a Machiavellian piece of advice. “When you’re a teacher, you have to be willing—actually willing—to not be loved, while still maintaining a fierce desire and a drive for helping students learn.”

However, Matera insists that figuring out how to actually impact students is the most rewarding thing you can do. “There’s nothing like seeing students transform themselves,” he says. Not on Yale’s terms. On their own.

Urban Renewal

by Jacque Feldman

Pete Digennero can still remember when the venerable Maha Ghosanda of Cambodia paid a visit to his two-story, white-shuttered house on Mansfield Street in New Haven. “He was one of those people you meet and they just have light come out of them,” he recalls. “He was like a big, huge sun.” Digenerro lives in the oldest continuously operating center of the Kwan Um School of Zen Buddhism, first founded by Zen Master Seung Sahn in Rhode Island in the 1970s and now practiced in chapters everywhere from Latvia to Israel. The New Haven Center’s history is palpable to those who live and practice there. “You can really feel the presence of the house,” Digenerro says.

But when I first arrive at the Center on a dark, windy October night, it’s tough to

sense any presence, house or human. No one seems to be around; my doorbell-ringing goes unanswered for ten minutes. I know almost nothing about Zen, and even this setting seems mysterious: only a small paper sign posted inside a front window marks the blue house as my destination. Getting closer, I read a weekly meditation schedule and a phone

number, but no other clues tell me what to expect when the door is finally

answered by a barefoot man in loose sweatpants. He apologizes It’s difficult, he says, to hear the doorbell throughout the house.

A golf course superintendent by day, Keith tells me he first came across Zen Buddhism in 1991 in an undergraduate Religious Studies class. Not until years later, though, did he begin practicing Zen, coming to the realization shortly thereafter that doing so would be “the only way I was going to be happy.” I am early for the meditation session, and he has time to show me around beforehand.

The house balances meditation space—the Dharma room, where a golden Buddha presides—with living space. The shopping list posted on the fridge downstairs supplements the staples of a healthy vegetarian diet with a few Eastern specialty items:  miso, udon and soba noodles, as well as “ko chi chang,” something so obscure it doesn’t even appear on Wikipedia. Above the fridge hangs a photo of a crowd of men and women, robed and smiling, underlined with the inscription: “Happy Holidays from the Kwan Um School of Zen.” Two huge bookcases in a living area contain works on spirituality from every branch of Buddhism and most world religions. One title reads, Wanting Enlightenment is a BIG MISTAKE. On another shelf rests a signed photograph of a hockey player, inscribed: “To NHZC, Thanks for showing me the PATH!” Soft rugs cover dark wood floors, and rooms are lined with comfy couches.

Meditation, though, takes place on the floor. My leg will likely fall asleep, Keith tells me, briefing me on Zen practice before the session. In that case, he says, I should bow and stand up without disrupting the room filled with about a dozen people in light-blue robes identical to the one I’m wearing now. “People think we’re a little goofy with these things,” Keith had said, laughing as he ties mine. The special square of cloth over Keith’s robe indicates that he has completed training in the five basic precepts needed for membership in this school of Zen.

As we enter, Keith demonstrates three of the four ways to cross your legs while meditating, leaving out the hardest one with the explanation, “If I were to take this leg and put it up here, it would break—but that would be full lotus.” He tells me to stare at the floor in front of me and mentally repeat a mantra to get into “question mode.” He suggests the words “clear head” as I inhale and “don’t know” as I exhale, but I am free to choose something else: “You could do ‘coca-cola’ and it would be all right, as long as you meant it sincerely. The words aren’t so important—it’s how you’re holding your mind.”

Besides the technical details of sitting, Keith summarizes the story of Buddha and a few basic principles of Zen Buddhism, whose precepts boil down, he says, to “being a decent human being.” As Ken Kessel, the center’s guiding teacher, will tell me later, the Korean words Kwan Um – the bodhisattva in Buddism that the center is named after—translate to “perceive sound,” and “perceiving the sound of the world draws you to that sound,” like a baby’s cries draw its mother. Listening leads to compassion. But Kessel is quick to clarify that compassion isn’t a goal to work toward; rather, compassion is “our original nature”—roots that Zen practice can help us rediscover. Keith also emphasizes that the wisdom Zen practice brings must be used to help others: “This isn’t the spiritual Olympics,” he says.

