The buildings themselves are a pale, unchanging beige, but the burst of color—magenta, almost rose pink—was visible from halfway down the block. As I walked down Church Street from Union Station, I saw the curl of color take shape on the second story wall of the last unit. It was a small mural of a tree, clumps of bright leaves and branches reaching up. The painting filled the side of a wall that, even from a distance, I could see bore deep cracks and tracks of rain and dirt. Where the tree limbs ended, the signs of disrepair crept out.

Last month, previously ignored residents of these Church Street housing developments started fighting this dilapidation in more tangible ways, on a far broader scale—they took legal action against the private owner. The city faces the challenge of relocating 289 families, and these families face the challenge of leaving their homes. In this week’s front, Lily Sawyer-Kaplan, ES ’17, explores the future of the residents and the fate of buildings that they will soon leave behind.

Elsewhere in the paper, Taylor Eldridge, BR ’16, condemns Yale’s response to a recent altercation in the context of violence against Black Americans. In Culture, Julia Hamer-Light, SM ’18, brings issues of racial bias and mass incarceration to light in a discussion of a recent Artspace conference. And Natalie Yang, ES ’18, asks us to move beyond passive reading to action. Take her advice–read us this week, then don’t just think about it. Talk about it.

A bespectacled man in a gray blazer and a navy blue tie sits on a couch, flanked by two students. He smiles magnanimously as the students around him sing. “A master brings us all together as our senior prof., hosting study breaks and lectures for when we need time off.” The master jumps in, sweeping his hands decisively through the room: “Who’d like to see a Broadway show? I’ll gladly subsidize. Let’s host another concert; I’ll proudly harmonize.” He sings of late-night snacks and Master’s Teas, where celebrities and intellectuals will share their stories with students. The scene fades out to Branford courtyard, dappled in sun.

In his office on the second floor of SSS, Psychology Professor Frank Keil sits across his desk from me, cutting slices off an apple with a small, wooden-handled knife. His hair and beard, graying in the video, now verge on white and, with blue books and papers piled on his desk, Keil looks slightly and reassuringly disheveled in comparison to his online persona. His voice comes out gentle and gravelly; it’s a surprise, after his resounding baritone. “Oh, that was not my voice,” Keil said.

Keil stepped down from his role as master of Morse College three years ago. In his 11-year tenure, he said his role was to “support and enable” the residential college community—“To create a community that is far more than a dorm. To create a community where intellectual, social, and moral issues are all blended together, and to elevate the whole experience to show that there is not an artificial boundary between your classroom and the living room.” He hoped to foster “deep intellectual discourse, sensitivity to others, and learned discussion.”

Two weeks before I spoke with Keil, Geoffrey Smith, PC ’15, sat across from me, tucked into one of the booths in the Pierson buttery. Over the sizzle of the first quesadillas of the night, he said that “despite being corny as heck, [the video] is a reasonable model of how masters interact with their college.”

Smith explained that, while he is supportive of the system of masters, he sees their role as two-fold: to host events, and to be a faculty presence in the colleges. “If Yale wants more than that, it would be quite conceivable to have a model where masters’ primary focus is helping the students of their college succeed, and being a warm, happy presence,” Smith said. “But that, for me, is kind of Yale’s call.”

This May, the masters of Morse, Saybrook, Silliman, and Timothy Dwight will step down. One month ago, University President Peter Salovey, GRD ’86, announced the appointment of EEB Professor Thomas Near as Saybrook master, and Sociology Professor Nicholas Christakis, ES ’84, as Silliman’s. As of publication, the remaining two masters had not been announced. A third of the masters are leaving this year—the most turnover that the position has seen in a single year in nearly three decades—and, within the past three years, another three colleges have received new masters. A new ten-year term limit implemented under the presidency of Richard Levin, GRD ’74, will only maintain turnover at a heightened pace. As such, a renewed look not only at the process of appointment but also at the position itself is warranted.

“A lot of people don’t know what masters do, and I think that’s the problem with a lot of masters,” said Colleen Kenney, SM ’17. As a board member of the Silliman Activities & Administrative Committee, Kenney sees Silliman Master Judith Krauss, NUR ’70, every week. She said, though, that relationships with masters are variable. “I have the utmost respect for [Master Krauss], because I know all the things she does for the college,” Kenney said. But, she says, Krauss’s dedication frequently remains unrecognized. “She’s been here for 14 years. She knows the college. She is Silliman.”

While masters hold the capacity to shape students’ experiences, the fact that the students they lead frequently do not recognize the role they play highlights a deep split in understanding of the mastership. Smith said that the model provided in “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” the goofy, viral advertisement for the University that featured Keil, is a fairly comprehensive account of the role of today’s masters. But these words fail to capture the professed mission of the nearly dozen incoming, current, and former masters who spoke with me. Many described aims—of shaping the intellectual, moral, and social life of the college, of fostering a college’s personality, of enriching students’ experiences, of guiding them, of being a first layer of support in times of need—that, after conversations with students, sound discordantly ambitious.

Eighty years ago, masters selected the students for their own colleges, and played a central role in shaping their colleges’ independence. Today, the degree to which masters inform students’ undergraduate experience is far from readily apparent. What is clear, though, is that in the face of a push to equalize the undergraduate experience, masters are one of, if not the only, remaining force that is not only permitted but also encouraged to make students’ undergraduate experience variable. Starting the summer before matriculation, and extending after graduation, one of the first questions that people ask if they learn you go to Yale is the name of your college. The masters are, in large part, trying to ensure that this question remains relevant.

***

The role of a master is intentionally ambiguous. When asked to explain their job, many masters described their influence in leading the social and intellectual life of the college. They unanimously cited a devotion to students, and many described the split in scope of influence between the individual and community-level. While deans are responsible for individual students, they said, masters are responsible for the college as a collective.

Christakis, who will assume Krauss’ role in Silliman next fall, assured me, “There must be some formal description of the role of masters.” And, after a beat: “I’m sure there is some formal description somewhere.” When I asked Calhoun Master Julia Adams, who became master last fall, what her job description is, she chuckled and told me that she isn’t quite sure. “The job is, initially, probably a bit mysterious to everyone,” she said.

Timothy Dwight Master Jeffrey Brenzel, TD ’75, who is stepping down after five years as master at this year’s close, told me, though, that the lack of definite description is fundamental to the role. Brenzel said that, when he talked to then-TD Master John Loge before assuming his position, he asked Loge to describe the job to him. “And he looked at me, and he thought about it for a couple minutes. And he goes, ‘Be present to the students.’” Here, Brenzel falls silent for a moment and glances around his dark wood-paneled study, amused and still a bit incredulous. “‘So, okay, that’s it?’ And he said that yes, that’s it. ‘Be present to the students.’” Brenzel shakes his head. “And I said, ‘Can you flesh that out a little?’”

But, Brenzel went on to tell me, that directive proved “precisely correct. That was the best description of the job that I’ve heard,” he said.

When, ultimately, I obtained the formal job description from the Yale College Dean’s Office, it provided little insight into the position. According to the document, last updated eight years ago, as “head and ranking officer” of the college, the master is responsible for the college’s “educational, intellectual, social, athletic, and artistic life,” as well as its administration and supervision of funds. As the description concludes, masters “have the freedom to establish what are widely held to be the best residential colleges of the country.”

***

The residential colleges were born, in part, from one student’s loneliness. As History Professor Jay Gitlin, CC ’71, MUS ’74, GRD ’02, explained to me, Edward Harkness, YC 1897, the alum who financed the creation of the residential colleges, “apparently felt like he was isolated as a student at Yale.”

In 1926, Harkness proposed that the University create quadrangles modeled on those that he and other academics had experienced at Oxford and Cambridge. Seven years later, Yale broke ground on the colleges, which were among the first of their kind in the country and were intended to foster community, alleviate isolation, and shape students’ moral, intellectual, and social lives. At the helm, the master, modeled on Oxbridge “Doms,” would lead the colleges.

