Father John Misty’s most recent LP release I Love You Honey­bear somehow pulls off everything that usually peeves me in con­temporary folk-rock albums. It’s nothing short of miraculous. The album begins with the title track: a ballad that opens with acoustic guitar strums and plinkety keys before a string section enters—close­ly followed by percussion— swelling into the first verse. Here’s the thing about us­ing strings in pop or rock songs: you better fucking do it right. It’s a bold move and one that’s been done a mil­lion times before, but more than that, it either makes or breaks a song—there’s no in between. For decades people have been trying to incorporate strings with either great success or ab­solute failure (think Nick Drake on one end of the spectrum versus mid-career Lana Del Rey on the latter), and Father John succeeds because he never lets the swells become too grandiose but never takes himself too seriously.

Folky albums all too often suffer from incessant repetition; it becomes hard to listen to the album in its entirety because each song sounds too much like the one before it. By the third song on I Love You Honeybear, though, Father John throws a wrench in the mix—the brilliant, unexpected wrench that is automated drum machines. The first time I listened to the album, I pretty much freaked out when the track, “True Affection” came on. He keeps the strings in the mix, but layers a synthetic kit, the combination of which almost sounds like something from 808s and Heartbreak.

On top of his clever arrangements and pretty melodies, Father John is just plain funny. Usually, attempts at humor woven too con­stantly into music just piss me off (think Childish Gambino), but once again Father John manages the implausible. His humor is dark and dirty and honestly plain weird (he uses a laugh track on “Bored in the USA”—it’s amazing), but, like, the album as a whole, it just works. If someone had described all these aspects of I Love You Honeybear to me, I probably would have dismissed it, but I’m glad I gave it a listen because, as it turns out, Father John seems to pos­sess some mystical ability to turn worn-out clichés into sonic gold.

At 2 p.m. on Mon., May 27, 2013, the Au Bon Pain located at 1 Broadway shut its doors. The closing was sudden. The cafe’s workers were given only four days notice. And less dramatically, the unexpecting student body that had been happily patronizing ABP since it opened in 1994 was blindsided. The popular cafe did not close because it was having financial trouble. Rather, Yale University Properties simply decided that it wanted a different retailer in that property and chose not to renew the lease.

For the next year and a half, that prime retail property remained boarded up, its windows shielded by advertisements for the previously unheard of but now ever-present “Shops at Yale.” Rumors abounded around campus about what would be filling the vacant spot, the most persistent of which said that the incoming store would be a Brooks Brothers.

On Jul. 31, 2014, Yale announced that a luxury department store called Emporium DNA 2050 would be opening in the coveted spot at the tip of the Broadway Triangle. The store opened for business mid fall. Emporium DNA is a chain owned by IK Retail Group, an American retail management and development corporation, but the store itself offers mainly European designer brands. The store’s high-end merchandise is openly advertised through Emporium’s glass façade—designer purses draped across mannequins clad in dresses that cling to the hard, faceless figures like Saran wrap. At roughly the same time, right next door, Italian cosmetics store Kiko Milano appeared. Its window reveals tables of colorful lipsticks and blushes that, too, look better fitted for European nightclubs than New Haven street corners—or even Toads.

The student body’s reception of the stores has been lukewarm at best and vitriolic at worst. The arrival of these stores represents a larger trend in upscale, chain-oriented development of commercial properties owned by Yale, and recent changes have highlighted that the University’s downtown development interests might not align with needs of the student body or the city at large.

* * *

Today, Yale University Properties—the real estate arm of Yale Corporation—manages a commercial real estate portfolio that includes over 85 retail tenants and 500 residential properties, ranging from American Apparel to the Harrison Court apartment complex. But if you looked at a map of the city dating before 1996, Yale’s reach would have been limited to academic property.

The University acquired most of the downtown property it now owns in what New Haven City Planner Karyn Gilvarg called an “accident of the economy” in 1996. Following the collapse of the housing market, local property manager Joel Schiavone saw most of his holdings foreclose. The city wanted the real estate portfolio to remain as a single package with a single owner to maintain a certain degree of regulation over which retailers were filling the storefronts, and Yale stepped forward as one of the only entities capable of keeping the set of properties intact. Yale created University Properties to manage its newfound commercial real estate portfolio.

This series of unforeseen events presented the University with the opportunity to branch out in an entirely new direction—urban retail development and commercial property management. But the institution saw the possibility of gaining more than simply financial returns on a good investment. The urban crime waves of the eighties and nineties in New Haven were affecting the University’s ability to attract both students and faculty, who were increasingly drawn to safer and generally wealthier cities such as Cambridge and Princeton.

“In the mid 1990s when people felt uncomfortable south of Chapel Street and north of York Street, it created a very bad environment for marketing Yale,” said Matthew Nemerson, New Haven’s economic development director. “The word was, ‘Yale is a great school; New Haven’s not a great town.’ Yale realized that in the internet and post-baby boomer age, it was in their interest to have a wonderful New Haven beyond and all around the campus, and a healthy New Haven everywhere throughout the town, too. The idea of spending millions of dollars to buy non-academic buildings had really never been something that legally or operationally Yale had thought about doing before, and then they took the plunge and that changed everything about downtown.”

UP aggressively retails its downtown properties. Highly regimented and regulated, Yale’s formula for creating a cohesive shopping district is strict, and its near-absolute control over the area gives it the freedom to mold it as they see fit. As with ABP, if the University no longer wants a particular retailer, they can simply choose not to renew the lease.

Bruce Alexander, vice president and director of New Haven and state affairs and campus development, came to Yale in 1996 from the Rouse Company, a national shopping mall developer. His formula for developing Yale’s commercial holdings as a single entity mirrors the strict regulation of mall retailing.

Alexander declined to comment for this article.

“What you see is uniformed hours of operation, shared promotion, shared street furniture and decorations,” former Mayor of New Haven John DeStefano said of UP’s retail development strategy. “You clearly get the sense of a mall. Yale has strict formulas of what kinds of stores are there.”

In other words, UP holds a tight grip on which stores are coming in and how they create a broader economic market—or, rather, a large shopping center. With too many restaurants, the shopping traffic would be concentrated only at night when diners would frequent restaurants for dinner. Yale’s self-contained microeconomy does not thrive on competition, eliminating the need for duplicate stores. (Some observers might argue that J. Crew and Gant don’t serve entirely disparate demographics.) Rather, UP places a clothing store next to a cosmetic store because, like at a mall, a single shopper might be inclined to go first to one and then to the other, maximizing the shopping experience—and also profits.

* * *

It is important to distinguish between Yale University Properties and Yale’s academic holdings. The two are independently managed, and serve their own purposes. The academic portfolio, obviously, houses the educational and research goals of the University. The commercial holdings, meanwhile, grapple with less refined issues—namely what public do these shops cater to, and what is that public looking for.

Yale views its property management project as a benevolent force in the New Haven community; UP is a part of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs, whose establishment, according to its website, “institutionalized the University’s commitment to the city of New Haven. We are committed to enhancing the quality of life in New Haven through the development of high quality retail and office environments and the revitalization of surrounding neighborhoods.” New Haven Deputy Economic Development Director Steven Fontana agreed that the University and the city have a “symbiotic relationship” when it comes to downtown development. Yale does the legwork creating this kind of cohesive shopping center, bringing revenue into New Haven and attracting people from outside the city to spend money.