Thirty minutes of sitting and doing nothing may sound simple enough, but Keith’s words have left me a little apprehensive. “We get a lot of people here wanting to chill out,” he says. They think sitting will be easy. But, as Keith tells me, “it’s really difficult. You’re stuck with you.” Others in the room will follow the first sitting with a brief interlude of “walking meditation” and then another full sitting session—but as a beginner, Keith says, I won’t continue past thirty minutes.

Sitting across from me are a couple of young men with ties visible above their robes. They look like grad students, maybe stressed-out, over-competitive medical students needing to relax—the one on the left, with glasses, has a harried look about him. Next to them, a middle-aged man sits in a wooden chair; I guess he has a bad back or knees too weak to sit on the floor. Poor circulation, maybe. Brush paintings hang on the walls, and far to my right is the golden Buddha. It is customary, Keith told me, to bow when passing before it.

All the people here seem deeply focused, but what if someone looks up and makes eye contact with me? I concentrate on the floor. I memorize the grain of the wood and then try again to stop my thoughts. I breathe in and then out, a long sigh: don’t knowwww. Clearhead clearhead clearhead, don’t knowww. I feel pins-and-needles so I pull my leg out from under me—and my mind wanders again. “The sitting is the key,” Keith had said, and I feel a little guilty.

Every few minutes, a bell rings and one of the experienced students leaves for an “interview” with Ken Kessel, the Center’s guiding teacher. As a first-timer, I won’t be called for an interview.  I’m as relieved as I am intrigued. Viewed from the Dharma room, the procedure seems a little eerie, as each student stands, bows, and exits the room soundlessly. Kessel lives in New Jersey and comes into town monthly to conduct these interviews which consist largely of mind-puzzles called kong-ans: like what “the sound of one hand clapping” is. “The original kong-an,” Kessel says is, “What are you?”

After the meditation, Pete tells me he first came to the center looking for “a spiritual home.” We have put our meditation robes away, and he has made himself a mugful of protein shake in the kitchen. Pete is now the center’s only full-time resident, but other students sometimes join him for his morning ritual, which begins with a 5:30am wake-up bell followed by bows, a chant, and finally, a sitting. Pete considers Zen practice everyday maintenance, like tooth-brushing or gym-going, but even more crucial. “It’s “part of my job on the planet,” he says. In fact, he adds, if he stops practicing “it’s just a matter of time before I misstep. It feels like a race, sometimes, between my clear mind and my discursive mind.” Zen is powerful stuff.

During  a second thirty-minute session, sitting alone in the upstairs kitchen, I can hear sounds from the interview room. I’m surprised to hear mostly low chuckles and giggles from the students. The process had seemed utterly mysterious to me, but now one thing is clear: they’re having fun in there. When I ask Kessel at the end of our talk if all the students have left, he says yes at first, and then corrects himself. “Some people are sticking around to watch the World Series.” I forget to ask if they’re Yankee fans.

Flux et Veritas

By Nicholas Geiser

In 1951, William Buckley accused Yale University of training a new generation of atheists. To many, William F. Buckley’s polemic against academic secularism might seem paranoid. But today, it is a challenge to find discussions of faith in a setting beyond the Divinity School, and it is an equal challenge to imagine the university any other way.  “Religious students expect to be challenged here,” says Greg Ganssle, a professor of philosophy at Yale. But rather than adopt the partisan stance of Buckley, many students of faith today choose to engage their peers on a discursive level, not merely advocating for the union of the intellectual and the religious but also demonstrating it.

Enter the Veritas Forum, a Christian organization active at Harvard and Yale, and committed, in their own words, to exploring the “original understanding of ‘veritas’,” a word that appears in the mottos of the nation’s two leading universities. Inspired by Kelly Monroe’s 1992 book, Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians, the first Veritas Forum held at Harvard that same year drew over 700 attendees. The Forum has since established over 80 chapters throughout the country.

According to Nick Shelton (DIV ’10), the organizer of this year’s Veritas Forum at Yale, religious students have to shoulder the responsibility of campus discussions, moving from trite questions about religion and science to more profound philosophical queries. Not only would these deeper discussions give religion more intellectual credence, they would also advance the goal of the university to improve the life of the mind. “We want to target people who are intimidated by religion but are interested in intellectual ideas,” says Shelton. With this mission in mind, the Veritas Forum invites students to discuss questions of life’s meaning in a more casual manner than the colleges’ humanities departments. The 2009 Veritas Forum at Yale, held at the Becton Center on October 13, featured Dr. Jennifer Wiseman. Dr. Wiseman, a NASA astrophysicist, spoke on the intersection between religion and cosmology. Her talk is part of a conversation she feels the old science-religion divide misses. “Churches and Christian schools are sometimes heavily influenced by the perception that Christianity and scientific processes cannot mix, and that Christians must always have a ‘defensive’ stance toward science.” Wiseman continues, “This is tragic because our Christian friends can miss out on rejoicing in some of the wonderful discoveries about our universe that reveal God’s glory and creativity.” Shifting the public perception of faith as anti-scientific to one that can incorporate science as well is crucial for the non-religious.