As former Stiles master A. Bartlett Giamatti, YC ’60, GRD ’64, wrote during his time as university president in the early 1980s, “[The master] is the person upon whom the success of our whole enterprise most delicately, persistently, and enduringly depends. The master is the point of reconciliation for all the academic energies, personal values, and administrative wisdom that has made and makes the college system successful.”

For the first 30 years, masters shaped the colleges in a transparently tangible way: At the close of freshmen year, each master selected students to his own college based on applications and, if applicable, legacy status. This led to distinct and widely recognized reputations that, Gitlin said, in many cases closely mirrored the affinities and personalities of the masters. Jonathan Edwards College, known for being musical, had a master from the music department; Davenport, Pierson, and others were “white shoe,” filled with students who were “socially adept, good dressers.” Calhoun, Gitlin’s own residential college, was the most social college. “Anytime you went some place, the girls would ask what college you’re in at Yale. If you said Calhoun, all of a sudden you got winks and smiles,” Gitlin said. And, somewhat haltingly: “It had a reputation.”

The push towards unity and equity began, in earnest, in the mid-1960s, when a centralized Office of Admissions began admitting students to the University and randomly assigning them to colleges the summer before they matriculated. Five years ago, in 2010, the colleges’ funds and alumni gifts were redistributed to equalize the budgets across the 12 colleges.

As Pierson Master Stephen Davis, GRD ’98, told me, “In the past, part of the problem with the system of masters was that each sort of operated their own fiefdom. There was independence to a fault.” Gitlin agreed: “Each college at Yale was like its own little republic, and the master was the ambassador.”

Today’s masters come from a faculty that faces not only higher teaching loads, but also greater demands for research and community involvement. As Mark Ryan, GRD ’71, GRD ’74, former JE Dean, wrote in his 2001 book, The Collegiate Way of Living: Residential Colleges and A Yale Education, the mastership was initially seen as “a vital and prestigious position in its own right.” Beyond this inherent prestige, each mastership came with the promise of a professorship for the appointee.

Now, the candidates are almost exclusively tenured professors, a shift that, according to Ryan, has brought out a tension in the selection process. “From time to time in the past, the difficulty in persuading faculty to take the post has been an open campus secret,” Ryan wrote. Today’s professors, “knowing that a master’s functions have little to do with their scholarly pursuits, are often likely to evade the task.”

When I asked Martha Highsmith, senior advisor to the president and the provost, why the TD and Morse masterships remain unfilled, she said it was indicative of nothing greater than the need to accommodate the president’s busy schedule and to give candidates time to make a thoughtful decision. She said that the offer to be master “is not the kind of thing where a lot of people turn you down.” According to Dean of Yale College Jonathan Holloway, GRD ’95, the positions would ideally be filled before spring break. This year’s high number of committees, though, led to an unusually complicated scheduling process that necessitated the delay.

***

The search for the new masters began nearly four months ago. Holloway said that once he hears that a master is stepping down, the president organizes a search committee that usually consists of several students, two fellows or affiliated faculty members, and one full professor who serves as chair. The committee’s first meeting, at the close of the fall semester, takes place in Woodbridge Hall, where each committee member signs a confidentiality agreement. Holloway said that, while the confidentiality is standard for University committees, it does make the master’s search “trickier.” “Committees, if they are going to pick or recommend somebody, usually interview them.” But Holloway shakes his head, once. “Can’t interview them.”

The confidentiality, which spans from the time that the president first convenes the committee until the time that the new master is announced, at once keeps the process out of the University’s public conscience and allows egos to remain intact. “If you know you are a player and you don’t get it, in the past this has caused otherwise very talented people to become bitter, and to not invest in Yale,” explained EEB Professor Stephen Stearns, BR ’67, who chaired the Saybrook committee.

It also renders the masters, students, and the committee itself unsure of how the final decisions take place. Professor of Music Theory Daniel Harrison, GRD ’86, who led the Silliman search committee, told me that he does not know how the final decision is made. The committee’s role ends once it makes its recommendations to the president; then, he said, “it goes private.”

When I asked Near, who will become Saybrook Master next fall, why he thought he was selected, he cited his years of commitment to Saybrook, his service on the University’s Executive Committee, and his time as a resident advisor at Northern Illinois State University. But, then, he trailed off. “You know, I’m just guessing, because it’s a very non-transparent process. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not questioning the process,” he said, emphatically shaking his head with each iteration. “But it is rather mysterious, how it moves forward.”

Stearns put it more bluntly: “It’s a kind of higgledy-piggledy process.”

Harrison’s office, two floors up in an office on Elm Street, has two windows. One, small and circular, would look out onto the street if it weren’t far above eye-level; the other, a large, six-paned window, frames a view of Silliman’s white alabaster exterior. “It’s always uncomfortable if people are thinking that they are getting discussed behind closed doors,” Harrison said. “It’s much better just to shut up and keep it quiet.”

Stearn echoed Harrison. “It was explained to us that the cost of this process, which is the loss of information, is not as great as the benefits, which is that people don’t get disappointed if they aren’t named,” he said.

Soon after the committees’ first meeting, Salovey and Holloway emailed each college’s students, fellows, and staff, announcing the committees and soliciting recommendations and suggestions. While this input could come in the form of specific names, both Stearns and Harrison said that even more helpful were the suggestions of character traits. “We really wanted to know, from the student point of view, what are the characteristics of a good master,” Stearns said. Harrison refused to tell me what any of these character traits were, saying that, when students write, “‘What we want from a master is X, Y, and Z,’ it can be read as an indictment of ‘A, B, and C’—of the current master.”

There also exists an informal pool or, as Harrison put it, “a list of people that is already known to decision-makers in Woodbridge Hall,” who, even before the search process begins, are leading candidates for the position. Holloway said that many of the people on this “short list” teach popular classes and have done significant community work in the University. Generally, they are tenured professors and have been at the University for years, although there exist exceptions—including Christakis, who arrived at Yale under two years ago.

“The pool of people who are eligible is relatively small, and they are known quantities,” Holloway said. He said this justifies the lack of an interview process. “We are dealing with a closed community.”

Once the committees canvass student input, they begin narrowing down their lists. He said that they aimed to find candidates who were “dedicated to the undergraduate experience.” While Holloway said that it varies by area of study, “tapping somebody who doesn’t have tenure for these positions is like a career killer, because it takes so much time away from your scholarship.” Stearns’ committee viewed candidates having kids as a plus.

Stearns also said that attention to diversity was “explicitly discussed.” Holloway, too, stressed that they hoped to select a diverse pool of leaders. He said that, while there had been “an occasional master here or there” who represented gender, racial, or ethnic diversity, even intellectual diversity was still “sort of a brand new thing for the masters.”

Yale’s first female undergraduates entered the University in the 1969; two years later, the University appointed its first female master. Since then, though, of the 78 masters that have been appointed, only 15 have been female. And while five of the University’s 12 current masters are female, two are among those stepping down at this year’s close. Since the early 90s, just over 15 percent of new masters have been people of color. These numbers do not diverge drastically from the gender or racial diversity of Yale’s faculty, or of the faculty of most peer institutions. Nonetheless, Holloway said that the search aims to emphasize diversity of all types.

Beyond any baseline qualifications, though, Harrison and Stearns said that they searched for intangibles: leadership-building experience, likableness, reliability, trustworthiness, and dedication. “We were looking for information about character, rather than standard measures of accomplishment,” Stearns said. With interviews disallowed and conversations with anyone about the candidates prohibited, Stearns said they turned to their laptops. “Google was our friend,” he said. Harrison said that he and his committee “read webpages” and worked off the prior knowledge of their fellow committee members.

