T H E O L D E S T C O L L E G E D A I L Y · F O U N D E D 1 8 7 8

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2012 · VOL. CXXXV, NO. 48 · yaledailynews.com

INSIDE THE NEWS

IT’S OBAMAFROM OLD CAMPUS TO BOSTON AND CHICAGO, THE NEWS COVERS THE 2012 ELECTION ELECTION SUPPLEMENTMORNING CLOUDY 40

EVENING RAINY 39

BY MICHELLE HACKMAN AND DIANA LISTAFF REPORTERS

CHICAGO, Ill. — Four years after an historic election victory, President Barack Obama clinched a second term on Tuesday, edg-ing out former Massachusetts

Gov. Mitt Romney and securing another four years of holding the nation’s highest public o!ce.

At press time, Obama had won a total of 303 electoral votes com-pared to Romney’s 206. Major news networks called the race for Obama at approximately

11:15 p.m., before all states had finished reporting final poll-ing results. The President’s vic-tory was accompanied by a slew of other Democratic victories in tight races, with Democrats maintaining control of the Sen-ate despite having more seats up

for reelection.“Tonight, in this election, you,

the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back, and we know in our hearts that for

the United States of America the best is yet to come,” Obama said in his victory speech.

Election buzz built through-out the day in Obama’s home city, where he started his politi-cal career with three terms in the Illinois state senate. The crowd

attending CNN’s public watch party at Chicago’s Thompson Center plaza steadily expanded as onlookers joined to to watch final results trickle in and hear the candidates’ speeches.

BY SOPHIE GOULDSTAFF REPORTER

At 11:25 p.m. on Tuesday, a pack of about 15 students, two of them shirt-less and waving their T-shirts in the air, spilled out of Farnam Hall onto the lawn of Old Campus and began a victory lap.

“Obama!” they cheered. “Four more years!”

The sound of Young Jeezy croon-ing “My President Is Black” ema-nated from a window of Durfee Hall, as occasional cheers echoed from the distance and the students finished

Yale responds to Obama win

Romney concedes election

BY LORENZO LIGATO, MARGARET NEIL AND RISHABH BHANDARI

STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS

In the culmination of one of the most closely-watched and controversial races in the country, Democratic Congress-man Chris Murphy defeated Republi-can candidate Linda McMahon for Con-necticut’s junior United States Senate seat in Tuesday’s national election.

As of press time, Murphy was reported to have received 54 percent of the vote, compared to McMahon’s 45 percent. New Haven’s electorate strongly swung in Murphy’s favor, with

86 percent of voters casting their bal-lots for Murphy compared to 14 percent for McMahon. The race garnered media attention nationwide as one of a hand-ful of senatorial contests that together would determine whether the Sen-ate remains in Democratic hands. The outgoing incumbent, Senator Joseph Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67, was one of two independents in the Senate, leaving his vacated seat a potential prize for both parties.

The race also drew attention for shattering former campaign financing records. McMahon, who already lost a bid for the Senate in 2010, heavily out-

spent her opponent and committed at least $43.9 million of her own personal net worth to her campaign, according to campaign finance reports. Combined with her failed bid in 2010, McMahon has spent close to $100 million of her own wealth — shattering the record for the largest personal sum a candidate has ever spent for a political seat. The pre-vious record was held by former Ross Perot, who spent a total of $72 million running for president in 1992 and 1996.

When Murphy took the stage around 10:20 p.m. in the ballroom of Hartford’s

Murphy takes Senate seat

OBAMA REELECTED‘The best is yet to come.’

MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

EMILIE FOYER/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

After hearing news of Obama’s victory, seniors celebrated at Box 63.

SEE CT SENATE PAGE 3

SEE OBAMA VICTORY PAGE 5

SEE ROMNEY CONCEDES PAGE 8SEE REACTIONS PAGE 6

BY MONICA DISARE AND CYNTHIA HUASTAFF REPORTERS

BOSTON — The convention hall was silent and somber as each news sta-tion called Ohio, and then the President Barack Obama’s re-election.

A man consoled his young son, who had burst into tears when he heard the news. Clusters of people stood silently, teary eyes fixated on the screens.

The scene was a stark contrast to a few hours earlier, when former Massa-chusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s supporters watched campaign videos about change and discussed his chances of winning over wine and cheese. Early hopes of

the Romney campaign fighting against Democrats on blue territory in Wis-consin and Pennsylvania were quickly dashed when both states were called early for Obama. The night went on, the results grew grimmer, but the Romney headquarters in Boston held onto the hope that the remaining votes in Ohio, Virginia and Florida would swing in their favor.

As Obama’s victory became increas-ingly real, Romney supporters listened quietly, many with tears in their eyes, to the Republican candidate’s concession speech.

“I pray the President will be success-ful in guiding our nation,” Romney said.

Romney, whose speech began around 12:55 a.m. and ended in fewer than five minutes, spoke about Americans’ need to look to pastors, preachers and job creators to help the United States in the future. The Republican candidate began with congratulations to the President and thanks to Romney’s wife, his run-ning mate, Paul Ryan, and his children.

Despite their loss, Romney said he and Ryan had campaigned to the best of their abilities, adding that he believes the campaign’s volunteers had put forth the Republican Party’s strongest e"ort in recent years.