For Shelton, who studied creative writing at Mercer College in Georgia and later at Oxford before coming to Yale’s Divinity School, faith isn’t to be taken lightly. After graduating high school, he published a collection of 50 original Christian short stories, and he recently published a novel inspired by the “9/11 Truth” movement entitled An American Truth. Shelton speaks frequently of corruption, greed, and intrigue as evils in government, and he hopes to address them through Christianity. Shelton compares his work to that of the writer C.S. Lewis, who infused his narratives with Christian overtones.

Hans Anderson SY ’10, editor-in-chief of Yale’s Christian journal Logos, echoes Shelton’s sentiments. Founded in 2007, Logos seeks to serve the Christian community first, but Anderson asserts that Logos’ audience consists of all “thoughtful, interested people,” Christian and non-Christian alike. Still, the faith-based and intellectual aspects of such a forum cannot be easily teased apart.

With figures like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Christianity has a robust history of intellectual debate. But such an incontrovertibly intellectual legacy is by no means exclusive to Christianity. Within the Abrahamic religions, Maimonides and Averroes loom as the towering intellectuals of Judaism and Islam. Yet it is the particularly Christian tradition of “bearing witness” to faith that seems to motivate exegesis and reflection.

Therein lies what Professor Ganssle sees as an enduring misunderstanding of what it means to be religious. As Ganssle phrases it, “It’s the difference between ‘believing that’ and ‘believing in.’” According to Ganssle, secular students create a false dichotomy between radical, irrational fundamentalist belief and rationally “believing that” something is the case. However “believing in” something occupies a space between these two views—by believing in something, you hold it both to be true and meaningful to you.

The equation of belief with fundamentalism indicates an important problem with how we talk about religion, and one of the most meaningful contributions of polemic organizations like the Veritas Forum and Logos to break down this equation. In Yale’s multicultural environment, students are used to interacting with people from a panoply of religious and ethnic backgrounds. But tolerance, some argue, sometimes misses the point of intercultural intellectual dialogue.  “People are willing to tolerate far more than they are willing to understand,” says Samantha Mosha ES ’12, an organizer of the Veritas Forum. By substituting tolerance for inquiry and understanding, secular and religious students unintentionally create a greater divide between one another.

The best thing religious students can do, Ganssle and Anderson agree, is to present their faith honestly and richly. Finding commonality with secular students involves describing what it means to truly believe in something. Ganssle, Anderson, and Shelton agree that at least for Christians, this is not to protect religious students from animosity or ostracism. Rather, it is to fight a subtle but pernicious misunderstanding of what it means to be a person of faith. Ms. Mosha notes that she has only met three or four secular students in her time at Yale who have been sincerely interested in questions of faith and belief. It’s in the interests of both parties—and the goal of Logos and the Veritas Forum—to raise that number

Off Track

By Rachel Caplan

Mike O’Hara* is on the academic job market for the second year in a row.  Sitting on a marble slab in Yale’s Beinecke Plaza, he pulls out a single, typed sheet of paper that lists all the open positions in his field.  “Best Bets” includes spots at ten or a dozen universities, “Long Shots” lists places at fifteen. Then, at the bottom of the sheet, there’s a slim category called “Hail Marys.”  These jobs, it seems, might only descend from heaven as a result of ardent prayer.

Mike’s wife, whom he met here at Yale’s Graduate School for the Arts and Sciences, told him not to talk to journalists about his job search.  In fact, he told me, he was sure that he would be the only grad student currently on the job market who would be willing to talk to me. Mike feels vulnerable, sensing he’s under the hawk-eyes of potential employers. In spite of the danger, though, Mike wants—needs—to get the word out about his and his classmates’ experiences.

“The mood” among his classmates, Mike says, “is one of despair.” Mike knows how slim his own odds of finding a professorial job.  The fact that he chose a rather unusual and multidisciplinary field rather limits his choices.  And all of the jobs on his list, he knows, will have about two hundred applicants each.

