Updated: Friday, July 4, 2008 at 8:35am
As Yale’s most popular interdisciplinary major undergoes a change in leadership, current professors say they hope to make some key changes to the structure of the Ethics, Politics and Economics program to bring some much-needed stability to its faculty roster. Both EP&E director Seyla Benhabib and Director of Undergraduate Studies Jennifer Bair will step down next...
In an effort to meet increasing student demand for upper-level writing classes and bolster the writing concentration, the English department is augmenting current offerings in both fiction and nonfiction writing classes, English Director of Undergraduate Studies Lawrence Manley said this week. The size of the writing faculty — currently totalling about 14 — will also...
When Michael Koelle, director of undergraduate studies in the Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry department, came to Yale 10 years ago, there were twice as many MB&B majors as there were last year. His initial reaction: it was simple coincidence. Biology-oriented students, he assumed, were probably just drifting to other biology-related majors. But a departmental...
Yale’s Faculty of Engineering will be spun off into its own school, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the University announced Monday. In a move approved by the Yale Corporation over the weekend, Dean of Engineering T. Kyle Vanderlick will take the helm of the new school, whose faculty will be increased in size by nearly 20 percent, the University said in...
Ari Berlin ’10 fared well during his spring-break travels to Morocco and Spain. He mastered “jus d’orange” in French and got by in Barcelona with his high-school Spanish. “I’m not a languages kind of guy,” Berlin says. Yet he speaks — or “interacts,” rather — in four languages: English since birth, Spanish from high school and Zulu and Afrikaans...
When Jill North, an assistant professor in the philosophy department, was considering a job offer from Yale four years ago, she could think of only one real downside: the University’s outdated, opaque tenure system. Under that system, revised last year after an 18-month review, junior faculty members in humanities departments like philosophy had an almost negligible...
Last semester, Japanese Literature professor Edward Kamens, then the acting director of the Whitney Humanities Center, noticed a consistent refrain in conversations with professors — and it wasn’t particularly uplifting. Those with whom Kamens spoke, he recalled, were concerned about drops in humanities enrollment, particularly in history, art history and...
Back in kindergarten, most boys had a fail-proof way of explaining the workings of the female mind: cooties. Soon, though, cooties become obsolete and now — after puberty, hormones and periods — understanding women is often perceived as a hopeless task for the college-aged man. But not for Colin Adamo ’10. As one of only four men who have declared a Women’s...
After spending over 20 years at the University as both a student and a teacher, Divinity School professor Serene Jones DIV ’85 GRD ’91 will leave Yale this fall to become the first female president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Jones’ appointment to Union, which was announced in late February, will halve the number of American Indian professors at...
Facing sharply declining undergraduate course enrollments, the Sociology department is attempting to reinvigorate its program by reaching out to sophomores and stabilizing faculty attrition, department chair Karl Ulrich Mayer said this week. The number of undergraduates enrolled in sociology courses has decreased nearly 75 percent over the last five years, according to...
When Michael Davies FES ’08 was unsatisfied with the lack of courses focused on environmentalism in politics that were offered at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, he did not just sit back and complain. He did something about it. With a group of like-minded peers, he spearheaded the development of a new course on environmental issues and the political...
Asian-American students make up the largest minority on campus. But many feel their culture is a bit underrepresented in the Blue Book. So this academic year, students have made efforts to bolster the Asian-American Studies Task Force, to push for an increase in courses addressing Asian-American issues and to encourage an increase in the number of Asian-American...
