Yale Daily News

Well, looks like Chase and the Women's Center have egg on their faces. Again. Who knew that writing an op-ed accusing the university of lying without any evidence whatsoever to back up that claim might not be a good idea?

so, essentially, yale has no concrete medical grounds on which it can deny Shvarts her exhibition. She is healthy now, probably did not induce any miscarriages, and therefore, in the invent that she was ever pregnant, experienced only safe miscarriages.

great job yale. you have totally screwed one of your students without any reason for doing so.

There really is no pleasing you, is there? If Shvarts were telling the truth, you'd accuse the University of lying and screwing over one of their students. If Shvarts is lying, you accuse the University of screwing over a student "without any reason for doing so." Never mind that Shvarts screwed over the University, her adviser and the DUS, and her classmates so she could make a name for herself with all the controversy, and that one of her friends publicly called the Dean of Yale College a liar and demanded his resignation... which, by the way, is LIBEL if it turns out Chase knew that Shvarts was (probably) lying about the project. Damn that Yale University, always trying to tell the truth to the press... how I hate them!

Look, it's all quite simple really... the University believes it's fake, but they can't be sure. They need Shvarts to officially make them sure, otherwise they'll be legally liable if something bad happens (like if, say, someone gets infected with her blood or in case some younger student suddenly thinks it's okay to artificially inseminate and use abortifacients for an academic project and then somehow hurts themselves in the process). Of course, the University would also like to avoid all the ridiculously bad press they're getting over this, but that just means that their conclusion's overdetermined. The public safety and liability issues alone justify not hanging the work unless Shvarts publicly admits it's a hoax, any other reasons are just icing on the cake. Sucks for Shvarts that she picked a project that put her in this spot, but that was her call. As for freedom of artistic expression... well that ends when your work potentially poses a direct (BIOHAZARD) and indirect (copycat) danger to other students. Did you even read the article? The doctors make it pretty clear that even if Shvarts is fine now, there's no way doing something like that is healthy.

#1,

Your comment makes no sense. Chase's claim was that Salovey is being a hypocrite by denying Aliza her exhibit while supposedly holding the academic value of challenging the legitimacy of the prevailing consensus.

If anything this article STRENGTHENS the anti-university case here: There was absolutely no reason to freak out but Yale panicked, freaked out and threw one of their students under the bus.

The administration should be ashamed.

Globally there are 160 million IUD users, New Haven.

It's kind of ridiculous that they didn't run this last Thursday.

interviews with medical experts should have been included in the initial article. the ydn has proved once again that it is more interested in drawing attention to itself than practicing sound journalism.

"Experts Shed Doubt"? A mixed metaphor. Did you mean "Cast Doubt"? "Shed Light"?

Then what about all these reports of herbal abortifacients in ancient texts? Oh well, I guess those darned pagans are only lying.

Voice of reason! What type of reason is that?

She claims to have experienced very unsafe, very risky health. As the doctor described, if she took the drugs in the right dosage to induce a miscarriage, it really could have ended in her death.

She claims she took the drugs in a way consistent with that end result, so yes, the university made the proper decision.

If it later comes out that Shvarts was lying, then the university hasn't made a mistake: it's been lied to, and acted as best it could on the information it had available.

I'm sorry you think you are being reasonable. The reasonable outlook is that the university should not support a student doing something potentially fatal-regardless of if it involves reproductive rights or playing russian roulette.

Gee, this should have been the article researched and written on day one--a little more information for the uniformed public might have helped manage the hysteria a bit.

We can now focus on the message I see in the project which is highlighting the ambiguity of menstruation. It is an interesting one mainly because your perceptions of it are entirely driven by your point of view at the time you experience the menstruation. It is a simple biological event, but imbued with significance based on your response. Your reaction to it changes dramatically as you cycle through the desire or antipathy of being pregnant over the course of a lifetime. Then there is the ultimate betrayal when the final bleeding announcing the death knell of cancer. I'll never forget being in the health plan being scrapped out after my first much desired pregnancy died in utero. There I was in the deepest grief, surrounded by college women deeply grateful they were terminating. A painful juxtaposition.

#4,

Maybe you support Aliza Shvartz's apparent contention that lying to the press and to the public about your piece constitutes "art," but the university doesn't have to agree. More to the point, you are COMPLETELY wrong about what Chase's argument was.