 

Scholars

 

But Mike has seen it all before. First, a job list comes out in September. Then, many hopefuls apply. Next, the initial applicant pool is whittled down to a handful who undergo tense interviews in hotel rooms. Ultimately, only three of those get invited for an on-campus interview.  When the economic downturn hit last year, however, up to two-thirds of the jobs posted by universities suddenly disappeared.  After what he termed “a cascade of cancellations,” there were even fewer places to look, and Mike and many of his classmates were forced to stay in New Haven for another year to try again.  In this time, he’s coming up with a second book project to contrast with his dissertation. And he’s formulating a Plan B. He can’t afford to stay here another year and endure this taxing process for a third time. People have got to realize, he emphasizes, that being an academic isn’t the only way to lead an intellectual life.

Steven Smith, Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale and Master of Branford College, believes it is the fate of higher education to persist despite the ravages of the economy. “Universities, colleges,” he says. “We manage to survive.” A tenured faculty member, he has the freedom to work on the topics that fire his curiosity: a few years ago it was the 17^th century Jewish philosopher Spinoza and then the 20^th century political thinker Leo Strauss; now he writes and lectures on Lincoln.  “It’s a wonderful life,” he said.  “You get to do what you care about.  Not many people can say that.”

In his course on political philosophy, he talks with great admiration for the birth of higher education, the era when Plato established his Academy and when philosophy was considered, among the Greeks, to be an expression of erotic desire. “Yale and places like this are distant ancestors of this idea of educational utopias…We’re Plato’s children in that way.”

 

Graduate Students on Graduation Day

 

 

But the values of today’s university system are irrevocably changed.  Discovery of the good life through studying life’s essential questions has faded out of view and been replaced by another goal: “marketable skills.”  To Professor Smith, the academic life cannot come out of a determination to lead a professor’s career: it is the work of fate.  “The subject chooses you,” he says.

But for Emily Coit, the subject that chose her was not enough to keep her within the world of academia.  Unlike Professor Smith, she never tried going on the job market.  Although she’s still listed on the English Department’s directory as a 6^th year graduate student, she left Yale last May to complete her dissertation on her own and to teach at a private high school in Massachusetts.  The transition hasn’t been perfectly straightforward: this Victorianist, with an interest in authors like Edith Wharton and Henry James, said that high school teaching has forced her to review her “kind of lacking” grammatical knowledge.  Students balk at being assigned a one-hundred page book to be read over the course of three weeks.  Deadlines are no longer self-imposed but are very real, and she is as busy as she’s ever been.

“I wanted to have conversations about literature that were more accessible, more about human moral problems,” she said of her decision to leave the academy behind. Though her two dissertation advisors urged her to pursue a professorial career, Emily was drawn to aspects of the discipline she felt were undervalued at the university level. While she acknowledges that she had a wonderful time at Yale, and that “the space and money and time for intellectual play at universities is unique,” she and the academic establishment had divergent priorities. She wants to read books “because they are beautiful, for their political issues, and human drama.”  Her high school students understand that.  About the passion she brings to the classroom, she says, “There’s a little bit of missionary zeal in me.”

Another scholar I talked to was, like Emily, once on the verge of breaking with academia.  Today, his picture is featured on the front page of the glossy, vivid brochure advertising “Graduate Study at Yale.”  He is in his doctoral robe of scarlet and black velvet, wearing a cropped white beard and round glasses, grinning broadly under his tassled academic cap and holding a strange kind of university scepter topped with a globe of crystal.  He is Jon Butler, the Dean of Yale’s Graduate School, and after graduate study at the University and Minnesota and a stint at Calstate Bakerville, winding up with an offer at Yale was an incredible windfall.  Having almost given up and tried another life, he is now a foremost scholar on the history religion in America who has published award-winning books and spoken as an expert on various TV and radio programs.