“We had to go and try to figure out what these people were like, just based on our network,” Stearns said. They read the résumés and biographies that they found online; they also read online course evaluations. “But since we are forbidden from interviewing people, it’s kind of a guess. You know?”

***

After a few laps around the courtyard I find the door, tucked in the far left corner, where the concrete buildings that ring the courtyard drop low. On the other side of the buildings, the Charles River sleepily slides by. It’s the last morning before spring break, and the courtyard is quiet. On the door, slightly askew cutouts of two faces labeled “Dr. Mike” and “Christie” smile at me.

Inside, at the end of a short hallway, is the office of Christie McDonald and Michael Rosengarten, co-masters of Mather House, one of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate residential houses. In these houses, which Harkness funded at the same time that he financed the creation of Yale’s colleges, masters can choose to serve jointly in the position as co-masters, splitting the job’s responsibilities. The majority of Harvard’s house masters, like McDonald and Rosengarten, are married couples who choose to serve together.

McDonald sits on a chair identical to those that line the tables in Pierson dining hall 140 miles south; her husband, in a crimson vest, leans back into a crimson and white-striped armchair next to her. “We did go through an extensive interview process,” McDonald tells me. “The interviews were with student committees, with everybody,” Rosengarten says. The year they were interested in becoming masters, there were openings in three houses. McDonald says that, for each house, “It was a day-long operation.”

They described meeting not only with students but also with tutors, the college’s staff, the building manager, administrators, the assistant to resident dean, the resident dean, and the college dean. “We met with everybody, really,” McDonald said. “It was an interesting experience. Even though it took a lot of time, it was actually terrific.”

The masters and others who I talked with at Yale said that maintaining faculty members’ commitment, which could be impacted if they knew they had been up for consideration but not chosen, outweighed the information lost to confidentiality. McDonald and Ronsegarten said that, to their knowledge, their selection process “was not public at all.” But they emphasized the importance of talking with students, with whom they “met over meals, and had very good conversations” about their prospective mastership. In New Haven, there exists the fear that the student voice might be lost, or at least subordinated to that of the administration.

“Right from the first meeting, it is made clear that the president can do whatever the heck he wants,” Stearns said. While Holloway said that the committee work is “not for show” and that “their recommendations really matter a lot to the president and to me,” ultimately, the president is not bound by the committee’s recommendations.

But, Gitlin argued, this may be for the best. “This matter is not one that students are going to decide. It’s one that administrators, faculty, and people who are here for more than four years are going to decide,” he said. Kate Wiener, CC ’15, a freshman counselor and former master’s aid, agreed. “Students, in some ways, are the most transient part of this place,” she said. “Maybe they shouldn’t have this overall say of what Yale should be, because in four years you’re gone.”

The search ends with a phone call. Holloway said he received his call while on sabbatical in California. “I thought I was in trouble. I thought, ‘I didn’t do anything!’” He said. “It wasn’t even anything near my radar screen.” Adams, the Calhoun master, remembered that when Salovey offered her the position, “I was shocked and delighted.”

Once the master accepts, the president and the dean gather the students in the college to announce the new mastership. According to Stearns, “the pageantry, the theater of [the announcement] is explicitly discussed, and set up from the start.” Christakis, who served as a Harvard house master before coming to Yale, was announced as master last month. “There is a dramatic announcement in the dining hall, which creates a little enthusiasm by the students,” Christakis said. “And I think that students like some of the pomp and circumstance that comes from coming to these old universities.” He said, at Harvard, “I don’t think they did that. I think just an email was sent out, or something.”

In the time between the announcement and when the new masters take their positions next fall, one half-day of training will take place. In 2011, Mary Miller, then-Dean of Yale College, implemented the training program, modeled on the year-long training that college deans undergo. There is, further, now a mentorship program for new masters, in which incoming masters are paired with more experienced colleagues. Many masters, both those who were appointed before and after the training day began, said that the bulk of their training comes in conversations with former masters, and from learning by experience.

Holloway said that the training was key in the same way that the lack of a clear-cut, unified job description was intentional. “The masters are kind of these wild cards. And we like them to be wild cards,” Holloway said. “The residential college deans really are supposed to be offering the same decision and interpretation on everything. That’s the ideal. But the masters?” He smiles, and leans back in his chair. “We expect a little bit of chaos.”

***

            But in a University that has pushed for equity and unity in the undergraduate experience for the last half century, is there a place for this chaos? The cohesion that Yale otherwise encourages seems to fall directly at odds with the expectation that, as part of the University’s senior leadership, masters should mold distinct experiences for their students.

Students themselves describe a divergent understanding of the masters’ role, although this gap is likely far from intentional. “I think Master Brenzel is really, really awesome,” said Dom Lounds, TD ’15. “So I’m always a little sad to hear people say, ‘What does he do? I don’t talk to him.’”

Fabiola Davila, MC ’15, said that, for her, the master’s role is to “throw awesome study breaks,” and to be “the face of the college.” But beyond that? “I don’t know all of the jobs she has,” Davila said.

I met Joshua Rosenfeld, MC ’16, at 9:30 p.m. last Wednesday; he had just returned from an intramural volleyball game. This winter, Rosenfeld served on the selection committee for the Morse master. He acknowledged, too, that few undergraduates understand the depth of the master’s role. “The master does a lot of different things for the community, and a lot behind the scenes that students wouldn’t even begin to know about,” Rosenfeld said. Emma Poole, SM ’17, added, “A lot of the time, they get tasked with the things that go unseen.”

Smith said that former longtime Pierson Master Harvey Goldblatt, GRD ’72, GRD ’78, was so successful because “he was a Pierson partisan. Though Master Davis runs Pierson College, he hasn’t done anything in particular to suggest that it is better than other colleges. Which sounds silly—why the heck would he want to suggest that Pierson is better than all the other colleges? Clearly, we are all the same,” Smith said. “But advancing their own college is part of the masters’ prerogative.”

While many said the colleges used to be variable to a fault, their individualism was so valued, in part, because it naturally fueled college pride. Today, this pride has a different, and more ambiguous, tenor. As Poole said, her master makes an effort to communicate that their college is “an obvious, overt, team—really just hammering you on the head with the ‘Let’s be a team!’ type thing.”

Davis, the Pierson master, said that a gathering of the masters soon after he was appointed fell on the night of an intramural final. And, Davis said of the two masters whose colleges were competing, “They were trash talking! And I thought, ‘So, this is how it is,’” Davis said. “But it was good natured, and you could see the way that the college rivalries buoyed up a sense of ownership and identity.”

The masters are one of, if not the only, last vestige of a college system defined by individualism. As initially conceived, this distinctiveness lay at the colleges’ core. Working with a deliberately selected student population and far-reaching independence, the masters could powerfully shape their colleges. In intentionally promoting excellence in one specific sphere or another, from sports to arts to music to science, masters fueled in their students a sense of superiority over their peers in neighboring colleges.

Now, with housing randomized, funds equalized, and an expectation of standardization overlaying the deans’ role, this dynamic has fundamentally changed. And at the core of this shift lies an unavoidable tension: Yale’s undergraduates are meant to believe that their residential college experiences are simultaneously the same as, and superior to, that of their peers. As such, the masters remain perhaps uniquely positioned to overtly assert their own colleges’ superiority, however they choose to do so.

Near, the newly appointed Saybrook master, said that the president and the dean made this expectation clear to him from the start. “You already have to walk in being the master for everybody, and also have this attitude of, ‘We are a community. We are a named community.’ We have our own crest and shield, you know? We have a place on this campus. And we are not the place that is next door.” Near grins, and taps his finger on the table, once. “This is us.”