Chase was arguing that Shvartz's project was real, and that the university lied about it because they were embarrassed they had approved it. Now it turns out that there is very little chance the project was real, and in fact it was Shvartz that was lying the whole time. So yes, Chase does have egg on her face.

The university has a responsibility to stand by students' work if it has been approved. But if a student lies about her work for the sake of ginning up some manufactured controversy, the university is perfectly within its rights to say, either you tell the truth about this or we're not going to give you a platform for your work. In fact, academic integrity DEMANDS that they do so.

Yale has done an excellent job responding to this. They have made me proud to go to this school.

To quote Chase directly: "Thousands of people denounced the project, Aliza Shvarts and Yale University as evil. Yale’s publicists, who are paid to care about what those people think, made a decision after meeting with Aliza Shvarts last Thursday. They decided to lie. On Thursday afternoon, in their first press release, they called Aliza Shvarts’ project a “creative fiction,” claimed that she had never artificially inseminated herself" and (paraphrasing) "Dean Salovey helped concoct the lie that the publicists told". Regardless of the fact that this was not the primary reason Chase was calling for Salovey's resignation, it would still constitute libel if Salovey could show that Chase knew (I hear she's close friends with Aliza, so odds are good she did know) Aliza was actually lying (if indeed she was), and that he suffered harm as a result of this lie. Whatever else you want to say about hypocrisy or the rest, Chase called the publicists and Salovey liars in the public forum in no uncertain terms. If she in fact knew that they were not lying, she's committed a pretty grave offense.

And there still definitely is a reason for the University to make Aliza sign a statement promising it's not real: they need to protect themselves from liability in case it is (they just had her word to go off of, and as we all know, she revels in "ambiguity"). Furthermore, they wanted other people to know it was fake so University students wouldn't be encouraged to endanger themselves for senior projects in future.

Salovey would allow Shvarts to challenge whatever she wants (if she wants to write a piece about how abortion is great, I'm sure he'd let her, didn't Xiaochen Su say something to that effect months ago?). What he won't do is allow her to pretend that the University condones taking idiotic risks with your health/life. It doesn't, it shouldn't, and allowing people to pretend that it does is the same as allowing it in the first place.

hieronymus, could you not find anything else to criticize in this article? is that why you must try to belittle the headline, of all things?

I agree, the university should not have signed off on the project in the 1st place.--she is the student.

#9, are you seriously disputing scientific conclusions about the effectiveness of herbal abortifacients by claiming that science is biased against pagans? Maybe the ancient pagan drugs can't be bought over the counter in America... or maybe they were wrong, why is that so surprising? It's not like they had rigorous testing, measurement, and verification methods back then. But no, science is just bigoted.

The quote from Funai is one of the best I've ever seen anywhere.

Seriously, YDN. Did you just make up "shed doubt" for the occasion?

finally! some science....some reason.
there's been way too much gut-reaction, over-the-top hype surrounding this whole thing.
we needed something like this.

Leave it to the Art major to come up with a scientifically impossible lie.

I'm confused. Is the artist a liar? Is her project a phony scam? More importantly, do I care?

You kids have a lot to learn about reporting if it took you a week to get to this point. If the medical sources had been called on the first day, you would have seen how thin this story is. Where was your skepticism? It really makes me fear for the future of journalism that everyone who reported this story so far has been so gullible.

Art? No - Disgusting!

So, lying is a new art medium according to the Yale art department. How much has she spent on her education?

In a few years, she'll be receiving NEA grants for such lying - oops! I mean performance art - from your hard earned tax dollars!

Many Chinese herbal materia medica in the Qi classification and pretty much all in the Blood invigorating classification are contraindicated for pregnancy. However, they are often used to induce labor. There are many acupuncture points that are also used to induce labor, and, if applied inappropriately, can also induce miscarriage.

All that aside, Schvats seemed to accomplish was obtain her proverbial 15 minutes in the royal panopticon. She and perhaps Lindman are sitting in the proverbial tower orgasming over the folly that has erupted that Schvats has created. The actual "art" is the folly that has erupted over the alleged controversy. With every day that this stays in the news, adds to her notoriety.

Pesonally, it would seem as if Schvats has not gotten over the reaction, or lack thereof, she received from her mother regarding the initial onset of her menses (the Ming Period), and this alleged project was just an extension of that temper tantrum.