But despite its inclusion in what sounds like a city-oriented project, UP is nonetheless a corporate entity, entirely independent from Yale’s academic holdings. The properties included in Yale’s campus proper would probably amount to a multi-billion dollar portfolio, but it is a somewhat futile exercise to attempt to put a price tag on Harkness Tower; moreover, it’s not as if Yale has plans to ever sell Sterling Memorial Library or Pierson College.

On the other hand, Yale’s interest in commercial properties, as with all corporate entities, stems from the University’s desire to remodel the area around campus to better suit its own needs—to attract prospective applicants and to build profits. And while the University maintains that the revitalization is a force for good, it is clear that these commercial moves have also exacerbated community divides.

Michael Schaffer, a commercial property manager for the local real estate company C.A. White, sees Yale’s retail development as beneficial to his business. “Honestly they’ve been helpful; they’ve stabilized the retail in this community. Obviously, everyone has a different perspective. My perspective is that the stronger, the better the quality of retailers there, whether it’s serving the undergraduate community or not, they’re providing a good base that attracts more people in from the suburbs to shop in the city—people that have money that are willing to spend money here.”

The example most often cited as a success story about Yale’s retail development is the Apple Store on Broadway, which has broad appeal, ranging from the Yale student to the New Haven resident to the Connecticut suburban family. City Planner Gilvarg acknowledged UP’s role in bringing business to New Haven but questioned whether it helped New Haven more broadly. “The Apple Store might not have come to New Haven without the pushing and prodding of Yale,” she said. “That’s an anchor for New Haven; it brings people here, but then the question is how to get them off Broadway to the rest of the city.” That is, Yale-owned properties are drawing customers, but are they shopping outside UP’s reaches and benefiting the broader New Haven economy?

Another problem is that the Apple Store’s broad appeal is not mirrored in much of the rest of Yale’s retail district. “In general it’s attractively imaged—it gives an inviting, appealing look to people who might not know New Haven very well,” Gilvarg said. “But on the other hand it doesn’t provide a lot of the basic essentials for the people living here. A lot of women like to say that there is nowhere to buy underwear in downtown New Haven.” The concern beyond the inaccessibility of certain necessary products is that the creation of discrete shopping districts is emphasizing the distinction between Yale’s sectors of the city and the rest of New Haven.

James Doss-Gollin, SM ’15, grew up in East Rock. He noted that these distinctions do not present a novel issue for the city, but expressed regret that Yale is not doing more to overturn 300 years of class divisions in New Haven. “They’re not creating separation, but they’re missing an opportunity to integrate the city,” he said. “The city’s been divided for a long time. It’s been town and gown, that’s not new. But they have a really special opportunity now because the University is investing so much money in developing the retail sector. They have an opportunity to make things that both students and the community at large could share.”

DeStefano, on the other hand, maintained that the development of specific retail appeal in specific areas can be healthy for urban growth. “There are distinctions that appear class-based, but I remember how many empty storefronts there were 20 years ago—there were a lot. Now, storefronts are filled, which is a good thing. Do I think there are shopping districts that appeal to different people? Yeah, but when haven’t there been?” He added that the development of distinct retail pockets is a natural occurrence in any city. “To me, it’s no more different than going to lower Manhattan where there are certain neighborhoods that have certain characteristics in the retail. You could say that we have class-based segregation of retail, but really retail serves different markets. Clearly, Upper Chapel and Broadway serve one market, but you don’t have to go far to find something completely different—it’s all pretty close to each other.”

* * *

From March through October of 2014, the landscape of Upper Chapel was disconcerting. Starbucks sat just footsteps away from a squeaky clean Pinkberry. And next door, Panera’s wax-cushioned booths were packed with undergrads filling up on clam chowder bread bowls. A corporate triumvirate had commanded the northern half of the block. Meanwhile, Claire’s—a vegetarian, neighborhood spot—stood its ground just down the block, although ideologically, it was miles away.

Ann Diamond, a community activist and former employee of Yale, said that the changes over the years have made it too difficult for New Haven’s small businesses to thrive in the areas surrounding campus. “I used to go downtown nearly every day and either shop or have lunch or walk around,” she told me. “I never go downtown anymore. There’s nothing for me there. All the small restaurants we used to go to have been pushed out by Yale. There were lots of little shops. Now there’s no reason to go there—you can get the same experience shopping online.”

In addition to potentially hindering the success of local business owners, the absence of affordable local stores is pushing New Haven residents’ consumption out of the city, to big box chains in the suburbs. “Some of my friends have cars, so now we can compete in a way we couldn’t before, it’s not just what we could get to by bus,” Doss-Gollin said. “We like to be downtown, we like New Haven, we all grew up here, but do you want to spend an extra 70 percent to have the same food in New Haven that you could have somewhere else? There’s still stuff here, but mostly it’s pushed us to cheaper chains in East Haven or West Haven.”

The buzzword here is, obviously, gentrification. Beginning as early as the sixties, middle and uppermiddle class families started moving out of the city into the surrounding suburbs, where there was less crime and better public schools. Development of the city over the last couple of decades or so is now causing an inversion of that process—middle and upper-middle class suburban families are moving back to the city, where housing stock has soared, crime has decreased, and schools have improved, causing prices to skyrocket and consequently pushing lower class families out to the suburbs.

“In our business, the role and impact of what is called gentrification is a huge, huge issue,” Nemerson said. “I think that one of the things that people often are really responding to is, when you have a neighborhood that actually works well but suddenly goes to a different price point and loses its ethnic character, that’s a real problem.”

This rising price point is certainly evident in downtown New Haven today. More than pulling people in for a weekend shopping spree, the upscale, luxury chains are now pulling these families to New Haven permanently. This is exactly what Yale is looking for—the comfortable middle class appeal of Princeton and Cambridge. Or, in other words, Yale begins to shed a storied stereotype—all Yalies are forced to endure living in New Haven for four years in exchange for a Yale education. Free of that assumption, the University would expect to attract an even higher caliber of students and faculty. From the perspective of the average New Haven resident, on the other hand, these changes can be catastrophic.

* * *

“I think Emporium DNA is universally disliked by the Yale College student body, regardless of one’s income level,” Andrea Villena, TC ’15, said. “But even if you can afford to shop there, there’s a good chance you won’t want to—I think there’s a lot of stigma surrounding this store and walking out of there with one of those absurdly fluorescent orange bags would make a lot of people uncomfortable.” Doss-Gollin agreed: “I certainly didn’t think that those were the kinds of stores that students were going for. It seems like these stores are something that most students aren’t accessing and most people in the community aren’t accessing.” The underlying questions that arise from these issues are who exactly UP is currently tailoring these retailers to and whether they should be appealing to a broader audience.

Student discontentment was perhaps made most public when the Yale Record staged a mock demonstration on the corner of Broadway and York Street asking UP to put in a second Kiko Milano. Carrying satirical signs that read “Kiko Mila-Yes!” and “I’m a father, a veteran, and a proud working mother, and I support 2 Kiko Milanos,” the publication’s contributors sought to express the general confusion among the student body about why Yale chose to bring in these particular high-end retailers.

Alexandra Barlowe, BR ’17, saw the new openings as fairly consistent with Yale’s past role in the community. “I wasn’t surprised by Yale deciding to open up more expensive shops around campus,” she said. “But I do think it is sending a pretty clear and unfortunate message that Yale intends to continue distinguishing itself and its wealth from the rest of New Haven, rather than attempt to integrate itself more into the surrounding community.”

In a UP press release from Thurs., Jul. 31 announcing the opening of these two stores, Associate Vice President for New Haven Affairs and University Properties Lauren Zucker explained Yale’s interest in these retailers: “Feedback from our customer surveys has indicated a strong desire for an affordable cosmetics offering as well as additional exciting brands in New Haven, and those requests are being met. Although these are international companies, these retailers will create local jobs in New Haven and will draw consumers to New Haven to support all of our downtown local merchants.”