Doug McKee is an economics professor, and he likes to think in terms of incentives. He also knows that the incentives for teaching at Yale are broken. On a Friday morning earlier this month, McKee leaned forward in his chair, across his desk at me. “At least in the Econ department, junior faculty are hired, and promoted, and granted tenure based on their research,” McKee said. “The incentives are entirely on research and very, very little on teaching.”

The day before, I had sat at another desk, two blocks down Hillhouse Ave., across from Tamar Gendler, PC ’87, who oversees hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Gendler told me, unflinchingly, “What we are looking for in our faculty is a convergence of two things: world leadership in scholarship and true excellence in pedagogy.”

But, Gendler said, if you are not a world leader in “pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge” in your area of expertise, “there are many, many other places that don’t have as their mission that every single member of their faculty be a world leader, that can happily take you as a teacher.” She added that this loss of a professor to another institution “isn’t, in the scheme of things, a loss to pedagogy.”

But paired with a lack of support for and recognition of exemplary teaching, Yale University’s insistence on world-class research could well be a loss to the students at Yale College. The University professes a dual mission: to be a world-class research institution and to support excellence in teaching. It is clear that Yale has succeeded in the first aim, but the second remains far from certain. This fall, a restructuring of the Provost’s office placed Gendler in charge of the faculty, and the University created a new Center for Teaching and Learning aimed at providing resources for professors to improve. But as Yale’s attempt to promote instruction reveals, the question of how to support both research and teaching—and whether this duality is sustainable, or even advisable—is something that the University is still struggling to understand.

***

“Yale sells itself as ‘the large research institution where you still have a wonderful undergraduate experience.’ And I think it’s true; that’s why I came here,” says Scott Stern, BR ’15. He sinks back into a couch in the Branford buttery and looks over at me. “But Yale is at risk of losing its soul because of its monomaniacal focus on research. I find it disturbing.” He shakes his head a bit. “It’s certainly not how Yale bills itself.” Stern, an American Studies major and a columnist for the Yale Daily News, recalled a conversation with his suitemates, who are STEM majors: “They were talking about how terrible the teaching is in their departments. I talked to them, and they said, ‘This is terrible. Yale has all this money and institutional fame, and the idea that they can’t get better teachers for us…’” Stern looks over at me and falls silent.

Tlalli Moya-Smith, SM ’16, a Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology major, told me she has had “phenomenal” teachers at Yale. “But, on the flip side, I have had teachers who were more invested in their research than their teaching,” Moya-Smith said. “You could tell based on their enthusiasm in class, their ability to relate to students and, frankly, to teach to students in a way that is helpful.”

Later that night, I talked to David Lawrence, CC ’15, an economics major and YCC Academic Chair. He nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he said, “Oftentimes, I think, professors are so focused on research that they don’t try to develop teaching skills. At Yale, someone who is an excellent researcher tends to be able to get away with not being a very good professor.” Lawrence said that it was unlikely that a student-led initiative could make substantive change in the quality of teaching. Instead, he said, “it really is the mandate of the administration at Yale to be thinking about how teaching can improve.”

Before talking to Lawrence, I sat with Jennifer Gersten, SY ’16, an English major, in Bass Cafe. The space around us was crammed with students and backpacks and end-of-midterm anxieties. After we spoke for ten minutes about professors, teaching, and her experience in the classroom at Yale, Gersten broke in. “I always feel bad complaining about any aspect of Yale. I feel this initial thought: ‘Stop complaining, because you have it so much better than 99.99 percent of the world,’” she said. But she continued. “At the same time, someone is paying for you to get the best possible education you can. And if that’s not what you’re getting, then you need to question why that is.”

***

A half century ago, Yale was asking that very question. In June 1965, the University published a report on hiring and tenure. In the report’s introduction, Political Science Professor and Committee Leader Robert Dahl, GRD ’40, posed the question at the core of the committee’s research: “Can Yale, or for that matter can any university, achieve and sustain greatness today both as an undergraduate college and as a university? The answer is far from clear or certain.” Dahl then explained the committee’s conclusions. “First, only a handful of institutions of higher education in the United States—or in the world—stand much chance of either acquiring or maintaining the highest quality in the two roles of university and liberal arts college,” he wrote. “Second, Yale is unquestionably one of these.”

Many today agree that this sense of exceptionalism is warranted. Gendler stressed that each of the 700 tenure-track professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences teaches undergraduates, a requirement that is not true of “any other institution of our research caliber.” Paul Bloom, Regan Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, who has taught psychology at Yale for over a decade and has served as chair of the cognitive science and psychology departments, backed up Gendler’s point. “I can’t think of a single place in the world where undergraduates get a better education than Yale,” Bloom told me. “I’m really serious about that. I love small liberal arts colleges, but I think that Yale beats them all.”

But Bloom also acknowledged that the hiring and tenure processes largely do not incentivize the teaching that would make Yale the pinnacle of undergraduate education. “We would never accept somebody [for hiring or tenure] just because they are a wonderful classroom teacher,” Bloom said. “If they don’t have a top-notch research record, it’s just not going to happen.”

While Dahl’s report went on to acknowledge the centrality of teaching, it upheld the primary importance of research in promotions. “[An] insistence on excellent undergraduate teaching as a condition for tenure, without a rigorous adherence to scholarly criteria, could lead to a deterioration in Yale’s scholarly contribution and hence its national and international stature as a university,” the committee members warned.

Nearly 50 years later, the University carried out its latest reexamination of the tenure process. In 2007, in response to long-time complaints about the process’s occluded standards and the unattainability of tenure itself, Yale created a track aimed at giving junior faculty a means to be granted tenure. In a 2011 progress report, Mary Miller, then dean of Yale College, wrote an introductory letter that echoed Dahl’s words. “We proclaim that teaching matters, but look at the contradictory messages we also give out,” Miller wrote. “We grant faculty leaders ‘relief’ from teaching, and we call it a ‘teaching load’ rather than a responsibility or, even a privilege, in that we teach engaged students who expect challenges. Despite much rhetoric about teaching, what do we do as an institution to reward it?”

***

“The most important reward structure in the University is tenure. If you are not a great teacher—” Scott Strobel pauses, and tilts his chair back, right leg propped against a low, glass-topped table that holds an assortment of what appear to be delicate-looking crustaceans. “You know, if you are not a reasonably competent teacher, then that should be actively discussed, and should be a topic of question for whether somebody should get tenure.”

Strobel’s office is tucked on the third floor of a building past Kline Biology Tower and the Geology and Geophysics Building, down a hallway lined with laboratories and fluorescent lights. He has taught at Yale for 20 years, but this year he has taken on a newly-created role: Deputy Provost for Teaching and Learning. When I asked him to explain his job description, he let out a short laugh and said he is still trying to figure it out—especially to understand what the scope of his oversight is. “At some point, you could say that everything in the University is teaching and learning. What isn’t teaching and learning?” he asked, with a shrug. Beyond his new role as provost, he is also in charge of developing Yale’s West Campus, runs a lab, and teaches undergraduates. “When somebody says, ‘Oh, I have no time for that,’” he says, giving a small, chagrinned grimace, “I just say, ‘You have no idea.’”

While nearly all of the professors who I talked with insisted on the dual importance of teaching and research, many of them returned to this same notion—that there are only so many hours in the day and, when pressed to make a choice of how to spend their time, research frequently and necessarily took precedence. Margaret Ferguson, now a professor at University of California-Davis and the president of the American Language Association, began teaching at Yale in the early 1970s. Ferguson called me from California and, after we spoke for 20 minutes about her time at Yale, she sighed. “Really, honestly? There was always a struggle at the level of how you were going to organize your time, the day, week, month, summer. How are you going to make the division of labor between preparing for class, grading papers, on the one hand, and trying to write your own articles?” Then, after a pause, “A lot of us didn’t get much sleep.”

