Yale Daily News

Can Yale afford a light rail or street car system rather than shuttle buses, to address some of the issues related to expansion? Campus-wide transportation is an issue with or without the construction of two new colleges, but the new colleges would add to the need. While the Yale Central Campus is compact, Yale extends from the Divinity School at the north end through Science Hill, the Central Campus to the Medical School complex and now on to the new West Haven campus, not to mention the athletic fields to the west of campus. It is impractical to get everywhere on foot, including among the three different areas devoted to the sciences.

Shuttle buses are a lower cost answer but have the ambience of a vacuum cleaner. A light rail system running from the new West Haven campus through Yale up to Science Hill could help unify the campus and expand the possiblities for Yale's growth and maybe help make majoring in the sciences at Yale seem less daunting (at least logistically). Building such a system would require the active participation of the City of New Haven (and perhaps funding from state and federal sources) and its benefits would extend to constituencies beyond Yale. And the notion of hopping on and off a streetcar could add an attractive new element to the Yale experience.

As Yale plans for its next century, it should give a Yale rail a serious look.

Good to know they "listened to the students". Hah.

The idea is great, but the planned location is horrible. The construction of new colleges on Prospect/Canal will effectively double the size of campus, resulting in the death of Yale's unique campus life, which is predicated on the fact that anyone can walk to any friend's dormitory in 2 minutes.

The new colleges should be built within the central campus precinct. Yes, this will be more expensive and require more "creative" solutions, but it will ultimately benefit Yale much more than any of Yale's current administrators - who have not lived on the campus as undergraduates within the past 20 or 30 years - currently realize.

and Sledge was wondering why most of us current students didn't even bother to attend most of the forums held on the potential expansion of the campus---because we knew that the weight given to our opinions would only amount to lip service, if even that.

Why waste our energy when we knew our opinions wouldn't be taken seriously to begin with?

Levin, if you actually took the time to get your head out of Pres. Hu's rear-end, you'd realize that expansion is a bad idea.

Levin stinks. "Listening to student's input" Yeah right. He doesn't even care. Why don't we call for a new president?

Agreed.

In 100 years, all of the great things that Levin has done for Yale will be forgotten.

What will be remembered is his legacy of new colleges, which, in order to save $50 million or so, were located way too far away from all the others, and which therefore destroyed the intimate, walkable character of Yale forever.

That will live in infamy.

Levin apparently wants to turn Yale into a bland wasteland like Stanford or Michigan.

what did they even BOTHER to ask us?! what a joke. ugh.

This article says the same thing over and over. It could have been reduced by 3/4 without any loss of content.

Yes # 1 ,Yale can afford a rail..

But as Rodney Dangerfield said in back to school....bring in more 50 ft. Behemoth buses,Fuck em it's Waste Haven and that's incredibly more corrupt than Stupido haven

President Levin is a great president who has done great things for the University. He inherited Yale in fiscal shambles and now has the fiscal resources to build a lasting legacy. We should be supportive of his hard work.

I am a huge supporter of Levin, but the placement of the new colleges in this location is a huge mistake. Perhaps the biggest mistake Yale could POSSIBLY make. New colleges are fine, but they have to be placed in the central campus area. Yes, I know this adds a huge additional construction cost because they can't be built together. But it is a worthwhile expense.

The main problem with the expansion is that it will necessarily decrease Yale's selectivity, and thus could negatively affect Yale's U.S. News rankings and prestige, causing more students to choose Harvard or Princeton, or perhaps even Stanford, over Yale.

The second problem with the expansion is that it appears to be a way not only to increase the student body, but also to change the composition of the student body. Specifically, Levin has said that the new slots would not go to legacies or athletes. This seems to be completely wrong in my opinion. If we increase the size of the student body, the proportion of athletes and legacies should remain the same (and no, I was neither an athlete nor a legacy, I just think that both of these groups have a lot to contribute). If the expansion is only intended to further increase affirmative action and lower class admits, Levin should say so much more openly, because I suspect I am not the only one who would have a problem with this.

Neither one of these problems has been addressed so far from either side of the issue, which is particularly disappointing.

Recent Alum: The expansion itself won't decrease Yale's selectivity. But if the colleges are cited where Levin is proposing them, Yale's uniquely strong campus life will go down the tubes -- and THAT will DEFINITELY hurt Yale's selectivity. I'm not saying it will turn into Penn, but it will no longer be the #1 destination for high school seniors around the country that it is today.

#12: Who do you suppose President Griswold intended to take advantage of Yale's expansion when it built Stiles and Morse? Does it matter? Levin might have a particular type of student in mind as Yale expands (although I doubt it is anything other than more of what Yale currently admits) but will that matter in five years? Ten years? Twenty-five years? Yale should expand if it can do so without harming the experience because it has the resources to do so and a growing group of students in America and around the world who are qualified. Concerns about selectivity miss the point; Yale shouldn't define itself by maximizing the number of applicants it rejects; it should consider only maintaining the quality of the students who matriculate. I see nothing that indicates that will be a problem.

I think that if light rail were to come out of this expansion, little chance of that happening as there is, that alone would make the endeavor worthwhile

furthermore, #12 is just flat wrong. I have no problem with legacies, but your contention that the proportion of minority and lower class admits should not be increased while athletics continues to suck an incredible amount of money and admission slots smacks of the kind of entitled arrongance of which yale alreay has too much

#15 - I totally concur with your response to #12. Yale will maintain it's current admissions policies, which are of course, need-blind (separate and closed from the financial aid application process) and free of any formal 'affirmative action' clauses. Yale admits the best students from across the nation, and that is what must be maintained. I think that Levin was implying that he would not see expansion as an opportunity to disproportionately admit more of any particular type of student, including those that lesser universities might prioritize for financial/advertising reasons - e.g. legacies or athletes.

re: the new colleges

is there any chance that Yale admin could be more clever and strategic about maintaining a centralized campus - like maybe using the space currently occupied by Hendrie Hall and the huge parking lot behind it - replace it with a college and sub-basement parking? Downtown is not absolutely full!

theres gotta be a balance. ive heard- not in this article- but in other ydn pieces (an editorial piece, if im remembering correctly) a student proposing the new colleges be built where hgs is. the new colleges cant displace whats already there. yale is a university made up of different parts- yale college, the grad school, the law school and so on. im sure many undergrads would love for each college to be a hop, skip and a jump away from each other but thats not realistic given what exists in the "core" of campus. im not saying build the new colleges in east rock or long wharf. but distance is relative. some people think td is too far away. yale's campus should be better integrated with each school having some relationship to the other, architecturally and otherwise. there may be no choice given the reality of space.

It was deeply naive of anyone to think that undergraduates' opinion ever figured into this decision in the first place. Your tuition is just a shred of the University's operating budget, not a terribly important shred at that. A $22.5 billion University, however dear to your heart, cares little for your take on its strategic development.

Of course the "college" has to expand. As the research and medical branches of the University grow, the "school" has to keep up so that it can still claim - arguably if not entirely legitimately - to be the heart of Yale's operations.

At the same time, many posters are overselling this great campus life and intimacy. The new colleges would be closer to, say, Stiles and Morse, than TD currently is to those colleges. What merits greater reflection, though, are students' anxieties about Yale's potentially diminished selectivity, read: exclusivity.