OPINION “All these debates and campaign promotions drive me crazy after a while” 'YDN78' ON 'WE HAVE NO CLUE'

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It goes without saying that Yale is a polit-ically active campus, especially during an election season. But too often I have

seen Yale students waste their breath in an attempt to convince those in the opposi-tion that they are wrong. Sadly, regardless of how well-informed and eloquent the argument, odds are slim that your partisan opponents will change their mind. Instead, your target audience should be people like me: independents who are open to new ideas, even if we have established beliefs. In the future, if you strive to sway our hearts, it’s helpful to keep the following in mind.

First, don’t call the opposition stupid, implicitly or explicitly. Everyone has rea-sons behind his beliefs. Comments like “I can’t understand who could think like that” make me question your intelligence, not your opposition’s. Similarly, the claim that you “don’t know a single person who supports this” only indicates that you seem to live in a bubble; I’m likely to take the rest of what you have to say with more than just a grain of salt.

More importantly, don’t attack your opponent with a straw man argument. Too often, I’ve heard students justify their beliefs by presenting a bastard-ized and usually ridiculous version of the other guy’s argument. While I identify as pro-choice, I don’t like when Yale stu-dents paint the typical pro-life advocate as a close-minded Bible-thumper. Those people exist but it’s unfair to conflate such fringes with the more polished pro-life arguments I’ve heard, all of which start by first acknowledging the danger of an over-

reaching government and then explain-ing their dissent. In the end, it boils down to just giving your political opponent some credit when trying to convince people like me to join your side.

Stop using the fallacy of the excluded middle: proving that your opponent is wrong does not make you any more right. This has been especially common this campaign season with much of the rhet-oric concentrating on why the other guy is worse. It’s not particularly di!cult to convince me that a Romney presidency would be destructive to gay rights. But that doesn’t actually compel me to vote for Obama. On the other side, even if I agree that Obama has handled the economy poorly, that doesn’t excuse the vagueness of Romney’s economic plan.

Finally, appreciate the importance of context. Yes, Obama said “the private sec-tor is doing just fine” and ”you didn’t build that,” but he made that point in context; a reasonable, well-informed person would understand the point he was making. Like-wise, Romney’s comments on “binders full of women” or the 47 percent have di"erent meanings than the sound bites themselves might imply.

This rule also applies to actual statistics. Believe it or not, numbers can be decep-tive; just ask any pollster how much fram-ing matters. So when you claim you are giving me “just the facts,” as if they are the smoking gun, don’t be surprised if I remain unconvinced.

As a student studying abroad during an election season, I’m disappointed to have

missed out on some of the most critical dis-course regarding the direction of American governance. But by studying with a diverse group of international students here in Milan, Italy, I have also come to recognize that our American political ideologies are still well within the confines of a limited liberal democracy that ensures broad indi-vidual rights — as well as liberties not found in most other parts of the world. Yes, this sounds childishly simple until you live in a country — an industrialized, First World, European country — whose last president controlled nearly 90% of the media, where professionals often put the cost of bribes into their budgets and where friends tell stories of how their families lost their jobs and were pressured out of town for speak-ing up against corruption. As much as we perceive Western Europe as a very open and liberal society, many of their economic and public policies would never be tol-erated by freedom-loving Americans on either side of the aisle. In short, when given the opportunity to step outside Ameri-ca’s political fray, you begin to realize that the supposedly irreconcilable di"erences that divide our country ultimately are not so great. Sadly, our discourse doesn’t usu-ally reflect that: trust me when I say that for many of us independents, partisanship sounds the same regardless of whether it’s liberal or conservative.

DAVID CROSSON is a junior in Branford College.

Contact him at david.crosson@yale.edu.

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T D AV I D C R O S S O N

Lessons from an independent

On this day four years ago, I let myself sleep in. The night before, I’d stood arms akimbo with an army

of Obama volunteers in the ballroom of a downtown Colorado Springs hotel as the results of the 2008 election were called out. As the regional director for the campaign in El Paso County, I felt enormous pride for my role in building something — a volun-teer apparatus that turned out more Dem-ocratic voters in this conservative bastion than any statewide campaign had in recent memory.

Just 18 months before, I’d left the protec-tive courtyards of Mother Yale for what I’d thought would be the last time, and signed up for the fledgling Obama campaign run-ning third in the Iowa caucus polls. Remem-ber John Edwards? We were behind him.

My job search, as I recall, had been driven by a desire to not do what many of my friends were doing — pursuing lucra-tive careers paths that would begin on Wall Street. Instead, I wanted to escape my life’s bubble, learn about my country and with the election around the corner, be a part of something much bigger than myself.

What I learned while campaigning in five states presaged the tragedy of the Great Recession. I witnessed poverty and divi-sion, crumbling, outdated infrastructure and an economy being robbed of its funda-mental fairness. But what I saw also fore-shadowed collective resolve. The citizens I met and the volunteers who marched into the o!ces I ran were unnervingly defiant,

bullish about their own futures and fired up about the election. Today, in the wake of Sandy, you don’t have to venture far down the Eastern Seaboard to encounter this same dichotomy.

Over the last four years, titanic firms have been downsized and bankrupted, bonuses slashed, and conversions for entire recruit-ing classes eliminated. Some of my closest and most talented friends that had taken coveted Big Apple financial jobs became victims of the worst financial crisis any of us will experience in our professional lives.

But demonstrating true Yalie resilience, my friends turned plight into opportu-nity and tried things they’d always wanted to do. One took his language and private equity skills to an emerging market in Viet-nam. Another left a big bank to apply his knowledge of the energy sector to a startup that creates industry-specific news feeds.