According to Nemerson, UP’s rubric for retail success doesn’t necessarily take into account the needs or desires of any single demographic. “Yale Properties holds themselves to the standards of a mall or well organized planned community. If they can assemble successful retailers who pay high rents and can make money, then things must be working pretty well,” Nemerson said. “So they’re maybe not always asking the question, what exactly does a sophomore in TD want to buy when she’s on her way to get a beer or a bite at some place on Chapel Street? Their question is, can we create a strong enough destination to charge 35 dollars a square foot, and still have a business do well—whether it’s Urban Outfitters or Atticus. Success is the best sign of success in a retail environment, and over the 15 years they’ve been at it, the national perception of New Haven as a destination has changed to a remarkable extent.”

While Nemerson emphasized UP’s ultimate goal of making a profit, Karen King added that UP also needs the businesses themselves to be successful. King, community affairs associate for Yale’s office of New Haven and state affairs, said that there is one major consideration in choosing specific retailers that forces UP to cater to non-student demographics: the length of the academic year. “As students are only here about eight months of the year, it is critical to find tenants who serve our immediate local population but also draw shoppers from a wide radius around New Haven,” she said. “Past history would show that the mix on Broadway, for example, cannot be just student friendly or the merchants do not survive.”

Deputy Economic Development Director Fontana agreed that business owners have expressed concern about the effect of the shorter academic year. “A number of retailers and restaurants have said to us that business is very cyclical or erratic depending on whether Yale students are here. They say, we die in the summer when the Yale students go home, so can you find a way to help us become more sustainable—we don’t need to make tons of money while the Yale students are gone, but we need to survive.”

He added that the city is starting to undertake projects of its own intended to help solve this problem of year-round sustainability. “What we’re trying to do at the macro level is to build up a downtown community neighborhood,” he said. “We’ve been avidly pursuing housing development projects all around the downtown. If we can build up a neighborhood of two or three or four thousand people who live in the downtown area separate and apart from the Yale students, we can support a lot of these businesses all year round.”

To an undergraduate student who is only spending four years in New Haven, changes can seem drastic, with all indications pointing toward Yale’s rapid encroachment into the rest of the city. But to someone like John DeStefano, who has been in New Haven all of his life, the changes appear more gradual—and perhaps more welcome. “They don’t own all the property. It might seem like they do. They own four blocks up around Broadway and they own four blocks up around Upper Chapel,” DeStefano remarked. “They don’t control Mid Chapel; they don’t control Lower Chapel; they don’t control the commercial strips; they don’t control Whalley Avenue. If you look at the concentration of properties, it’s in places where the campus is on both sides. I don’t have the sense that Yale is controlling retail in New Haven, because they don’t own most of the storefronts. They own concentrated areas.”

As a corporation, Yale’s interest is to build profits from its investments; as an academic institution, its interest is to develop a host city that is appealing to prospective applicants. Anything beyond its own institutional goals broaches the issue of moral responsibility to the city of New Haven.

Gilvarg suggested that one thing UP could do to help the city beyond its own interests would be to advise on retailing in other parts of New Haven: “One thing that doesn’t happen as often as it ought to is conversations between Yale and the retail community at large. Some potential renters might not be appealing for Yale Properties, but could work elsewhere in the city. Yale could be very helpful in pitching retailers.”

* * *

Gilvarg’s suggestion is a simple one, but right now UP seems more interested in opening stores like Emporium DNA and Kiko Milano than addressing broader city planning issues.

Emporium DNA sits at the tip of the Broadway Triangle, its floor-to-ceiling windows stretching out to reveal immaculate shelves of accessories and neat rows of clothing. Its position on the corner of Broadway and York Street places it at the entrance to Yale’s mini shopping strip—it is intended to be welcoming, inviting. But for many, the bright storefront has the opposite effect; it appears daunting and exclusive. The expensive products sit in full view, but just out of reach.

As the latest addition to UP’s downtown retail portfolio, the luxury department store appears to be what Yale envisions as the future of downtown New Haven. But the student pushback on Yale’s recent acquisition raises the question, if not for the students, then for whom? And with that, we return to the reentry of the middle class to downtown New Haven after several decades of hiatus from the city. With a middle class appeal gaining momentum, Yale University Properties seems to be effectively creating a neighborhood less different from those surrounding Yale’s largest collegiate competitors.

So no, perhaps Yale University Properties is not catering to the students currently walking Chapel and High Streets. Rather, its eyes focus forward, as those of a University corporation must, to the students who will soon be bustling in and out of WLH, students who will perhaps wait to buy their Barbours in New Haven rather than packing them.

At 2 p.m. on Mon., May 27, 2013, the Au Bon Pain located at 1 Broadway shut its doors. The closing was sudden. The cafe’s workers were given only four days notice. And less dramatically, the unexpecting student body that had been happily patronizing ABP since it opened in 1994 was blindsided. The popular cafe did not close because it was having financial trouble. Rather, Yale University Properties simply decided that it wanted a different retailer in that property and chose not to renew the lease.

For the next year and a half, that prime retail property remained boarded up, its windows shielded by advertisements for the previously unheard of but now ever-present “Shops at Yale.” Rumors abounded around campus about what would be filling the vacant spot, the most persistent of which said that the incoming store would be a Brooks Brothers.

On Jul. 31, 2014, Yale announced that a luxury department store called Emporium DNA 2050 would be opening in the coveted spot at the tip of the Broadway Triangle. The store opened for business mid fall. Emporium DNA is a chain owned by IK Retail Group, an American retail management and development corporation, but the store itself offers mainly European designer brands. The store’s high-end merchandise is openly advertised through Emporium’s glass façade—designer purses draped across mannequins clad in dresses that cling to the hard, faceless figures like Saran wrap. At roughly the same time, right next door, Italian cosmetics store Kiko Milano appeared. Its window reveals tables of colorful lipsticks and blushes that, too, look better fitted for European nightclubs than New Haven street corners—or even Toads.

The student body’s reception of the stores has been lukewarm at best and vitriolic at worst. The arrival of these stores represents a larger trend in upscale, chain-oriented development of commercial properties owned by Yale, and recent changes have highlighted that the University’s downtown development interests might not align with needs of the student body or the city at large.

* * *

Today, Yale University Properties—the real estate arm of Yale Corporation—manages a commercial real estate portfolio that includes over 85 retail tenants and 500 residential properties, ranging from American Apparel to the Harrison Court apartment complex. But if you looked at a map of the city dating before 1996, Yale’s reach would have been limited to academic property.

The University acquired most of the downtown property it now owns in what New Haven City Planner Karyn Gilvarg called an “accident of the economy” in 1996. Following the collapse of the housing market, local property manager Joel Schiavone saw most of his holdings foreclose. The city wanted the real estate portfolio to remain as a single package with a single owner to maintain a certain degree of regulation over which retailers were filling the storefronts, and Yale stepped forward as one of the only entities capable of keeping the set of properties intact. Yale created University Properties to manage its newfound commercial real estate portfolio.

This series of unforeseen events presented the University with the opportunity to branch out in an entirely new direction—urban retail development and commercial property management. But the institution saw the possibility of gaining more than simply financial returns on a good investment. The urban crime waves of the eighties and nineties in New Haven were affecting the University’s ability to attract both students and faculty, who were increasingly drawn to safer and generally wealthier cities such as Cambridge and Princeton.