To be considered for tenure, Ferguson said that she and her colleagues had to write a book on top of an already-demanding teaching load. “I would stay up all night preparing lectures, do my nine-o’clock lectures, and go home and go to sleep—for a little while. People said to me, ‘Oh you shouldn’t be spending your time grading those papers. Where there is triage to be done, it is your research that counts,’” Ferguson recalled. Still, she said that administrators made clear that they wanted professors to excel both in scholarship and teaching. In 1982, Ferguson was offered tenure at Yale, and three years later, she won the DeVane medal for the best undergraduate teaching at Yale.

Ferguson said she was “very surprised and very touched” to have received the teaching award after getting tenure. It becomes clear, too, when looking at the DeVane medal winners, that excellence in teaching by no means translates to tenure.

Steven Gillon, who began teaching history at Yale in 1985, won the DeVane medal in 1993. He recalled the morning he won the award. “A colleague approached me and said, ‘I’m really sorry to hear the news that you won the DeVane medal. You know, it’s the ‘Kiss of Death’ for a junior faculty member—everybody knows that it’s the ‘Kiss of Death.’” Gillon said that his colleague told him that every junior faculty member he’d known of up to that point had left the University a year or two after winning the medal. “He was joking, of course,” Gillon said. “But it was a dose of reality on a day that I wanted to just savor the moment.” Gillon told me that he had entered Yale without any expectation of receiving tenure and “loved my time at Yale.” But, by the end of the year, Gillon had left the University.

As Stern described in a column in the Yale Daily News last fall, only one of the six untenured professors who have won the DeVane medal since 1988 went on to get tenure at Yale. The phrase “Kiss of Death,” Stern found, originated in a 1999 article on teaching awards and medical school departmental longevity. The study’s authors reported a strong association between teaching awards and shortened employment. “The article said that it is, to some extent, real, and to some extent perception,” Stern said. “But even if it is not necessarily a trend, if this is what young scholars think is reality, it’s going to shape the way they act.”

McKee, the economics professor, adamantly agrees. “These big prizes that go to very few people are really broken,” McKee said. “They incentivize people to spend a lot of time teaching, to win these prizes, and then they sacrifice their research.” McKee paused. “Frankly, it’s evil, because you are incentivizing people to not get tenure, and that’s just wrong.” It is this gap in priorities—and the mutually exclusive nature of qualifications for teaching awards and tenure itself—that Yale’s latest effort to improve its teaching attempts to address.

***

Jenny Frederick, Director of the Center for the Teaching and Learning, hopes to rid the University of this split. When we met in her office in the Hall of Graduate Studies, she apologized for missing our first meeting—she had triple booked a half-hour slot.

In August, the University combined eight pre-existing centers, including the Center for Scientific Teaching, the Center for Language Study, and the Writing Center, to create the Center for Teaching and Learning. Frederick explained that the CTL has a tripartite goal: learning, learning to teach, and teaching, with three underlying focuses of online education, academic technology, and assessment. While it offers academic help to students, the Center will also provide resources for professors including workshops and one-on-one mentoring.

“The goal is twofold: to showcase excellence—to make teaching a more public activity—and to facilitate conversations between faculty members,” Frederick said. “The people who come here for academic appointments are excellent. They’re at the top of their fields. In general, they want to be excellent at everything. So why wouldn’t they take advantage of opportunities to improve their teaching?”

Strobel, who oversees Frederick’s work at the CTL, was more blunt. “Nobody wants to suck at what they do,” he said. “So if a Center for Teaching and Learning can provide a resource that, in a relatively easy way, can help people teach better, that’s a great outcome.”

Frederick and Strobel understand that the CTL can only do so much; the workshops may not immediately shift the quality of teaching, and they may not immediately reach the faculty who most need to improve. But they believe that the Center holds the capacity to start a much-needed dialogue about teaching. “I could go around talking to people until I’m blue in the face, saying, ‘Here’s a good idea for your teaching,’” Frederick said. “But what’s much, much more effective is faculty talking to faculty.” Strobel added that his goal, and the goal of the Center for Teaching and Learning, is “to make teaching a more public process, in the sense that what happens in the classroom isn’t just between me and my students. [It’s also] between me and all the rest of the faculty in the University, and what I’m doing well I can share, and for what I’m not doing well, I can expect that there will be commentary about how I can improve.” What Strobel knows, too, is that outside of the CTL, individual departments have made—and have seen success in—their efforts to improve teaching on their own.

***

In a second-floor classroom in Linsly-Chittenden on a Monday afternoon, Professor Fred Strebeigh, PC ’74, English 120 course director, is in high gear. The last few students hoist on backpacks and trickle out of the classroom as Strebeigh perches on the edge of the oval table at the center of the room. He runs his hands through his peppergray hair, and leans forward towards the woman seated in the wooden chair next to him. “Gina! I mean…” Strebeigh pauses, casts his eyes around the room, searching for the right words. He is positively beaming. “I mean… This is a classic example of good, close reading for craft.” Strebeigh pauses, and glances down at the page full of notes in front of him. “Very cool, your opening question, which was looking at ‘Squashed,’ the Susan Orlean piece, and looking at structure as a servant of drama—that idea was just perfect.”

For the next 12 minutes, Strebeigh breaks down, minute by minute, the class that Gina Hurley, a PhD candidate in Medieval Studies, had just led. He notes the questions she asked, how the class responded, how she encouraged the students and led the discussion to its logical conclusion. “This piece became a really neat lesson—thanks to you—in the ways that an author gets a whole lot out from an interview subject who isn’t giving anything to her. That was neat.” He looks up at Hurley. “It was a classically beautifully done class.” Strebeigh has reached the end of his notes; Hurley puts down her pen, and moves to pack up her bag. She lifts it onto her shoulder, then pauses. “Thank you, again, for letting me do this,” Hurley tells Strebeigh. “It’s been really wonderful, really instructive for me.”

A few minutes later, I sit outside of the classroom with Hurley, who has a master’s degree in English and had just completed three weeks of observation in Strebeigh’s classroom. The observation is a core component of English 990, a graduate student course that Writing Center Director Alfred Guy leads. Through the course, each graduate student observes an English 120 section for part of the semester and then teaches part of a class on her own. Hurley said she was grateful that the graduate school facilitated her training in the classroom. “By having these sorts of experiences in place that are required for PhDs, Yale is showing that it’s willing to develop both sides, to operate on this teacher-scholar model rather than abandoning the teaching side in service of the scholarship,” Hurley said.

The observation system in English 990 mirrors a system that is in place for the English 120 faculty. Strebeigh started the observation program in the spring of 2002. Each English 120 professor is required to visit at least one class session a semester; then, at the end of the semester, the faculty meet. Each professor shares a best practice—what Strebeigh describes as “the one thing that’s worth perpetuating within a teaching system”—that he or she observed.

Strebeigh, who originally conceived of the program, explained his rationale. “We only really gain from developing new strengths. With an ever-increasing number of new strengths, there is no time in the seminar left for the weak spots,” he said. “The system of open invitations to visit is the best strengthener of teaching I’ve ever seen.”

When I ask him why this policy has not spread to other departments, Strebeigh simply remarks that the 75-minute investment of watching a colleague teach feels “quite small and the reward seems high.” So, I ask again, why hasn’t it spread? Earlier, he had noted that nearly all of the professors who teach English 120 are non-tenure-track faculty. Still, in the same breath, he insisted that this fact did not explain their willingness to commit time to improving their teaching.