 

MacDougal Center at Hall of Graduate Studies

 

 

Sitting comfortably in his surroundings—a wide, airy office near the entrance of the Hall of Graduate Studies—Butler isn’t ready to call the current downswing in academic jobs a “crisis.” The fact that a drop in hiring has coincided with general economic decline is what makes it more of an alarming piece of news, he said.  He has witnessed ups and downs in academic hiring since the late 60s. Having trouble finding a job, he says, is nothing new, and frankly, jobs aren’t really the point. Butler makes clear that applicants are nearly always people who are there to study—not to attain a professional degree.  “I’m inclined to think that most are academically and intellectually driven to do deep study,” he says, and notes that only a minority of the students decide not to pursue an academic career after they have earned their Ph.D. After all, Ph.D. candidates are self selecting, he says.  “We don’t pursue students—we don’t go out and recruit.” Not recruiting means that there will be students like Emily Coit who at the end of six years will find their career goals diverging from those of many of her classmates. To Dean Butler, such cases are perfectly normal; the focus should be on pursuing an education and enjoying the moment.  As we’re standing and shaking hands at the conclusion of our interview, Dean Butler smiles and offers some friendly advice to those who might engage in graduate study: don’t worry about it.  “Do what you want to do,” he said cheerily. “Close your eyes, wake up in six years and take a look around at the job market.”

Steven Pincus, the Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department, is equally unruffled about the futures of his students. Having received his Ph.D. nearly twenty years ago, he experiences a certain distance from the mood of panic on the ground.  Yet he says that the reality of the situation is far better than the perception. Most of the jobs that were cancelled, he says, were at the bottom of the heap—jobs that he believes Yale graduate students would be overqualified for. And Yale graduate students are eminently qualified to be professors, especially today. “I have a strong sense that every single one (of my students) that’s written a good dissertation has gotten a good job” he says.  Being prepared to get a good job, though, requires a lot more than it used to.  Having had several academic articles published, Pincus says, is “pretty much de rigeur,” and students are expected to “perform as professionals”.

Increased professionalization, however, comes with a cost.  Pincus becomes very thoughtful when he talks about the downside to the professionalization of scholarship.  While universities and their students benefit, scholarship itself may suffer.  “We don’t encourage high-risk dissertations,” he told me. He says that if one of his students came to him with a very daring plan for research, he would be likely to dissuade him. “It’s a much more professionalized existence,” he says about today’s academic life, and graduate students must write dissertations that conform to detailed standards if they want a good chance of getting a job.  The improvements in graduate education have been immense and there is “an overwhelming difference” in the quality of teaching that graduate students receive today as compared with the teaching they received a generation ago.  But in this generation, Pincus says with a real sense of regret, “opportunities for paradigm-shifting dissertation are lost.” It would take a true maverick, an academic rebel-genius, it seems, to write a dissertation that would shake up a field.

Paul Shin just may be that maverick, and happier for it. A fourth-year graduate student in the history of science and medicine, nothing about Paul’s approach to graduate school has been typical.  After earning an undergraduate degree in economics, he enrolled in medical school, but soon became fascinated in medical humanities, reading about the history of science on the side.  He decided to take a break—a six year break—from medical school to delve into the topics that go unaddressed in the average M.D. program: spiritualism, uncertainty, the practice of mesmerism and animal magnetism in 19^th century American medicine, the vague boundaries between medical practice, magic, and religious belief.  If his interests sound whimsical or unconventional, Paul is used to defying expectation.  Compared to other medical students who are eager to get a degree and begin residency, Paul seems at home with the idea of taking even more time to study.  His interests extend far beyond his field. For Paul, graduate school has been a time to nurture a love of writing—he coordinates a “writing history” group and talks about the pleasures of writing and storytelling.  Instead of writing something purely academic for his dissertation, he muses, he’d like to end up with a book that Penguin or Viking could publish.  He talks in terms of plot and characters instead of thesis and conclusion, and heimagines his audience including his fellow physicians or his friends pursuing “complimentary and alternative medicine,” whose approach to their profession would be enriched by historical thinking.  To Paul, who reads Thomas Kuhn’s landmark history Structure of Scientific Revolutions along with his pathology textbook, doctoring and the humanities are inseparable.  “Grad school,” he says, “is this great time where you develop an understanding of some aspect of human experience.”

The last graduate student I talked to tends bar where Plato’s children go to get a drink.  Erik Graham-Smith runs the Gryphon’s at the Graduate and Professional Student Center at Yale.  Last spring Erik earned his Master’s of Divinity, which he describes as a course of study in “very academic hardcore systematic theology and ethics… books with 14-syllable words.”  Unlike his classmates up at the Divinity School, Erik has had much closer contact with students in the Graduate School. At once an insider and an outsider—Erik’s degree will allow him to someday become a Jesuit priest—he shares many things in common with them.  Sitting on the chilly patio outside the warm, glowing lights of his bar, Erik talked, not without a little humor, about how the Masters in Divinity is “notoriously a degree people get when they’re figuring stuff out—it’s a spiritual degree.”  In that way it’s not unlike what a graduate degree can be for many people.  “As a recession avoider,” he says, a divinity degree is much the same as a Ph.D., and he has a number of friends who are earning doctorates but who plan on pursuing careers outside of academic research.  He’s in his mid-twenties, and pauses to tell me that his grandfather, at his age, was running a family farm.  He had already been to war, married, and had children.  Today, for those who attend graduate school, things can be much different.  Extending one’s education, pausing for a degree that will not inevitably lead to a career doesn’t necessarily have to be a waste of one’s time.  Paul, the historian and future physician, says his last four years have been “about stillness, listening, finding what’s really interesting… about life”.