“In the mid 1990s when people felt uncomfortable south of Chapel Street and north of York Street, it created a very bad environment for marketing Yale,” said Matthew Nemerson, New Haven’s economic development director. “The word was, ‘Yale is a great school; New Haven’s not a great town.’ Yale realized that in the internet and post-baby boomer age, it was in their interest to have a wonderful New Haven beyond and all around the campus, and a healthy New Haven everywhere throughout the town, too. The idea of spending millions of dollars to buy non-academic buildings had really never been something that legally or operationally Yale had thought about doing before, and then they took the plunge and that changed everything about downtown.”

UP aggressively retails its downtown properties. Highly regimented and regulated, Yale’s formula for creating a cohesive shopping district is strict, and its near-absolute control over the area gives it the freedom to mold it as they see fit. As with ABP, if the University no longer wants a particular retailer, they can simply choose not to renew the lease.

Bruce Alexander, vice president and director of New Haven and state affairs and campus development, came to Yale in 1996 from the Rouse Company, a national shopping mall developer. His formula for developing Yale’s commercial holdings as a single entity mirrors the strict regulation of mall retailing.

Alexander declined to comment for this article.

“What you see is uniformed hours of operation, shared promotion, shared street furniture and decorations,” former Mayor of New Haven John DeStefano said of UP’s retail development strategy. “You clearly get the sense of a mall. Yale has strict formulas of what kinds of stores are there.”

In other words, UP holds a tight grip on which stores are coming in and how they create a broader economic market—or, rather, a large shopping center. With too many restaurants, the shopping traffic would be concentrated only at night when diners would frequent restaurants for dinner. Yale’s self-contained microeconomy does not thrive on competition, eliminating the need for duplicate stores. (Some observers might argue that J. Crew and Gant don’t serve entirely disparate demographics.) Rather, UP places a clothing store next to a cosmetic store because, like at a mall, a single shopper might be inclined to go first to one and then to the other, maximizing the shopping experience—and also profits.

* * *

It is important to distinguish between Yale University Properties and Yale’s academic holdings. The two are independently managed, and serve their own purposes. The academic portfolio, obviously, houses the educational and research goals of the University. The commercial holdings, meanwhile, grapple with less refined issues—namely what public do these shops cater to, and what is that public looking for.

Yale views its property management project as a benevolent force in the New Haven community; UP is a part of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs, whose establishment, according to its website, “institutionalized the University’s commitment to the city of New Haven. We are committed to enhancing the quality of life in New Haven through the development of high quality retail and office environments and the revitalization of surrounding neighborhoods.” New Haven Deputy Economic Development Director Steven Fontana agreed that the University and the city have a “symbiotic relationship” when it comes to downtown development. Yale does the legwork creating this kind of cohesive shopping center, bringing revenue into New Haven and attracting people from outside the city to spend money.

But despite its inclusion in what sounds like a city-oriented project, UP is nonetheless a corporate entity, entirely independent from Yale’s academic holdings. The properties included in Yale’s campus proper would probably amount to a multi-billion dollar portfolio, but it is a somewhat futile exercise to attempt to put a price tag on Harkness Tower; moreover, it’s not as if Yale has plans to ever sell Sterling Memorial Library or Pierson College.

On the other hand, Yale’s interest in commercial properties, as with all corporate entities, stems from the University’s desire to remodel the area around campus to better suit its own needs—to attract prospective applicants and to build profits. And while the University maintains that the revitalization is a force for good, it is clear that these commercial moves have also exacerbated community divides.

Michael Schaffer, a commercial property manager for the local real estate company C.A. White, sees Yale’s retail development as beneficial to his business. “Honestly they’ve been helpful; they’ve stabilized the retail in this community. Obviously, everyone has a different perspective. My perspective is that the stronger, the better the quality of retailers there, whether it’s serving the undergraduate community or not, they’re providing a good base that attracts more people in from the suburbs to shop in the city—people that have money that are willing to spend money here.”

The example most often cited as a success story about Yale’s retail development is the Apple Store on Broadway, which has broad appeal, ranging from the Yale student to the New Haven resident to the Connecticut suburban family. City Planner Gilvarg acknowledged UP’s role in bringing business to New Haven but questioned whether it helped New Haven more broadly. “The Apple Store might not have come to New Haven without the pushing and prodding of Yale,” she said. “That’s an anchor for New Haven; it brings people here, but then the question is how to get them off Broadway to the rest of the city.” That is, Yale-owned properties are drawing customers, but are they shopping outside UP’s reaches and benefiting the broader New Haven economy?

Another problem is that the Apple Store’s broad appeal is not mirrored in much of the rest of Yale’s retail district. “In general it’s attractively imaged—it gives an inviting, appealing look to people who might not know New Haven very well,” Gilvarg said. “But on the other hand it doesn’t provide a lot of the basic essentials for the people living here. A lot of women like to say that there is nowhere to buy underwear in downtown New Haven.” The concern beyond the inaccessibility of certain necessary products is that the creation of discrete shopping districts is emphasizing the distinction between Yale’s sectors of the city and the rest of New Haven.

James Doss-Gollin, SM ’15, grew up in East Rock. He noted that these distinctions do not present a novel issue for the city, but expressed regret that Yale is not doing more to overturn 300 years of class divisions in New Haven. “They’re not creating separation, but they’re missing an opportunity to integrate the city,” he said. “The city’s been divided for a long time. It’s been town and gown, that’s not new. But they have a really special opportunity now because the University is investing so much money in developing the retail sector. They have an opportunity to make things that both students and the community at large could share.”

DeStefano, on the other hand, maintained that the development of specific retail appeal in specific areas can be healthy for urban growth. “There are distinctions that appear class-based, but I remember how many empty storefronts there were 20 years ago—there were a lot. Now, storefronts are filled, which is a good thing. Do I think there are shopping districts that appeal to different people? Yeah, but when haven’t there been?” He added that the development of distinct retail pockets is a natural occurrence in any city. “To me, it’s no more different than going to lower Manhattan where there are certain neighborhoods that have certain characteristics in the retail. You could say that we have class-based segregation of retail, but really retail serves different markets. Clearly, Upper Chapel and Broadway serve one market, but you don’t have to go far to find something completely different—it’s all pretty close to each other.”

* * *

From March through October of 2014, the landscape of Upper Chapel was disconcerting. Starbucks sat just footsteps away from a squeaky clean Pinkberry. And next door, Panera’s wax-cushioned booths were packed with undergrads filling up on clam chowder bread bowls. A corporate triumvirate had commanded the northern half of the block. Meanwhile, Claire’s—a vegetarian, neighborhood spot—stood its ground just down the block, although ideologically, it was miles away.

Ann Diamond, a community activist and former employee of Yale, said that the changes over the years have made it too difficult for New Haven’s small businesses to thrive in the areas surrounding campus. “I used to go downtown nearly every day and either shop or have lunch or walk around,” she told me. “I never go downtown anymore. There’s nothing for me there. All the small restaurants we used to go to have been pushed out by Yale. There were lots of little shops. Now there’s no reason to go there—you can get the same experience shopping online.”

In addition to potentially hindering the success of local business owners, the absence of affordable local stores is pushing New Haven residents’ consumption out of the city, to big box chains in the suburbs. “Some of my friends have cars, so now we can compete in a way we couldn’t before, it’s not just what we could get to by bus,” Doss-Gollin said. “We like to be downtown, we like New Haven, we all grew up here, but do you want to spend an extra 70 percent to have the same food in New Haven that you could have somewhere else? There’s still stuff here, but mostly it’s pushed us to cheaper chains in East Haven or West Haven.”