The extent to which this dialogue around teaching is localized, and still largely inaccessible to current and future teachers, becomes clear when I meet John Valdovinos, an Engineering PhD and a postdoc at the Yale School of Medicine. At the Center for Engineering and Design at 15 Prospect Street, I sit with Valdovinos at a low module table. Light pours in through the open lab space behind us where students crowd around lab tables and 3D printers. Valdovinos tells me that, while he wants to be a great teacher, there are no resources for him to improve. “I have zero interaction or experience here with teaching,” Valdovinos said. He said that he emailed several professors in his department about training opportunities for teaching earlier in the semester. None had responded. “I love research, don’t get me wrong. I find great pleasure in doing it. But I don’t know what’s going to happen when I do get that faculty position, and I have to go in a class and…teach.” His brow tightens. “An academic should be a great teacher, a great researcher—a great scholar, basically. And we’ve turned to the point where it’s just a great researcher. Because you bring in the money, and that’s pretty much it.”

All of the professors with whom I talked recalled a nearly complete lack of training in graduate school before they entered the classroom. Gillon, the DeVane medalist who now teaches history at the University of Oklahoma, mused, “The odd thing about professors is that we receive no training in what it is we do for a living. We are trained to be historians; we are not trained to be teachers.” Bloom—who won the Lex Hixon prize for teaching in the social sciences at Yale 10 years ago—said that for the first seminar he taught, at the University of Arizona, he had received no formal training. “I was a train-wreck. I was awful. You wouldn’t believe how bad I was. And because I was bad, the students hated me. And because the students hated me, I had a difficulty time teaching.” Bloom grimaces, gives a little shake of his head. “You know, no one wants to be a bad teacher. So there is a tremendous impetus for improving.”

Bloom thinks that this intrinsic incentive should not be ignored. “I think people are driven by intrinsic goals. And the sort of external incentive that matters a lot, in some ways, is respect,” Bloom said. “One of the many things that I really like about this place is that good teaching is respected.” Gendler agrees: “Yale is one of the few institutions where there is a culture of competition in teaching excellence.”

It is far from obvious, though, how to make this professed commitment to teaching a reality. Even Strobel admits, “I’m not sure if I’m in a position to do anything about it. But I’ll try.” He agrees with McKee, the economics professor, that reforming the teaching prizes is likely necessary; he hopes to create, as a different type of incentive, a “Dean’s List” for teaching. “It’s something you can put on your resume,” Strobel said. “If every semester you teach with some version of quality, you could receive some kind of recognition. It would both be motivating to retain that level and motivating to achieve it.” Frederick, the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, agrees. “It becomes much more like, ‘Hey, you’ve been [at Yale] for three years, and you haven’t been on the Dean’s List? What’s wrong? What’s going on?’”

In addition to reforming teaching prizes, Frederick and Strobel hope that the Center for Teaching and Learning will spread the system of observation that is in place in English 120. “What if, even on a small scale, we could create an environment in which Yale faculty get to experience what’s happening in Yale classrooms other than their own?” Strobel asked. “Wouldn’t that start a dialogue?”

***

In his high-ceilinged office in the shadow of Kline Biology Tower, Professor Paul Tipton, the chair of the physics department, tells me that he is trying to start the conversation. Tipton is creating a program of voluntary peer-to-peer classroom visitation in his department, similar to the English 120 faculty observation model. “But what as a department are we not going to do, if we start really trying to put the effort into taking our teaching to the next level?” Tipton asked. He described colleagues who are already stretched to the brink and said that it was difficult to imagine the tradeoff that would necessarily occur for teaching to become a priority. “No one wants us to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to tolerate a lower level of research activity.’ So what are we going to ask them not to do?” He folds his arms across his torso. “Something’s got to give.”

Bloom said that while some might be “surprised” to learn of the primary importance of research in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions, “at the same time, teaching is really, really valued here. And can somebody who isn’t a great scholar be a tremendous teacher?” Bloom looked up and continued without hesitating: “No.” He acknowledged, though, that this confluence is difficult to achieve. “The truth is, the time I spend teaching Intro Psych isn’t going to help my research program, and vice versa,” Bloom said. “For some reason, sometimes people like to say everything is all wonderful. But some things are zero sum.”

While McKee told me that a fundamental change in hiring, promotion, or tenure is unlikely, he agreed with Bloom that the motives behind such a change could be misinformed. “Yale is happy doing what it does, and even if they did change, it would be bad for Yale,” McKee said. “We would end up with people who do worse research, and the prestige would go down. People wouldn’t want to come.”

Tipton, for his part, said he has trouble imagining how to resolve the dual mission. “We’ve decided that you can’t possibly be the world’s leader in undergraduate education if you aren’t also a world leader at research,” Tipton said. “It’s just a tension that I think we’re going to have to live with.”

Four up from the ground floor of The Study Hotel on Chapel Street, the elevator door slid open, and, beyond a wall of glass, New Haven unfolded before my eyes. The late- season snowstorm of that morning had melted away, and the afternoon light cast lengthening shadows on the roofs of the buildings below. In a room of dark paneled floors and white walls, two-dozen people stood around tall tables, sipping long- stemmed wine glasses and nibbling on cheese and olives. On one wall hung three clusters of photos—the only hint of the event’s purpose—one of an industrial warehouse filled with stacks of cow hides; another picturing a gull, which, against the backdrop of a dark, choppy sea, dug its beak into the pock-marked back of a surfacing whale. I heard music start behind me and, turning around, saw in the corner by the wall of windows a man in a dark suit and black dress shoes who had started playing the cello—one of Bach’s Six Suites.

In the opposite corner of the room, Taylor Rees, FES ’14, set down her glass of water. “Every once in a while, we’re like, ‘Wow, this is getting really serious. What if something were to happen? Who will be there to pick up the pieces? Is there a professor here somewhere?’” Rees said, glancing around the room, and gave me a tight-lipped smile. “No. It’s completely on us.”

Rees, along with a team of five other second-year students at FES, is directing the sixth Environmental Film Festival at Yale (EFFY), an annual film festival held at Yale that is free and open to the public. Over the course of the weeklong fes- tival that will culminate on Sun., April 6, audiences will view 10 feature-length films and 18 shorts, with either Q&As or panels after each viewing. There are several workshops sched- uled over the course of the week, as well as an exhibition of work by winners of EFFY’s second annual Young Filmmakers and Photographers Contest.

“Last time we checked, it was still the largest student-run environmental film festival in the world,” said Elizabeth Baba- lola, FES ’14, Co-Director of EFFY 2014. Babalola said that the process for planning this year’s festival began almost a year ago, when the new second-year graduate students took the helm. The team of six directors and nine student collabo- rators marks a significant increase from the two-person team of FES students—Eric Desatnik, FES ’10, and Mary Fischer, FES ’10—that established EFFY in 2008. Starting this past summer, Babalola and her classmates reached out to individual filmmakers and solicited submissions, primarily through the online platform Without a Box; ul- timately, they received around 400 submissions both from the U.S. and abroad.

“Every year that the festival grows, we get bigger and bigger films,” Rees said. “We are build- ing a reputation.” Across the room, EFFY 2014 Co-Director Lexi Tuddenham, FES ’14, nodded in agreement. “We’re drawing from Berlin, and drawing from D.C.; we’re drawing from Sundance,” Tuddenham said. “As much as we absolutely do want to support small filmmakers, we are pushing the people who are producing for festivals like us to reach a higher standard.”

Around one of the high tables, fiddling with name cards and laughing in the too-loud voices of people who have only just met, stood three of the six jurors who will determine awards at the week’s close. “I think we all know instinctively whether a film is good or not,” said Ila Tyagi, GRD ’19, and the other two nodded encouragingly. “But we’re going to do our best to be fair and smart with our judgments. There are a number of awards: ‘Best Feature Film’, ‘Best Cinematography.’ What was the last one?” A pause. The three women looked at each other quizzically. “Oh!” Tyagi’s head snapped up. “‘Best Environmental Storytelling.’