My own road, which included stops in the Obama Administration’s Interior Department and at two of Silicon Val-ley’s biggest companies, has led me back to Yale, where I am a student at our School of Management. Despite the fact that televi-sion analysts were predicting a rally on Wall Street if Gov. Romney won, I am thrilled with the results.

The reason is that we have a president for the next four years that stands for equal-ity. No, not socialism. Far from it. In time, President Obama’s first term will be seen as the Great Reset. Between 2008 and 2012, he restored our sanity in a dizzying number of

ways that Colbert and Stewart could not.In the president’s second term, I expect

common-sense tax reform that asks every-one to pay their fair share and backs us o" the fiscal cli". I expect immigrants to be treated as equals, with respectful policies that reward hard work, while discourag-ing illegal activity. I expect clean energy to be given the same opportunities to power our nation as dirty energy providers have been handed. I expect entrepreneurs to be encouraged and monopolistic merg-ers to be mitigated. I expect a safer and more prosperous planet and a more rele-vant and responsible federal government that stays out of the bedroom while looking out for my lot in life. As crisis after crisis — both man-made and natural, from Lehman Brothers and BP to Hurricane Sandy — have shown, we need a public sector that keeps pace with innovation and complexity, anticipates disaster on the horizon, spares us devastation and is accountable as we recover.

Most of all, I expect that I’ll have to pick up a torch and carry on the work that I believe in. I expect you to pick up a torch as well. After all, this has never been about one man or woman; it’s always been about the collective us. So with the 2012 election now behind us, we can all sleep in this morning. But just a little. It’s time to look forward.

NATHANIEL HUNDT is a 2007 graduate of Davenport College and a student at the School of

Management.

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T N A T H A N I E L H U N D T

After four years

Yesterday began freneti-cally. Students woke to find the campus grounds

littered with posters and fly-ers pasted all over our hallways. Student political activists rose early and barely stopped for breath, knocking on doors in a desperate final attempt to “get out the vote.” It seemed every-one — faculty, students and sta" — was proudly display-ing an “I voted” sticker and encouraging others to do the same.

But then the polls closed and the mood shifted. Anxi-ety seeped in. We knew there was nothing more to do, and so we paced powerlessly or sat nervously and chatted with friends. The world appeared to hang in the balance and we simply could not focus on other things. The TV networks real-ized this, and so hours before they had anything meaning-ful to report, they were already in full form, talking dramati-cally about nothing in particu-lar. For a few hours, undirected angst and excitement got in the way of everything Yale. Men-tal space simply did not allow for problem sets or reading responses.

The anxiety a"ected Dem-ocrats and Republicans alike. Perhaps Democrats waited hopefully and Republicans with a greater sense of dread, but despite Nate Silver’s oracular pronouncements, we all found our way to nervous uncertainty.

But where the day began as a common experience, the eve-ning was for partisans. A little after 11 p.m., the mood shifted again as the networks began announcing the election’s results. For the first time in this strange day, the mood among my friends began to divide.

Most Yale students were thrilled, and the cheers were as loud as the relief was palat-able. But for the Yale College Republicans watching in Silli-flicks, there could only be dis-appointment in a country that signed itself up for an addi-tional four years of misman-agement. Other Romney sup-porters, few and far between, outnumbered and low-profile, shook their heads at the willful blindness of their classmates, but resigned themselves to the inevitable.

As I sat in my room writ-ing this piece, I felt myself sur-rounded by this strange mix-ture of suddenly released and conflicting emotions. Out my window, I could hear the revelry of those elated by this evening’s results. But even as I heard those voices, I also watched as mournful emails trickled into my inbox. I am not sure how my address ended up on the Yale College Republicans' mailman list, but it allowed me to bear witness to a string of laments and consolation. As happy shouts overtook the area in front of Connecticut Hall, one lonely Republican student

e m a i l e d : “The worst p o s s i b l e night to be living on Old Campus.”

That sud-den mix-ture of dis-a p p o i n t -ment and j u b i l a t i o n felt strange. If not for a handful of

friends and email-list happen-stance, I would have no contact with the (apparent) majority of voters who are deeply saddened by last night’s results. At Yale, we live in a cocoon of political liberalism so tight that the Yale Political Union couldn’t find a conservative professor will-ing to debate professor David Bromwich on the resolution “Vote Obama.” In this deeply divided country, tonight is a deeply divisive moment. But on Yale’s campus, unless you look hard, you may never know.

Four years ago was the first time I voted. I had just turned 18 and I was spending the year at a religious seminary in Israel. After casting my vote by absen-tee ballot, I spent Election Night with friends in an apart-ment in Jerusalem. Because of the time di"erence, final elec-tion returns and speeches did not occur until about 7 a.m.

I remember the excitement of casting my first vote — but what stood out for me most was watching Senator John McCain’s concession speech in the early morning hours. I don’t remember the content, but I remember him quiet-ing the crowd as they tried to jeer mention of the president-elect. In defeat, amidst crush-ing disappointment, McCain did all could to heal the divi-sions that elections inevita-bly create. Again last night, Mitt Romney followed in that impossibly di!cult tradition of concession. Amid crushing disappointment, this man who has given so much of his life to the single-minded pursuit of a failed goal prayed for the pres-ident’s success and the coun-try’s unity.