The buzzword here is, obviously, gentrification. Beginning as early as the sixties, middle and uppermiddle class families started moving out of the city into the surrounding suburbs, where there was less crime and better public schools. Development of the city over the last couple of decades or so is now causing an inversion of that process—middle and upper-middle class suburban families are moving back to the city, where housing stock has soared, crime has decreased, and schools have improved, causing prices to skyrocket and consequently pushing lower class families out to the suburbs.

“In our business, the role and impact of what is called gentrification is a huge, huge issue,” Nemerson said. “I think that one of the things that people often are really responding to is, when you have a neighborhood that actually works well but suddenly goes to a different price point and loses its ethnic character, that’s a real problem.”

This rising price point is certainly evident in downtown New Haven today. More than pulling people in for a weekend shopping spree, the upscale, luxury chains are now pulling these families to New Haven permanently. This is exactly what Yale is looking for—the comfortable middle class appeal of Princeton and Cambridge. Or, in other words, Yale begins to shed a storied stereotype—all Yalies are forced to endure living in New Haven for four years in exchange for a Yale education. Free of that assumption, the University would expect to attract an even higher caliber of students and faculty. From the perspective of the average New Haven resident, on the other hand, these changes can be catastrophic.

* * *

“I think Emporium DNA is universally disliked by the Yale College student body, regardless of one’s income level,” Andrea Villena, TC ’15, said. “But even if you can afford to shop there, there’s a good chance you won’t want to—I think there’s a lot of stigma surrounding this store and walking out of there with one of those absurdly fluorescent orange bags would make a lot of people uncomfortable.” Doss-Gollin agreed: “I certainly didn’t think that those were the kinds of stores that students were going for. It seems like these stores are something that most students aren’t accessing and most people in the community aren’t accessing.” The underlying questions that arise from these issues are who exactly UP is currently tailoring these retailers to and whether they should be appealing to a broader audience.

Student discontentment was perhaps made most public when the Yale Record staged a mock demonstration on the corner of Broadway and York Street asking UP to put in a second Kiko Milano. Carrying satirical signs that read “Kiko Mila-Yes!” and “I’m a father, a veteran, and a proud working mother, and I support 2 Kiko Milanos,” the publication’s contributors sought to express the general confusion among the student body about why Yale chose to bring in these particular high-end retailers.

Alexandra Barlowe, BR ’17, saw the new openings as fairly consistent with Yale’s past role in the community. “I wasn’t surprised by Yale deciding to open up more expensive shops around campus,” she said. “But I do think it is sending a pretty clear and unfortunate message that Yale intends to continue distinguishing itself and its wealth from the rest of New Haven, rather than attempt to integrate itself more into the surrounding community.”

In a UP press release from Thurs., Jul. 31 announcing the opening of these two stores, Associate Vice President for New Haven Affairs and University Properties Lauren Zucker explained Yale’s interest in these retailers: “Feedback from our customer surveys has indicated a strong desire for an affordable cosmetics offering as well as additional exciting brands in New Haven, and those requests are being met. Although these are international companies, these retailers will create local jobs in New Haven and will draw consumers to New Haven to support all of our downtown local merchants.”

According to Nemerson, UP’s rubric for retail success doesn’t necessarily take into account the needs or desires of any single demographic. “Yale Properties holds themselves to the standards of a mall or well organized planned community. If they can assemble successful retailers who pay high rents and can make money, then things must be working pretty well,” Nemerson said. “So they’re maybe not always asking the question, what exactly does a sophomore in TD want to buy when she’s on her way to get a beer or a bite at some place on Chapel Street? Their question is, can we create a strong enough destination to charge 35 dollars a square foot, and still have a business do well—whether it’s Urban Outfitters or Atticus. Success is the best sign of success in a retail environment, and over the 15 years they’ve been at it, the national perception of New Haven as a destination has changed to a remarkable extent.”

While Nemerson emphasized UP’s ultimate goal of making a profit, Karen King added that UP also needs the businesses themselves to be successful. King, community affairs associate for Yale’s office of New Haven and state affairs, said that there is one major consideration in choosing specific retailers that forces UP to cater to non-student demographics: the length of the academic year. “As students are only here about eight months of the year, it is critical to find tenants who serve our immediate local population but also draw shoppers from a wide radius around New Haven,” she said. “Past history would show that the mix on Broadway, for example, cannot be just student friendly or the merchants do not survive.”

Deputy Economic Development Director Fontana agreed that business owners have expressed concern about the effect of the shorter academic year. “A number of retailers and restaurants have said to us that business is very cyclical or erratic depending on whether Yale students are here. They say, we die in the summer when the Yale students go home, so can you find a way to help us become more sustainable—we don’t need to make tons of money while the Yale students are gone, but we need to survive.”

He added that the city is starting to undertake projects of its own intended to help solve this problem of year-round sustainability. “What we’re trying to do at the macro level is to build up a downtown community neighborhood,” he said. “We’ve been avidly pursuing housing development projects all around the downtown. If we can build up a neighborhood of two or three or four thousand people who live in the downtown area separate and apart from the Yale students, we can support a lot of these businesses all year round.”

To an undergraduate student who is only spending four years in New Haven, changes can seem drastic, with all indications pointing toward Yale’s rapid encroachment into the rest of the city. But to someone like John DeStefano, who has been in New Haven all of his life, the changes appear more gradual—and perhaps more welcome. “They don’t own all the property. It might seem like they do. They own four blocks up around Broadway and they own four blocks up around Upper Chapel,” DeStefano remarked. “They don’t control Mid Chapel; they don’t control Lower Chapel; they don’t control the commercial strips; they don’t control Whalley Avenue. If you look at the concentration of properties, it’s in places where the campus is on both sides. I don’t have the sense that Yale is controlling retail in New Haven, because they don’t own most of the storefronts. They own concentrated areas.”

As a corporation, Yale’s interest is to build profits from its investments; as an academic institution, its interest is to develop a host city that is appealing to prospective applicants. Anything beyond its own institutional goals broaches the issue of moral responsibility to the city of New Haven.

Gilvarg suggested that one thing UP could do to help the city beyond its own interests would be to advise on retailing in other parts of New Haven: “One thing that doesn’t happen as often as it ought to is conversations between Yale and the retail community at large. Some potential renters might not be appealing for Yale Properties, but could work elsewhere in the city. Yale could be very helpful in pitching retailers.”

* * *

Gilvarg’s suggestion is a simple one, but right now UP seems more interested in opening stores like Emporium DNA and Kiko Milano than addressing broader city planning issues.

Emporium DNA sits at the tip of the Broadway Triangle, its floor-to-ceiling windows stretching out to reveal immaculate shelves of accessories and neat rows of clothing. Its position on the corner of Broadway and York Street places it at the entrance to Yale’s mini shopping strip—it is intended to be welcoming, inviting. But for many, the bright storefront has the opposite effect; it appears daunting and exclusive. The expensive products sit in full view, but just out of reach.

As the latest addition to UP’s downtown retail portfolio, the luxury department store appears to be what Yale envisions as the future of downtown New Haven. But the student pushback on Yale’s recent acquisition raises the question, if not for the students, then for whom? And with that, we return to the reentry of the middle class to downtown New Haven after several decades of hiatus from the city. With a middle class appeal gaining momentum, Yale University Properties seems to be effectively creating a neighborhood less different from those surrounding Yale’s largest collegiate competitors.