In fact, this theme of environmental storytelling will serve as the unifying thread for this year’s festival. As Tuddenham explained, one of the primary challenges of her field of inter- est is that, in spite of the groundbreaking scientific discover- ies researchers are making, much of this work will never reach the conscience of the general public. “How do we bridge that gap? How do we get the American public talking about it?” Tuddenham asked. “If you want to get people engaged, including policy makers, you have to have a strong story. There’s just no other way.”

Yiyuan Qin, FES ’15, one of the winners of the ‘Young Film- makers and Photographers Contest’, agreed that, if any me- dium could engage broad audiences, it would be film. “People are lazy,” Qin said. “Maybe they don’t read anymore, but they still watch movies. Images are moving. They are powerful.”

Still, Tuddenham admitted that the translation from in- formation to action is no easy feat. “The environmental field is filled with these fantastic people who are really grounded, who really want to change the world, but there is also this sense of despair, right? Even by just existing sometimes, we are inimical to our own purpose. How do you deal with that despair, and still be able to act, and get out of bed in the morning and do something?”

Here, Tuddenham laughed, a little bubbly noise, crackling with inevitability. Something seemed to unclench in her, and she glanced out at the city, and back at me. “Storytelling is this really joyful, human art that gives you some motivation, and gives you some hope, and brings to life some of the feel- ing of, ‘Okay, let’s go do this.’”

In a pitch-dark room, a constellation of pinprick stars floated in front of me. But the light was starting to change. Infinitesimally, the inky black washed away, and the stars became points of light on three panels, mounted on a white wall. As the light continued to rise, the stars disappeared and words in precise, black font took their place. The light from the screen now shone out into the room, so I could see the top of the beanie-clad boy’s head in front of me when he leaned in close to the girl beside him and told her, in a quiet voice, “I’m not sure, but I think I like this.”

“Sky Box I” exemplifies the discipline bending work of Charles Gaines,who delivered a lecture at the Yale School of Art on Mon., March 3.  Since 1970, Gaines has created conceptual art that has been displayed in around 70 solo exhibitions and several hundred group shows, that addresses issues including racism, sexism, and the relationship between the artist and viewer.

In “Sky Box I”, Gaines displayed four political manifestos—“A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed of England” (1649) by Gerard Winstanley, two post-colonial texts by philosophers and politicians Léopold Sédar Senghor and Frantz Fanon, and Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence (1945)—on an LED screen that, in a repeating seven-minute-long loop, fade into a black sky dusted with stars made from 60,000 tiny holes in the screen. “There’s no beginning or end,” Gaines said of the work. “Whatever time you walk in, you have no idea what you’ll experience.” While Gaines tries to limit his presence in his work in order to allow viewers to come to their own conclusions about it, he emphasized, “The work has to be positioned so that, as we experience it and interpret it, we are engaged as a community in the same thing.” Ultimately, he said, “I need to control the terms of the debate.”

 ***

Twenty minutes after his talk ended, I sat in the sub-street level dining room at Thai Taste on Chapel Street at a long table filled with graduate students from the School of Art. To my right sat Gaines; at the opposite end of the table sat Robert Storr, Dean of Yale School of Art, who informed me that after each lecture by a visiting artist, the graduate school provides money to take the artist, and a group of students, out to dinner. Gaines ordered bourbon with a single ice cube—Maker’s Mark whiskey. “When the drinks come, we’ll talk,” he insisted.

“The role of experience has been underplayed in art,” Gaines told me, a few minutes later, with the glass resting in his palm. His brow furrowed, tendons bunching between his eyebrows, as he spoke. “I was really interested in the relationship between the subject and the work, and the affect that the subject produces.” Gaines, who was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1944, and who is African American, said that he has been grappling with the issues of oppression and social justice through the medium of conceptual art since he was 22.

Gaines spoke in cautious, halting phrases, frequently stopping sentences midway through, doubled back, and started over. “Right now, criticism and discourse around work is on a downward slope,” Gaines said. “We are at a period where language is highly suspicious. People are very suspicious of discourse about work.” For Gaines, though, the discussion about the work is nearly as important as the piece itself. Without the viewer’s experience of the work and the start of a discussion, the work would be rendered essentially pointless.

“One might assume that the purpose of raising [social] issues is to change society,” Gaines said. “But I’m not thinking that I might change the existence of racism.” Instead, he is “in the stage of trying to make these issues important to others,” raising “basic questions about how we perceive and receive ideas, how they are influencing our thoughts.”

But, here, he stopped short; the waitress had arrived with his shrimp and asparagus. Gaines gave me a last glance, and swirled the remnants of the ice cube in his glass. Drinks were over; art talk faded out.

The room was dark, but inside the rectangle of images projected onto the screen, I hurtled through a pink jungle. The images flipped back and forth as the soundtrack blared and then dropped to a hum. Now, a coastline: the water all pristine blue ripples, the land gradients of bubblegum. Back to the forest: crimson foliage and blood-red tree limbs in tangles, closing in from all sides. The camera follows a man in military fatigues with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. Next, a landscape shot of mud huts and thatched roofs and scarred hillsides and people living in a cotton-candy hued world.

Richard Mosse, ART ’08, is an Irish photographer and the Yale Poynter Fellow in Journalism—although, he’d tell you, “I’m just sick and tired of photojournalism.” On Wed., Feb. 5, Mosse came to Yale to give a talk about his time at the School of Art and his work photographing and filming in warzones. His most recent project, The Enclave, is a multimedia installation produced over six months in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo using a method of filming that builds upon his work with discontinued Kodak Aerochrome film. Kodak Aerochrome, a type of infrared film, makes invisible green hues register as shades of pink or red.

“I am interested in the points of failure of documentary photography itself, where it breaks down or is inadequate to tell very complex stories,” Mosse told his audience on Wednesday, adding that he turned away from documentary photography to focus his work on contemporary art, which draws on what he calls “the sublime.” But now that his work has taken off—after his 2011 photography show, Infra, he represented Ireland at the 55th Annual International Art Exhibition in Venice, and has since garnered international acclaim—Mosse said that, sometimes, he wishes he could return to the time when he was the only one who cared about his work.

“Nowadays, I’m answering so many fucking emails that I don’t have time to take pictures,” Mosse said, with a chagrined half-smile. “This is what I dreamed about. But it’s not much of a dream.” If he is not working on a project, Mosse will never have his camera with him; he described having “two lives”—one, as a photographer, and the other (which he is growing into) as his own manager and businessman. “Being an artist these days is really challenging,” he explained. “You’ve got to be good at art marking; you’ve got be a bit of a business man. You’ve got to be able to forge documents, and lie through your teeth, and write press releases, and tell everyone you’re great even though you know you’re not. You’ve got to act suave and social.” Finally, he said, “You have to deal with interviews. Everyone wants an interview. It’s so boring! But if you don’t do it, the world will leave you behind.”

 ***

A few hours later, I talked with Mosse over a cup of coffee in a cramped café around the corner from the School of Art. He wore a black V-neck, black pants, and glossy black shoes, and spoke with a thick, lilting, and invariably charming Irish accent. In between heavy-eyed blinks—he had flown in from Berlin the night before, and repeatedly and apologetically told me he was still jet lagged—he stared intensely as we talked, and grinned in what seemed to be a mixture of disbelief and self-deprecation any time he told a story especially out of the ordinary (“I spent the Christmas in Congo. Should’ve been more fun, but we drove off a bridge, unfortunately.”) Before Berlin, Mosse had been in Dublin, where he opened an exhibition, and then, before that, had made what he believes will be his last visit to Congo. “I went back for myself, to get some closure,” Mosse said. “It was really just to say goodbye to the country, to the people.”