The classy concession is the bedrock of democracy, and we betray that democratic pro-cess if we turn a blind eye to the trauma of electoral loss. So even as you cheer, happy the country has chosen a path you prefer, search out those small pockets of Yale students who disagree. The grace of the defeated pol-itician is the glue that allows the country to function even as half of our citizenry goes to bed despondent. This election was brutal, but now begins the truly di!cult work: putting the jagged and broken pieces back together.

YISHAI SCHWARTZ is a senior in Branford College. Contact him at

yishai.schwartz@yale.edu .

S T A F F I L L U S T R A T O R A U B E R E Y L E S C U R E

YISHAI SCHWARTZDissentary

Remember the concession

International Dispatches

ELECTION 2012YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 3

GROVER CLEVELANDO!ceholders are the agents of the people, not their masters.

Two weeks ago, an alumnus of the Yale College Class of 2012, the field man-ager for his father’s congressional re-

election team, was caught on film acqui-escing to a sting investigator’s suggestion that he commit voter fraud. He has since resigned his position on the campaign.

Over the summer, another 2012 graduate lost her internship at the Wall Street Journal after she mistook a quotidian piece about the reopening of a footbridge in Manhat-tan for a creative writing exercise, invent-ing fictional sources and attributing quotes to them.

Though these stories may appear to be isolated, anecdotal events, they should worry us. The stakes are higher than one young man’s future in politics or one young woman’s career in journalism. Yale prides itself on educating the leaders of tomor-row, but if these stories are any indication, the leaders we are producing lack character, judgment and virtue. Unless Yale recovers its moral compass and relearns how to edu-cate its students in the virtues required for leadership, the nation would do well to look elsewhere for its future leaders.

Neither Yale’s academic excellence nor its social culture distinguishes its under-graduate program; both are similar enough to those of hundreds of other colleges and universities. What sets Yale and its peer institutions apart is that they consider themselves — and are considered — train-ing grounds for future leaders par excel-lence. We undergraduates have the gospel of leadership preached to us from our first moments on campus; at Commencement, the president of the University admits us

to the “rights and responsibilities” (not “rights and privileges”) of Yale alumni, implying that we have a duty to take what we have learned at Yale and use it for the betterment of the world. Sometimes, it can be hard to tell whether this fixation on lead-ership is entirely healthy; in my opinion, it often has the savor of a smug complacency or an unseemly messiah complex. Either way, the fixation is undeniable. Ours is an education for leadership, and rarely are we allowed to forget it.

It is therefore frightening how little con-cern Mother Yale evinces for the moral education of her charges. Fifty years ago, the philosopher Henry Veatch commented on the American university’s accelerat-ing abdication of moral authority: “Even the professors of ethics nowadays … would not for a minute consider it their business to instruct students in such time-honored themes as ‘the di!erence between right and wrong,’ ‘the good life for man,’ or the obli-gation of being ‘For God, For Country, And For Yale.’”

Admittedly, the Harvard-educated Veatch may have taken a more than philo-sophic pleasure in that jab at New England’s second-oldest college. But we cannot deny the substance of the charge. Do our classes impart any coherent system of ethics? Do our extracurriculars? Does the administra-tion? During the Title IX controversy, many o"cial statements pronounced that sex-ual assault was inimical to “Yale’s values.” And yet in my four years as a student here, I have yet to see that phrase — “Yale’s val-ues” — applied to anything more concrete or less specific than the disapproval of rape,

which ought to be a presupposition of any meaningful moral education — not its first and only lesson.

Nor is the faculty concerned with moral instruction. There are, undoubtedly, many teachers who see their job as the bettering of their students’ whole being, including the cultivation of virtue. For the most part, though, our professors are profession-als, not mentors. They were hired for their specialized academic competencies, not because anyone thought they would add to the University’s ability to convert bright pupils into principled and profound lead-ers.

Many, I am sure, will feel that this is proper, that it isn’t the university’s place to teach virtue, that the academy should confine itself to academics and leave the students to their own moral explanations. Yet if young men and women are to spend four years of their lives acutely conscious of their present and future privilege, they had better receive a sound moral education to prepare them for the use of that privilege. Yes, there is room for disagreement over the precise virtues Yale should be impart-ing. But when Yalies are willing to partici-pate in voter fraud or fabricate journalis-tic sources, it is clear that their moral edu-cation has been so deficient that they have not even picked up the preliminary virtues of self-respect and integrity, without which no true leadership is possible.

BIJAN ABOUTORABI is a senior in Trumbull College. Contact him at

bijan.aboutorabi@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T B I J A N A B O U T O R A B I

Leadership without virtue

If I wake up today and I find out Obama hasn’t won, my biggest worry will not be what will happen to health care,

or how taxation will change, or whether Romney will continue to find more women in binders to o!end. Nope, my biggest worry will be that if Obama hasn’t won, my suitemates and roommate will have a collective aneurysm and internally com-bust, and I will have no one to room with next year.

Lesser mortals come home and com-plain about their p-sets (me), but not my suitemates. They like to come home and complain about some idiot in Entryway X of College Y and his Romney-Ryan laptop sticker. Some people sit and calculate their GPA — my suitemates calculate the votes needed to make swing states, well, swing. I spent one evening just watching my suite-mate throw popcorn at the TV screen every single time Romney opened his mouth to speak. When I wanted to grab the atten-tion of my other suitemate, all I need to do was whisper “Paul Ryan tax cuts,” and she became as alert as any good Democrat could be. Meanwhile my roommate tacked not one, but two Obama-Biden posters in our room, including one in Spanish. “Estamos Unidos” is now the last thing I read before going to sleep.