So no, perhaps Yale University Properties is not catering to the students currently walking Chapel and High Streets. Rather, its eyes focus forward, as those of a University corporation must, to the students who will soon be bustling in and out of WLH, students who will perhaps wait to buy their Barbours in New Haven rather than packing them.

Ratking’s sophomore LP So It Goes opens with a cacophony of voices in a dissonant but intentional chaos that characterizes this frenetic album. The bass drops two successive beats, and then an unnamed character enters, retelling an argument he had with his friend the other night at a bar on Amsterdam Avenue. His friend says that hip-hop is dead, that all music made today is “garbage.” But the unknown voice comes to the defense of contemporary rappers, arguing that the genre has evolved, that it really doesn’t make sense to compare 20-year-old rappers in 2014 to Tupac and Biggie. “So it goes,” he says, before frontman Wiki starts his verse.

This intro encapsulates the album as a whole. Ratking is not looking to regurgitate the kind of rap that has dominated the genre for the past two decades. And with the reference to Amsterdam Avenue, Ratking announces the most important part of their image—they’re from New York. The album is about the chaotic beauty of a 20-something making his or her way through the urban wildlife. Listening to the album, you feel like you’re there, in a city pulsating with life.

But it does eventually get tiresome. The issues they address (such as the brutality of the NYPD and the stop-and-frisk policy) and the detailed pictures that they paint of life in the city are important, even moving. But there are times when it feels like they are forgetting the frenzied image they’re trying to create in favor of reminding the listener of their hometown pride, which is the exact kind of tired trope in rap that they claim to transcend.

But it is overall a hugely successful sophomore issue. The songs “So Sick Stories” and “Puerto Rican Judo,” featuring King Krule and Princess Nokia (Ante-Fling, what up?) respectively, especially stand out. All I can say is that I can’t wait to hear what these guys do next; I’m expecting big things.

Sun Kil Moon’s sixth LP Benji is really more a series of stories set to music than a compilation of songs with lyrics. His songwriting style reminds me of Bob Dylan, whose songs often told similar stories about love and struggle—coming from me, that is a huge compliment.

What sets Sun Kil Moon apart from other storytellers, however, is that every story is true. He adds small details that locate the listener in place and time to reinforce this notion of an underlying truth, but they’re almost unnecessary because I just believe him. In all 11 songs on the LP, someone dies, someone falls in or out of love, and Sun Kil Moon says something melancholy about it all. In a particularly moving song called “Jim Wise,” he tells the story of visiting his father’s friend who is about to go to jail for mercifully euthanizing his wife and then failing at his own suicide immediately afterward. This song is especially successful because it is in many ways subtler than the other tracks, which tend to smack you in the face with their messages. Take, for instance, the two songs dedicated to his mother and father: “I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love” and “I Love My Dad.” I have to believe that Sun Kil Moon is at least partially joking with these absurd titles, but the sentiment behind them is definitely real.

My one real beef with Benji is that the music seems to take a backseat to the lyrics. As skilled of a guitarist as he is, Sun Kil Moon comes off more as a poet who decided to accompany his words with music than as a musician at heart. The LP suffers a bit from this prioritization, but it remains one of the best overall compositions I’ve heard this year.

American Hustle: Honestly my favorite part of the movie was when JLaw sang along to Paul McCartney and The Wings while cleaning her gaudily ‘70s-decorated house.

Gravity: I really just didn’t care about Sandra Bullock’s dead daughter and the line where she tells Houston “No harm no foul … because either way it’s going to be one hell of a ride” is beyond cringe-worthy. Warning: do not see this movie if you are afraid of dying alone.

Her: Warning: do not see this movie if you are afraid of dying alone.

The Wolf of Wall Street: Call me insensitive, but the scene where Leo tosses little people in velcro suits at a giant velcro target is just priceless. But seriously, though, his performance is a (admittedly three-hour) tour-de-force.

You can definitely get away with it,” said Nicholas, talking over the phone from an airport in Baltimore where he was waiting for a flight. A senior in Silliman who requested that his last name not be printed, Nicholas didn’t have his electronic cigarette with him, but he said that he would puff it “discretely” there in the airport terminal if he did. For smokers seeking a nicotine fix without the constant flow of carcinogens into their lungs, these once rare E-Cigarettes are becoming increasingly present in popular culture. But what do we really know about these nicotine machines? As it turns out, the answer is not much at all, and the federal government is hoping a team of Yale researchers will be able to unpack this recently popularized technology.

On Sept. 19, scientists at Yale received a federal grant from the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Health to study the effects of flavored tobacco products and electronic cigarettes. The five-year, $20 million allocation will go towards the creation of the Yale Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science, one of 14 similar centers across the country.

Tobacco addiction remains the most common preventable cause of death in the United States today, a startling statistic that helped spur this new effort to provide the investigation necessary for future regulation. The various grants funding the program are part of a larger effort on the part of the FDA to better regulate various tobacco products. The FDA’s effort is concentrated on seven research goals, some of which include looking into the diversity of tobacco products, reduction of addiction, reduction of toxicity and carcinogenicity, and adverse health effects. Marina Picciotto, professor of psychiatry and one of the core members of Yale’s research team, explained that new nicotine products required the FDA to update its research. “The FDA has new regulatory oversight over tobacco products, and they need to get the science that is appropriate so that they can regulate these products rationally,” she said.

The introduction of new nicotine delivery systems such as E-Cigarettes has left a gap in the necessary research required for federal regulation. Electronic cigarette tech involves heating a nicotine-infused liquid until it evaporates, creating nicotine water vapor that can then be drawn into the lungs. Other ingredients in this mixture often include vegetable glycerine, artificial flavoring, and propylene glycol, a common ingredient in asthma inhalers.

“They are looking for strong scientific support for regulatory decisions they are trying to make,” said Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, associate professor of psychiatry and co-director of the project. One such decision involves the legality of smoking electronic cigarettes indoors. Nicholas was speaking to me from the Baltimore/Washington International Airport, and if he had lit up an electronic cigarette while we were on the phone he would have been breaking Maryland state law. Had he been talking to me from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in Missouri, however, smoking his FIN brand electronic cigarette would have been perfectly legal. In fact, one Blu E-cig advertisement features the actor Stephen Dorff saying to the camera, “With Blu, you can smoke at a basketball game if you want to, and how about not having to go outside every ten minutes when you’re in a bar with your friends?”

 ***

The research effort at Yale will be multidisciplinary, combining programs from the perspective of different departments, including psychiatry and the school of public health. “Each level of investigation will interact closely with the others, so that we can use the science at each level to determine what we will study next,” Picciotto said. The center also features a program that addresses FDA’s changing interests over the five-year period. Benjamin Toll, associate professor of psychiatry and program director of the Smoking Cessation Service at Smilow Cancer Hospital, will head this effort: “We will begin with five pilot programs that will change on a yearly basis,” he said.

The pilot project programs are intended to give Yale’s researchers the capacity to alter the focus of their investigations based on the fluctuating needs of the FDA. As the results begin to flow in, it is expected that the necessary areas of research required for the FDA’s intended regulations will shift based on the findings.

The main focus of Yale’s research will be on what Toll calls “modified risk products,” such as E-Cigarettes and flavored tobacco products, including sugar additives and menthols, an additive that triggers cold-sensitive nerves. The center will seek to explain how these products affect the brain in both adults and adolescents. “There is very little research on the effects of menthol on consumers,” Sven-Eric Jordt, associate professor of psychology, said. “Data shows that sales of menthol products have increased over the years, which is not necessarily true in other countries.”