Would the Greeks have disagreed?

House of Cards

By Maya Seidler

Everyone loves a good card game: Poker, Bridge, Go Fish – you name it.  All who play understand the basic premises – kings are higher than queens and each deck has four suits. But suppose one day the cards dealt a different hand: acorns instead of clubs, dancing jesters instead of jacks, floral patterns instead of the numbers one through ten. At the Beinecke Library, there are hundreds and thousands of these cards – cards that speak their own language and make their own rules.

The Beinecke began its acquisition of playing cards in 1945 when Mrs. Samuel Fisher donated a set of decks dating back to the fifteenth century. But it wasn’t until the wife of Melbert B. Cary YC ’16 donated her husband’s expansive collection after his death in 1967 that this card catalogue really came into its own.  Throughout his life, Cary, an American graphic artist who spent his life assembling a rich spread of decks from all corners of the globe, showed an appreciation for all things quirky. In addition to his eccentric and eclectic card collection, he founded the Press of the Woolly Whale, a private publication that only printed unique and marginalized texts. Cary was not concerned with glorifying the already famous; instead, he wanted to explore the underappreciated.

Cards from the Cary Collection

Cary’s passion for the peculiar is exemplified in his anthology of cards: hand-drawn Apache decks, cards designed with cryptic Austrian lithographs, Amos Whitney Co. aces that enigmatically read, “Use but don’t abuse me. Evil be to him that evil thinks.” Among the Beinecke’s 2,600 decks are cards originating from 26 different countries and spanning hundreds of years of card-making, from 16th century France to contemporary America.

The cards are categorized not only by their geographic and temporal origins, but also by whether they are playing or collector cards. This distinction is what that makes cards valuable cultural artifacts for scholars. “I was intrigued by the concept of making a definite distinction between cards [manufactured] for actual playing and cards created for aesthetic purposes,” says William Keller, the librarian responsible for cataloging Cary’s collection. “Recognizing the difference was the key to figuring out how to describe the collection so future researchers could extract the cultural meaning important for their work.”

The design of standard playing cards—the ones found on blackjack tables, in household game drawers, and up the magician’s sleeve—has never gone through dramatic changes. The non-standard collector cards, on the other hand, can be read as unique statements about the culture of the time. As Timothy Young, a curator at the Beinecke, notes, the design of non-standard cards is often as much a political and social statement as it is a creative one. “Through playing cards, one can read historical trends, the development of printing technology, the commemoration of events and phenomena, and the mindset of people at play,” Young says. The presidential campaign deck from 1892, for example, could be an invaluable artifact for a historian of the period. The natural hierarchy of a suit also lends itself to social commentary. “The playing card is a kind of societal mirror,” Keller explains. The immense breadth of the collection offers scholars a means of comparing socio-political artifacts from different eras and locations, an opportunity to compare card packs issued in a particular geographic region, for example. Through comparison of the court cards and other elements, one discovers differences that may relate to the contemporary material culture.”

The dialectic between standard and non-standard extends beyond playing cards. “Folk art has a linguistic and cultural dimension that is very different from the aesthetic concerns of high art,” Keller points out by way of comparison. “These two strands of development are part of larger-scale modes of interpreting language and culture.” Even though serious analysis of cards may seem eccentric, their study reveals an important distinction between objects meant for a purpose and those meant for visual appreciation. Keller insists that his time with the collection helped him to “develop a theoretical toolkit that aided my later study of the history of art and architecture.”

Yet the very consistency of “standard” cards contain a telling cultural narrative. Hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs unite the college kid on poker night with the grandmotherly bridge adicianado and the card sharks of yore. By deeming a standard playing deck as worthy of collection as a tangram-decorated English deck from 1795, Cary endowed cultural significance to objects both average and unique. His collection at Beinecke thus invites students to look for historical narratives not merely in their textbooks and course packets but in the materiality of the every day.