These are the girls I live with, and I am completely grateful for that. It’s com-

forting to know that at two in the morn-ing, your suitemate will be jumping up and down because she single handedly regis-tered 42 people to vote. There’s just one problem: I can’t vote. I’m not from this country. My passport is a di!erent color.

And so set in the apathy. This wasn’t the apathy that people have complained about: the why-did-more-of-us-show-up-in-2008 variety. This was the pecu-liar, almost snobbish apathy of interna-tional kids who have no connection to this country at all — except, of course, for the fact that we’re at Yale. We didn’t skip class to campaign, and we didn’t tear Linda McMahon stickers o! signposts (another thing my suitemates did in their spare time).

And this apathy is beginning to irritate me. For some, this “I don’t care” attitude morphed into a “I don’t know” attitude, but the last thing anyone should remain uninformed about is a presidential elec-tion in one of the most, if not the most, important countries when it comes to for-eign policy.

And the election results will a!ect international students, too, right down to whether or not you can receive an I-20 student visa and how long it’s valid.

One international kid told me: “Why should I care about American politics? It’s not like they care about politics in other

countries.” I’ll tell you why. Because I’m sorry if

you’re from a little island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or a random Mid-dle Eastern country churning out oil or a South Asian country with nuclear arms — no matter how important a player your country is in their region, its foreign policy doesn’t count for anything. The decisions their Congress or Senate or Parliament make are incomparable to the kind of deci-sions that the U.S. Congress and president will make. That my suitemate’s vote — the same lovable p-set-enduring, lunch-buddy suitemate — potentially decided how much aid my country will receive in the coming years is almost surreal. But it’s true, and it happened right in front of me. For anyone to argue otherwise that inter-national students really shouldn’t care is ridiculous.

The election is over, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be aware. Know your far-left liberals from your moderate Dem-ocrats, and your McMahons from your Murphys. Don’t be apathetic, even if you couldn’t vote. Because the people who did vote, on some distant level, voted for you, too. And that, more than anything, is the real worry.

MEIRYUM ALI is a freshman in Pierson Col-lege. Contact her at meiryum.ali@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T M E I R Y U M A L I

A di!erent kind of apathyWhenever election sea-

son rolls around, I can’t help but think of

the TV show “The West Wing” (and it would appear that other YDN columnists feel the same). I inevitably compare all politi-cal candidates to Jed Bartlett, the idealistic, wildly intellec-tual president on the show, and his group of brilliant, irrever-ent aides. I don’t think of the show with longing during elec-tion season because it’s hilarious — though it is — or because it’s the equivalent of chicken soup for the tortured liberal soul. No, what makes the world of “The West Wing” so compelling dur-ing election season is the way the characters on the show talk.

It’s not the way our politicians talk today, and it’s not the way they’ve been talking through-out this election as they vented partisan bitterness, called each other names and lied through their teeth. No, the characters on “The West Wing” weren’t per-fect, and they didn’t always tell the full truth, but they were men and women of integrity, people that you believed had your best interests — and the best interests of the country — at heart.

Yesterday our country voted, modeling for the world what sustainable, vital democracy looks like. And yet, I wonder how many people voted because they genuinely believed that the peo-ple they were voting for were fully invested in making a bet-ter world for them, their con-stituents. I say “fully” because I believe that many politicians — our current and now future president amongst them — do want to build a better world for Americans.

But I also believe that we, and our president of the past four years, have come to realize that American politicians are often more interested in agendas other than building a better Amer-ica: imposing their religious beliefs on people in the country who don’t share them, building up their own power bases and maintaining the status quo for their cronies in the private sec-tor.

While most of these poli-ticians won’t own up to the biases that inform their behav-iors and opinions, they are also all too ready to call others out for the very same tendencies. The hypocrisy and disingenuousness of politics has become wearying, and it’s largely boiled down — for me — to a single point: our pol-iticians are afraid of disclosure. They are eager to avoid substan-tive discussion with each other in which they are forced to agree, disagree and compromise.

Jed Bartlett ends one episode of “The West Wing” dreaming of a great conversation about American values and practices sweeping the country: in homes, in the media, in the White House and in Congress. I too dream of such a conversation, one beyond

the above-m e n t i o n e d partisan bick-ering and snarky asides.

We as a nation deserve such a conversa-tion, one that acknowledges what our country isn’t doing well and what we can do better,

making room in the conversation for everyone’s voice. I imagine an election in four years in which the voice of a millionaire doesn’t mean more than the voice of a new-made citizen; where young people are listened to as much as the old; where minorities can advocate for the changes that must be made in order for them to have equal opportunities and full participation in American public life.

Yes, it is the idealist in me imagining this conversation. But the realist in me is prepared for more of the same political dodg-ing, ducking and road-blocking of avenues to honest, nuanced discourse.

And so, as everyone wakes up this morning, I want to advo-cate for a little outrage. We stood in line. We voted. We don’t nec-essarily believe our vote will change the world or our lives for the better. And yet we con-tinue to wait and hope that the country we live in and love will improve economically, socially and politically — that our chil-dren will have better lives than ours.

Together, we’ve made a deci-sion about who we want to lead us. We have four more years of President Obama. But it’s now our job to call the leaders of our many di!erent branches of gov-ernment to account, and remind them of their true responsibili-ties: our prosperity, our peace of mind.