E-Cigarettes in particular remain somewhat of a mystery to the scientific community, given that limited research has been done on these relatively new products. Though they are sometimes marketed as an alternative option for smoking or even as a method for eventual quitting, there is little scientific evidence to back up this claim, according to the World Health Organization. Because the nicotine is delivered using vapor instead of carcinogens, E-Cigarettes are widely considered to be healthier, though no formal research has been conducted to support these claims.

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Although it remains to be seen what the center’s research will reveal over the next five years, the investigators have several working hypotheses about the outcome of their efforts. The researchers expect to find that flavored tobacco works to intensify the effect of nicotine on the brain: “We think that when sugars or other flavors are combined with nicotine, there is an additive or synergistic effect to increase the addiction,” Picciotto said. The concern is that smokers are experiencing an entirely different biological effect when using these products, an effect that has not been studied and therefore has unknown effects on humans. “We can’t really say what we will find, but there is the hypothesis that in these new products, added flavors can change consumer behavior,” Jordt added. “Certain consumers may favor certain flavors over others and they might also work pharmacologically to drive consumption.” The FDA can’t address any additional risks potentially associated with these unknown effects until more data has been collected.

If this is indeed the case, it certainly would not be the first time that tobacco companies manipulated various nicotine products to increase the possibility of addiction and thereby increase profits. In 2007, Harvard researchers released a study that showed that tobacco companies knowingly increased the nicotine content in their products steadily over a seven-year period between 1997 and 2005 and the increase in nicotine led to skyrocketing levels of cigarette addiction.

Another critical aspect of the research, headed by Krishnan-Sarin, who co-directs the larger initiative, is the study of the effects of these products on younger populations. “We are developing a bio-behavioral understanding of the effects of tobacco on adolescents,” Krishnan-Sarin said. “Flavors can be very attractive forms of initiation of smoking in children and adolescents, and can actually enhance how much adolescents like these products and increase the likelihood of initiation and addiction.”

The regulation of tobacco products has always been largely focused on adolescents. This is in large part due to the interest in tobacco companies of gaining long-term users at a young age, which they achieve by targeting adolescents through marketing and advertising. Yale’s research may provide scientific evidence that flavored tobacco products serve as another means to this end.

Through this interdisciplinary approach, Yale researchers seek to present the federal government with the necessary tools for better regulation of these presently mysterious products. E-Cigarettes, now comprising 10-15 percent of overall cigarette sales, is a massive two billion dollar industry that is only growing. In the past year, the number of middle and high school students who tried alternative nicotine products doubled to 1.8 million. One fifth of those adolescents had never smoked before, reinforcing Krishnan-Sarin’s hypothesis that these products serve as methods of initiation.

 ***

A recent FIN E-Cigarette advertisement featured young men and women in bars and restaurants dressed in 1950s clothing, coolly smoking their E-Cigarettes. The narrator recalled a golden age of smoking, when no one concerned themselves with the health consequences, but did it only for the social appeal. He announces that e-cigarettes promise to return smokers to this age of nonchalance. The ad embodies the efforts of E-Cigarettes to reverse the toxic stigma surrounding smoking that has been built up over the last four decades and return smoking to its former ubiquity.

And the efforts of Yale researchers hope to combat this campaign with hard science.

Early one morning in February, nine unsuspecting writers received a phone call. The speaker on the other line had news that would prove to entirely alter their paths in the literary world.

On the morning of Mon., Mar. 4, Yale University conferred on nine emerging writers the Windham-Campbell Global Literary Prize. The ceremony took place within the translucent walls of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which also administers the award. The prize, in its first year, bestowed to each of its inaugural winners an award of $150,000, totaling $1.35 million. This award joins the lineup of prestigious literary prizes offered by Yale, such as the Bollingen Prize and the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

The nine winners were split evenly among three categories: Jonny Steinberg, Jeremy Scahill, and Adina Hoffman for non-fiction; Naomi Wallace, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Stephen Adly Guirgis for drama; and Zoë Wicomb, James Salter, and Tom McCarthy for fiction. Of the recipients of this global prize, six are from the United States, two from South Africa, and one from England. The prize was limited to English-language writers. The other requirements of the recipients are that they must have one published book (or one professionally-produced play), accept the award in person, and participate in a literary festival on the Yale campus. The festival will take place from Sept. 10–13, 2013. 

President-elect Peter Salovey, GRD ’86, who presented the awards at the ceremony, said of the program, “I think what I love about this prize the most, and why I think it will play a role in world literature, is the focus on emerging writers, where recognition can make a huge difference publicly and where financial support can make a huge difference personally.” 

The funding for the award came from the estate of Donald Windham, who left his fortune to Yale for the purpose of creating such a prize. In his speech at the beginning of the awards ceremony, Michael Kelleher, the director of the program, said that Windham made the donation with very few stipulations. “When he left his estate to Yale in 2010, Donald Windham made very few demands,” Kelleher said, “other than that the awards be made annually in amounts sufficient to provide the recipient with the resources to pursue his or her writing for a year without having to be concerned with outside support.”

The selection process for the award is extremely rigorous: first, a group of nominators “selected for their experience in the literary field,” according to the program’s website, choose an initial list of candidates. The prize does not accept applications or nominations from anyone other than their official nominators. Then, the nominees are judged by one of three juries (one for each category), each with three expert jurors. The finalists are then judged by the selection committee, four of which were named as life-time members by Windham’s will. The other five members are selected by the president of Yale. In the highly confidential process, the prizewinners are not aware that they have been nominated until they are told that they have won. 

 “[The award] allows me to not have to worry so much.” Hoffman said. “Basically, this will sustain me through most of the remnants of my books, if all goes well. So it relieves a kind of pressure, but I should say, it’s not just a financial thing, it’s also a psychological thing. It makes it easier to sit down at your desk in the morning.” Hoffman, whose work has mostly revolved around Israeli relations with the Middle East, splits her time between Jerusalem and New Haven. She described the focus of her work as “deeply involved in the life of the Middle East, in particular the lives of people who are often overlooked in more conventional accounts of what happens in the Middle East.”

“Impossible,” said Wicomb, a South African fiction writer who lives in Glasgow, Scotland, in her official press statement upon receiving the award. “For a minor writer like myself, this is a validation I would never have dreamt of. I am overwhelmed—and deeply grateful for this generous prize. It will keep me for several years, and it will speed up the writing too since I can now afford to go away when the first draft proves difficult to produce in my own house.”

As the prize concludes its inaugural year, Kelleher is looking to expand the reach of the program. “We’re going to have a literature festival here in September, and my hope is that we really are going to make this festival part of the fabric of student life here on campus.” He added, “We’re going to have a book club that runs throughout the school year; we’re going to recommend one book from each author on our website throughout the year, in the hopes that students will be encouraged to read it, and that faculty will be encouraged to put some of these books on their syllabi.”

You go through the most painful of treatments. You’re drained physically and emotionally. You’re greeted by countless ‘congrats.’ You feel guilty complaining, when you are constantly being told how lucky you are to have made it,” said a breast cancer survivor who asked to remain anonymous. But what no one talks about is what happens “after you survive cancer—the problems you face, especially as a woman.”

In the world of cancer treatment—one that is in constant fluctuation as new treatments regularly emerge—medical professionals have traditionally placed great emphasis on physical diagnosis and prognosis. The questions that doctors address relate almost exclusively to outcome and longevity, and far more rarely to quality of life. Recently, however, a new facet of treatment has begun to emerge: survivorship.