While he is known primarily for his work in Congo using Kodak infrared film, Mosse’s exposure to photography stretches back to his childhood. His parents are both artists who had staunchly opposed their son’s pursuing a career in the arts (“Over their dead bodies, kind of thing. I was basically threatened into taking anything else”), so he took his interests elsewhere. Mosse said that his love for “big, anonymous cities” drove him to go to London for his undergraduate education; he earned his B.A. in English literature from Kings College London in 2001. After college, he worked in an Irish pub in Berlin, and, at the age of 21, traveled to Bosnia with his savings to photograph about the missing persons’ crisis in the wake of the Bosnian genocide. The next year, he returned to London, where he earned his Masters in Cultural Studies at the London Consortium and then attended Goldsmiths College for a year before dropping out. “It was a very self-conscious bastion of hypercritical, interdisciplinary art making,” Mosse said. “I really wanted just to make photos. Call me old-fashioned. They didn’t respect what I wanted to do, so I left.” By the next fall, he had enrolled at Yale.

“Yale, for me, was the holy grail,” Mosse recalled. The two-year program, which he described as a “super intense, crazy experience,” had a total of eighteen students enrolled at once, and, like it does today, centered on critiques, every five weeks, of each student’s body of work. Mosse described these critiques as “like being on a firing squad.” But, he said, “Eventually you realize that the only thing that matters is whether you like your own work.” While he recalled doing a multimedia project with the fraternity DKE while at Yale, he soon moved on to more serious work.

He travelled to Iraq, where he photographed Saddam Hussein’s abandoned compounds; then, he continued to Ireland, Ghaza, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Ethiopia, the Far East, and, finally, eastern Congo. He had been at a creative standstill when he discovered Kodak Aerochrome film, the infrared-sensitive film that Kodak and the U.S. Military collaborated to design for use in WWII. Mosse explained that the film was particularly applicable to what he sought to capture in the Congo. “There was a whole history there of the invisible, the unseen,” Mosse said. “It relates, quite specifically, to eastern Congo’s conflict, which is entirely overlooked in the media.”

For his latest work, Infra, much of Mosse’s focus was on photographing Congolese rebels. Many of them, he said, had been indicted war criminals and were almost always resistant to having their photo taken. “It’s a face-off,” Mosse said. He uses either a wooden, eight-by-ten camera mounted on a tripod—which takes up to three minutes to set up—or a Mamiya 7 camera. “They look down the barrel of the lens, and they don’t want me to take that picture.” He takes the photographs anyway, with the knowledge that the film will transform the visual palette of the image. “They don’t know it, but I’m portraying them in a field of pink flowers. They are shimmering in this very campy scene. So it’s a violation of that posturing masculinity. It’s a way of undermining these evil people, or at least complicating them,” Mosse said.

On the first trip to the Congo, Mosse said that he pretended he was doing charity work and stayed in Catholic missions so he could travel within his budget. “Frankly, I went to places that western people hadn’t been to for a while,” Mosse said. He would travel by car, and then, when the car could go no farther, walk for days on end into the depths of rural Congo. According to Mosse, people were often suspicious when he would first arrive in a village. “But,” he recalled, “when I explained I was there to tell their story, one way or another, they were really appreciative. A lot of people paint these rebel groups as monsters. They do carry out war crimes and horrible acts, but they also have a narrative. Every side has a story.”

For Mosse, while his work started primarily as an experiment in contemporary art, it has turned into something much more concrete. “I started it more as an aesthetic exercise, or a philosophical experiment,” he said. “This art project trickled down into raising awareness about the Congo situation.”

“The infrared film allowed me to become the thing that I feared the most, which is to become a photojournalist,” Mosse said. “But it had a life, eventually, as true documentary photography. It didn’t begin this way. The work has evolved, and now it’s really about communicating, about raising awareness, about advocacy, in ways I never would have imagined.”

Mosse not only occupies the space in-between two genres of photography—he also finds himself in the physical in-between. He has travelled to Congo eight times, and acknowledges the gaping difference between that world and New Haven. “It’s very confusing, jumping between these two worlds. It’s very, very difficult, sometimes,” Mosse said. “I remember waking up at dawn in a rebel enclave, surrounded by rocket launchers. Then, I walked for days to get out of there, and got on a plane and flew to Miami Basel, which is a total art world circus,” he told me, rubbing his eyes. “It’s the hardest part of my life, to make those jumps. If you are not careful, that can affect your sanity. But it also gives you perspective on the world. A lot of us don’t step out of our realities. I think I feel very lucky to be able to do that.”

He chuckled to himself one last time, and rubbed his eyes again. “Sorry, I’m not being articulate.” With a camo-green backpack and two smaller bags resting against his spindly chair in the coffee shop, Mosse was packed, and heading out of New Haven in a few minutes. “I’ve had a long day, talking and talking, and I’m jet-lagged.”

Sitting in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center on the night of Wednesday, September 18, I felt distinctly sacrilegious. For the last three weeks, I had seen nine dignified professors deliver their lectures for Directed Studies on Homer, Thucydides, and Plato from the auditorium’s lectern while I would frantically scribble notes and jumbled phonetic spellings of ancient Greek words in my notebook. Earlier that day, light streamed through the stained-glass windows that line the auditorium, and I sat in rapt silence alongside a hundred and twenty-five similarly agog freshmen. There seemed to be something almost holy about the space.

Six hours later, I returned to the auditorium’s creaky seats. This time, I had left my backpack behind. At ten minutes before 7:00 pm, the room was filled with two hundred people who had arrived for the Yale Film Society’s pre-release screening of “Don Jon,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial and screenwriting debut.

Ryan Campbell, CC ’16, had arrived at the Whitney Center an hour and a half before the screening began. While there had been rumors that Gordon-Levitt himself would make an appearance, Campbell said that his reason for attending was more straightforward. “It’s a free movie,” Campbell said with a shrug. “What else am I going to do on a Wednesday evening?”

Apparently, many other students had the same idea. By 5:30 pm, the line for the movie had snaked around the corner of Wall Street, disappearing from view. Yale Film Society President Becca Edelman, MC ’14, said that she was thrilled with the turnout.

According to Edelman, the distributors of “Don Jon” had contacted the Film Society to ask if they would be interested in screening the movie at Yale; the Film Society happily acquiesced. Edelman said that they were particularly excited to show the movie because it was shot on 35 mm film, which the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center had the capacity to play. “Not many people still make their new movies on 35 mm print,” Edelman, a Film Studies major, said. “It’s pretty cool that it’s on actual film.”

She added another reason that she believes that the distributors were eager to share the film at Yale: “I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt is trying to put on a less commercial persona than he’s had in the past,” Edelman said. “I think college audiences are really good for that, and just to spread word about the movie.”

Gordon-Levitt directed, wrote, and starred in the movie, which chronicles the travails of a young man from New Jersey who, at the opening of the film, declares that his life revolves around eight things: “My body. My pad. My ride. My family. My church. My boys. My girls. And my porn.” As becomes quickly apparent, Gordon-Levitt’s character, Jon, is addicted to pornography. While this obsession lies at the crux of the movie, it also drives the plot in an exploration of the nature of loss, religion, familial ties, and evolving relationships.

Ninety minutes later, the film finished. “I thought it was a really fun movie!” said the resolutely perky Edelman, as she picked pieces of discarded paper off the floor of the room.

The theater quickly emptied out. A mother could be heard telling her teenaged daughter, on their way out the door, “You can’t be too pissed. It was free!” The two remaining members of the audience were a middle-aged couple who sat side-by-side, a slightly dazed look in their eyes, pointedly not looking at each other. The man whistled through his teeth as I walked by, and the sound faded into the empty space. Silence had fallen once more over the Whitney Humanities Center auditorium. Two hundred people would never be able to look at Gordon-Levitt the same way again, and, when I returned to the Humanities Center the next day, it was with a renewed sense of skepticism and awareness that, maybe, it wasn’t so holy after all.