As a lover of “The West Wing” and a young voter that never wants to feel the mixture of out-rage, apathy and disbelief that I experienced during this election, I want to put forward a statement that politicians don’t seem to want to acknowledge: they work, and should only work, for us. Let’s spend this term reminding our leaders of what they can be — and what they owe us.

ZOE MERCER-GOLDEN is a senior in Davenport College. Contact her at zoe.mercer-golden@yale.edu .

ZOE MERCER- GOLDEN

Meditations

YALE SOUNDS OFF ELECTION RESULTS

A new conversation

THE CONVERSATION WILL BEGIN

WITH US

I think the results of the election point to a diverse political middle that is will-ing to fight back. Entire swaths of voters were turned o! by the extreme posi-tions Romney took during the primaries — just look at his losing margins among women and minorities. No candidate will ever win national o"ce with 25 percent of the Hispanic vote; it's that simple. American politics are no longer dominated by white male voters. The political center has moved to the left, and the Republican party would be smart to follow suit. -ROD CUESTAS '15

‘

I am excited for Obama to put the election behind him and use his newfound freedom to make bolder, more liberal policies during his second term. And maybe to install President Levin as Treasury Secretary! -JONAH BADER '16

‘

It always seems darkest just before the dawn. My parents told me that when Carter won, they thought we'd lose the Cold War to the Soviets — and then came Reagan. Maybe Romney's loss is just paving the way for the Reagan of the twenty-first century. I certainly pray so, at least. -ELIZABETH HENRY '14

‘

I am ecstatic for another term of sensible foreign policy, higher quality healthcare, improved educational goals and hopefully more bipartisan action. I am, however, disappointed about the negativity of this campaign; it is a reflection on the American political sphere, one that desperately needs positive change. -KELLY WU '16

‘

When President Obama assumed o"ce, he broke down racial bar-riers. Four years later, he continues to inspire with both his rhetoric and his actions. We still have a ways to go, but for now, I celebrate. I just can’t wipe the childlike grin from my face, because today I know that our country will continue to move forward. -OMAR NJIE '13

‘

To quote a friend from back home, last night was a "tough night for rape enthusiasts." Thank-fully, yesterday evening was tough for many people in the country who were attempting to systematically strip people of their rights — be it the right to marry, the right to make choices about one's own body or even the right to vote. As an American, I'm happy to look forward to another four years of an Obama presidency. As a Missourian, I'm thrilled, though not sur-prised, that Claire trounced Todd Akin, allowing my state to retain some shred of dignity. For the first time ever, something that I voted for actually happened. -BECCA STEINBERG '15

‘

Like many conservatives, I am more disappointed that President Obama won than that Mr. Romney lost. I only hope that the popular vote will be favorable for us, so that the President will know he was America's second choice. -EMILY POIRIER '15

‘

NEWSPAGE 4 YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

BY AMY WANGCONTRIBUTING REPORTER

For the graduates of the Class of 2012 who chose to stay in Con-necticut after Commencement last May, opportunities to recon-nect with Yale may come sooner than their five-year reunion.

The Association of Yale Alumni is creating the Young Alumni Council of Connecticut, an ini-tiative that will invite alumni

in Connecticut who graduated from any Yale school since 2000 to monthly events, in an e!ort to bring together young alumni for networking and socializing. The initiative, which will target the roughly 4,800 young alumni who live in Connecticut, will o"cially kick o! Nov. 30 with an event at Shake Shack on Chapel Street. It will host events similar to those already o!ered by the Yale Club of New Haven, which has around

400 members, but the new group will be an AYA organization and will not charge annual dues.

“The AYA is very interested and innovative, I hope, in producing events that attract young alumni,” said Mark Dollhopf ’77, executive director of the AYA.

Dollhopf added that the new initiative is one of “dozens of doz-ens” of initiatives in the AYA’s strategic plan to increase alumni involvement within their local

regions across the country.Johnson Flucker ’80, the AYA

director in charge of New Haven alumni who is coordinating the initiative, said young alumni in Connecticut and New Haven rep-resent “one of the largest untapped resources” for social activities and networking opportunities. According to AYA records, 3,300 of Connecticut’s young alumni are concentrated in New Haven.

Flucker added that alumni who

attend the Shake Shack event will have the opportunity to provide suggestions for future events. Though feedback to the AYA has previously shown that young alumni are mostly interested in social events, he said, the AYA would also like to organize some service-oriented and cultural events for the new group.

Tahia Thaddeus Kamp ’98, president of the Yale Club of New Haven, said she does not see the new initiative as “detracting at all” from the Yale Club’s events.

“It’s a wonderful way to bridge our influence with very recent graduates who are often busy setting out on careers and think something like a Yale Club or AYA event may not have a great deal to o!er them — but actually it does, especially for networking and

career opportunities,” she said.All five local alumni interviewed

said they would be interested in attending at least one of the new initiative’s events.

“It seems like a good idea, so I’d definitely plan on going to what-ever I can,” said Christine Jun ’12, a current resident of New Haven. “Graduation happened really quickly, and it’s really hard to keep track of where all my friends are — so to corral everyone in the area together and just do some sort of social event would be enough.”

Another New Haven resident, Zachary Rotholz ’11, said he would enjoy meeting Yale graduates from other years, although he already has a group of alumni friends in Connecticut. He added that it would also be helpful to see the initiative bring in panels of older alumni who could give advice to recent graduates and talk about their experiences transitioning from college to their careers.