This developing field addresses the realities cancer patients face after they have undergone intensive treatments, including various surgeries and chemotherapy. Survivorship encompasses a wide range of issues relating to rehabilitation, but the medical community has only recently begun to address the relationships of cancer survivors to their sexuality, bodies, and fears for the future.

The Sexuality, Intimacy, and Menopause Clinic at the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, which opened in Jan. 2008, is one of the first centers in the country to focus exclusively on rebuilding the lives of women after they have survived cancer. The clinic aims to help female cancer survivors, most of whom battled uteran, ovarian, vulvar, or breast cancer, to reconnect with their bodies, sexuality, and loved ones by addressing problems ranging from loss of sex drive to early onset menopause. The clinic, which currently holds workshops once a month, was co-founded by Elena Ratner, MD, who specializes in gynecologic oncology, and Mary Jane Minkin, MD, whose specialties are obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences.

Drs. Ratner and Minkin created the clinic in partnership with Dr. Dwain Fehon, PsyD, the chief psychologist of psychiatric services at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Their goal was to create a clinic that employs what they term a “multidisciplinary approach,” integrating the often-divided medical and psychological approaches to cancer treatment. In the past, the fields of psychological treatment and physical treatment remained separate—and even, at times, at odds—from one another. The doctors at the SIMS clinic view this separation as a hindrance to total care. At the monthly clinic, cancer survivors can choose from various treatment options including: acupuncture, reike, physical therapy, individual and couples’ counseling, and both medical and herbal remedies.

In creating the SIMS clinic, the doctors sought to fill what they saw as a void in the traditional approach to cancer treatment. “As cancer doctors we are very aggressive with treatment itself,” Ratner said, “but after it’s over, we often forget that patients are left with certain deficits.”

In addition to doctors’ concerted focus on the solely physical treatment of the cancer, patients themselves also often remain unaware of the post-treatment consequences of their illness. One 58-year old breast cancer survivor (who asked to remain anonymous and to whom this article will refer to as Jane Smith), confirmed that upon hearing her diagnosis, she did not consider the sexual repercussions of the cancer: “Honestly, I don’t know what I expected to feel about my ffsexuality and intimacy. When I heard I had breast cancer I just was panicked about surviving and being there for my children.” She continued, “Once I got through the surgery and knew that I was doing well, only then did I feel the physical and psychological consequences of breast cancer. Not only did I have my breasts removed, but I went right into menopause. There was a period where I felt like I was in a dream and had become an old, sexless eunuch.”

A research study conducted by the University of Chicago Medical Center demonstrated that Smith was not alone in her predicament. Indeed, the study’s results, which sampled from 216 female cancer survivors, showed that 41.6 percent of patients were interested in seeking treatment for issues with their sexuality. Only seven percent had actually received it.

Fehon explained that impetus, at least in part, for creating the clinic: “There are very few cancer centers throughout the country that address issues of sexuality and sexual functioning within the care of oncology patients,” she said. The clinic’s efforts to improve the quality of post-cancer life can largely be divided into three categories: menopause, pain, and rehabilitation.

Fehon described the patient pool for the clinic’s menopause treatment as “largely young women who, as a result of their cancer or surgery or chemotherapy, are now experiencing menopause.” The treatment goes beyond the addressing the physical symptoms of menopause, she said. “There is a host of emotional and psychological issues, relating to not being able to have children anymore, the body changes that go along with that, and the changes in sexual functioning that can occur as a result of menopause,” she said. “This creates a strain not only within the individual, but also within a couple’s relationship.”

Emblematic of the hybrid medical and psychological approach the clinic has adopted, SIMS offers both estrogen treatments to help ease the symptoms of menopause and therapeutic counseling.

The pain most patients at the clinic encounter occurs during sexual intercourse. The clinic addresses both the physical and psychological factors that contribute to this common issue among cancer survivors.

Finally, the clinic seeks to rehabilitate the sex lives of its patients. According to Fehon, the SIMS physicians assist their patients in the process of “rebuilding one’s life after one’s had cancer, reintegrating the changes with one’s self and one’s body, and reestablishing a healthy sense of identity to move forward.”

Smith agreed that the sexual transition after treatment was exceedingly difficult. “After my surgery for breast cancer where I had a mastectomy, I was numb for the first year about my body and sexuality. I forced myself to look at my breast reconstruction, but I felt very self-conscious about anyone else seeing these breasts. I felt like these breasts were only for show, to make my clothes look normal, but they really were not part of me.” Smith added that in addition to her own personal issues with her reconstructive surgery, she also had to contend with the reactions of others. “My husband tried to act like he had no problem but I could see him flinch and look away when I got undressed. I had no interest in sex for quite awhile. I also have to admit that I felt like men no longer would find me attractive if they knew I no longer had ‘real’ breasts.”

The clinical program addresses the treatment of these three principal issues through its hallmark multidisciplinary approach. The potential value of combining approaches to both behavioral and physical matters is only recently beginning to permeate the culture of the medical community. “Over the last decade there has been a greater emphasis on the value of integrating psychological and medical care,” Fehon said. “It provides better care for patients, because it involves the recognition that they have complex needs that involve comprehensive and complex approaches to their treatment. That improves patient outcomes and the satisfaction that patients feel through their medical care: they feel understood.”

In addition to the benefits of a multidisciplinary approach for their patients, the doctors also are hopeful that such an approach can help change the culture of field separation in the medical community at large. “We learn from each other,” Fehon noted. “That also helps in subtle ways change the culture from a traditional medical model that has not felt comfortable with asking about the emotional lives of patients to one where there is more willingness and receptiveness to integrating the psychological with the medical.”

Smith agreed that the traditional approach to cancer treatment simply does not suffice in terms of long-term quality of life. “The oncologists often only have time for traditional medical checkups and don’t assist in ongoing, untraditional health recommendations like herbal treatments for cancer survivors.” she said. “It would be great to have one place where you could go to talk about medical concerns and psychological advice.”

Through their work, the doctors at the SIMS clinic also hope to rewrite the taboos in the medical community toward discussing patients’ relationships with sexuality. “By asking routine questions about sexuality, it becomes the norm,” Ratner said. “I cannot tell you how many women have said that this acknowledgement alone makes a huge difference.”

Four years after its initial opening, the clinic is now seeking to expand. Having hired an advanced-practice nurse practitioner, the cofounders of the clinic hope to reach even more patients. The clinic also hopes to meet more regularly: beginning at twice a month and potentially moving to once a week. According to Minkin, the clinic is also looking to offer fertility preservation for young women diagnosed with cancer, whose chemotherapy may affect their ovaries.

“We’re also very interested in research,” Minkin said. “We are basically doing sexual surveys with everyone coming in to see how our intervention has an impact on sexual satisfaction scales.”

Furthermore, Fehon hopes to extend the range of services to men as well. “The issues of sexuality are not specific to women; they are relevant to men throughout the cancer center as well,” he said. “Sexuality and sexual functioning are a huge concern among patients who have prostate cancer, testicular cancer, especially, but again, it’s not just specific to those cancers that affect organs that we most associate with sexual functioning. Because sexuality, identity, sexual functioning, and quality of life are so tightly connected to emotional functioning in general. So these types of issues can be experienced by anyone with any kind of cancer.”

While not unique, the SIMS clinic at the Smilow Center is one of very few of its kind around the United States, and the cofounders of the clinic hope that its success will lead to the creation of other such programs. Their main concern, however, is to continue offering the “total care” approach that their project touts. “Cancer survivors have the same desires in life that we all do,” Ratner said. “We need to stop treating the cancer and start treating the woman.”