Though the initiative o"cially focuses on students from the Class of 2000 to the Class of 2012, alumni from other graduation years are also eligible to attend its events.

Contact AMY WANG at xiaotian.wang@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 5

NEWS “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE SPOKEN BY KING RICHARD IN SHAKE-

SPEARE’S PLAY “RICHARD II”

Association of Yale Alumni launches local council

BY ANYA GRENIERSTAFF REPORTER

Thirty minutes after Under-graduate Production’s “Sound/Projections Seminar” was sched-uled to begin yesterday afternoon, its hosts were still waiting for a sin-gle student to show.

But UP Technical Director Tom Delgado DRA ’09 and Nathan Roberts DRA ’10, production coor-dinator for the Theater Studies Department, attributed the lack of attendance to Election Day has-sle and preparation for this week’s Dramat mainstage “The Drowsy Chaperone,” rather than to an absence of student interest. The use of new media and projections technology on the stage is a grow-ing trend in the theater industry that is sparking excitement among the upcoming generation of theater students, Delgado said.

Roberts and Delgado planned the production workshop to take place while the Whitney Human-ities Center’s Whitney Theater is still equipped for the senior project “Richard 2012” to show students how the production is making use of live feed video and various media projections, and to introduce them to the the use of sound and projec-tions programs Q-lab and Isadora.

“Richard” is not the first the-ater studies project to make use of such technology, Delgado said. Senior projects “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Hamlet” inte-grated projections into their shows last year, and Delgado said that he anticipates more senior proj-ects, such as January’s “Breaking the Code,” will do the same next semester.

Both the Theater Studies Department and Undergradu-ate Production have begun new initiatives this year to respond to student interest. Theater Stud-ies Director of Undergraduate Studies Paige McGinley explained that her department is aware that using media projections is a grow-ing trend in the field. For the first time this year, she has made it part of the curriculum both to keep up with developments in the field and to adequately prepare students entering the theater world after graduation.

“[New technology]’s constantly getting integrated into shows on Broadway,” Roberts said. “Stu-dents go to New York, and they come to us and ask, ‘How do we do that? How do we make that hap-pen?’”

MIXING MEDIATo better provide training in

these technologies, Delgado, UP Technical Director Justin Deland and Senior Technical Director Rorie Fitzsimmons are all taking a projections engineering class at the Yale School of Drama this semes-ter. While the professional school o!ers classes in technical mastery, undergraduates interested in the-ater’s technical side have histori-cally had few academic outlets for increasing their knowledge. The UP workshops have tried to fill in any gaps students may have, Del-gado said, citing a series of light-ing workshops he held last year that catered to a variety of student needs and skill sets.

This semester the Theater Stud-ies Department is also hoping to broaden students’ understanding of new technologies by hiring Elise Morrison as an Interdisciplinary Performance Studies postdoctoral associate. Morrison, who received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Perfor-mance Studies from Brown Uni-versity in 2011, focuses her work around the use of video installa-tions and surveillance technologies in theater. Next semester, Morrison will teach an undergraduate course on digital media in performance which will serve as a “laboratory” for students, exposing them both to the theoretical and technical side of the new techniques avail-able to them, she said.

“I think that the value of this kind of exploration in the theater is that it allows people to come together and consider what this

new media means for our lives,” Morrison explained.

Morrison emphasized that while the use of digital media spe-cifically is new, its incorporation is part of a long history of theat-rical productions experiment-ing with developing technolo-gies. Past examples have included everything from the use of per-spectival painting to the incorpo-ration of photography and film, she explained.

“Theater has always been a mixed media form,” Morrison said.

Morrison said that because video technologies “are so embed-ded in our daily lives” they are quickly becoming an important way of conveying the realities of modern life and communication on the stage.

In “Richard 2012,” for instance, the use of projections helped to “make [it] a completely di!erent kind of event,” creator Alex Kramer ’13 said. The show used live video feed of the actors and audience members, as well as video clips from the news media and politi-cal ad campaigns in projections around the stage.

For “Richard,” the use of pro-jections is necessary for convey-ing to audiences the show’s mes-sage about the media-saturated culture of the presidential elec-tion, Delgado said. Roberts said he hopes other students like those involved in “Richard” will use the projections technology available to them in ways that advance the artistic goals of their projects, and not simply because “it’s the hot new thing.”

THEATER’S DIGITAL AGETo make new technology more

readily available for student use, Delgado said UP recently pur-chased a MacBook Pro for the Whitney Humanities Center’s theater so that future shows can also benefit from computer-based lighting and sound mixing pro-grams.

One up-and-coming theater innovation is LED lighting tech-nology, which allows lighting designers to far more easily create any color on the spectrum, includ-ing blended shades not possible with conventional light fixtures,

DeLand explained. He added that this semester’s “Spring Awak-ening” production made use of LED lights to great e!ect, and that spaces around campus includ-ing the O! Broadway Theater and the Morse-Stiles Crescent Under-ground Theater now have new light boards compatible with LED light fixtures.

New computer software now gives sound designers a similar plethora of options, Roberts said.

“I got into sound design when some people were still splic-ing together tape,” Roberts said. “Now there’s an infinite amount of sources available… it’s limited only by the computer’s memory.”

Modern technologies make technical work in theater less labor intensive and more “user-friendly” than it has been in the past, Mor-rison said. DeLand explained

that the new LED-equipped light boards are “a lot more intuitive” to students who are used to working with computers.

By allowing directors to more easily “dabble” in the technical aspects of shows, new technolo-gies are inspiring more students to begin working on the techni-cal design side of theater, Delgado said. UP Peer Advisor and sound designer Josh Stein ’13 said the undergraduate theater scene has historically su!ered from a lack of students on the design and tech-nical fields given the number of shows going up — lighting design-ers, for instance, have sometimes become “burnt out” due to the high demand for their skills. He said that it is necessary to recruit and retain students with technical skills by giving them more creative outlets.

Delgado said he has already wit-nessed the increased engagement of students with theater’s techni-cal aspects after they are exposed to the mixed media elements now possible with new technology. He cited the example of Charlie Polinger ’13 as a student now inter-ested in gaining experience as a sound designer after experiment-ing with recent developments in sound technology as the director of “Richard 2012.”

“[New technologies in theater] force actors and directors to have a deeper understanding of the tech-nical sides of production,” Mor-rison said, adding that her class next semester will blur the lines between various roles.

Contact ANYA GRENIER at anna.grenier@yale.edu .

BY THE NUMBERS LOCAL ALUMNI4,800 Alumni in Connecticut

3,300 Alumni in New Haven

400 Yale Club of New Haven members

SARAH ECKINGER/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The Whitney Humanities Center’s Whitney Theater is still equipped for the senior project “Richard 2012.”

Theater has always been a mixed media form.

ELISE MORRISONPostdoctoral associate, Interdisciplinary

Performance Studies

Graduation happened really quickly, and it’s really hard to keep track of where all my friends are.

CHRISTINE JUN ’12New Haven resident

DRAMA

Theater adapts to new technology

SARA STALLA/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The Young Alumni Council of Connecticut will kick o! in Shake Shack on Nov. 30, providing local Yale alumni with networking opportunities.

NEWSPAGE 6 YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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BY HAYLEY BYRNESCONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Seun Adebiyi LAW ’09 answers to many titles — among them, Yale Law School gradu-ate, future Olympian and cancer survivor.

Adebiyi spoke as part of the Yale Afri-can Student Association’s annual Africa Week, which runs from Nov. 1 to Nov. 10 and was themed “Culture Shifters of the Afri-can Renaissance.” Along with speakers like Adebiyi, the week’s lineup features seven events, such as film screenings and lectures from artists, public health o!cials and econ-omists. YASA President Shamillah Bankiya ’14 said the week’s organizers made an e"ort to choose speakers who could relate to college students and inspire them to become involved with African development.

“Having young people speak, it’s more relatable,” she said. “You can make a di"er-ence however young you are … We’re inviting young people to make a di"erence.”

The week began with a talk from George Ayittey — a noted TED speaker and presi-dent of the Free Africa Foundation — who said Africa’s problems come from widespread cor-ruption, though the continent can improve its future with a new generation of African lead-ers.

On Monday night, Adebiyi spoke to an audience of 12 students, most of whom were YASA members. His lecture, titled “The Challenges and Opportunities of Setting Up a Registry in Nigeria,” described his back-ground at Yale Law School, where he first began to participate in skeleton, a sport that involves sledding on an ice track and one in which he will compete at the 2014 Olympics. After graduating from law school, he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and later started the first bone marrow registry in Nigeria. Adebiyi said it became clear that a “huge gap” exists along racial lines for blood donors. Seventy percent of blood donors in America are white, he added, which means African-Americans face a harder time secur-ing a genetic match — only 13 percent are suc-cessful in finding donors.

Adebiyi said he is hopeful for the registry’s future success, but he said he is frustrated at the pessimism of African leaders.

“[There is] a mental paralysis within elites and experts — a huge gap between what can be done and what people think can be done,” he said.

Bankiya said Africa Week is funded jointly by the Council of African Studies, O!ce of International Students and Scholars and the Traphagen Alumni Speakers Fund, and the events primarily rely on African Studies pro-fessors and Yale alumni to assemble speakers. She added that she hopes the events will pro-vide more visibility for YASA and African stu-dents on campus.

Ameze Belo-Osagie ’16, an international student from Nigeria who attended Ayittey’s talk last week, said she agrees that youth hold the power to change Africa, but she thinks some value Africans who leave for educa-tion- or business-related reasons over those leaders who remain in Africa. Belo-Osagie, who also attended Adebiyi’s lecture, said she found Adebiyi’s talk both relevant and acces-sible, and she appreciated that he spoke more broadly about succeeding in a challenging environment.

Ajua Duker ’15, a YASA board member who attended Adebiyi’s lecture, said she found the talk so inspiring that she is now considering moving to Africa after graduation.

Africa Week will end this Saturday with a fashion show at the Afro-American Cultural Center.

Contact HAYLEY BYRNES at hayley.byrnes@yale.edu .

Africa week aims to inspire youth

BY JOSEPH TISCHCONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Yale linguist and anthropolo-gist Mark Turin plans to preserve some of the world’s most endan-gered languages by enlisting the help of native speakers.

Turin was recently awarded roughly $70,000 for two di"er-ent projects which will document these rare languages. A $20,000 grant from the Google Earth Outreach program, which was awarded to him Oct. 31, will spon-sor him and Language Landscape, a London-based team of program-mers, in creating an online inter-face to map the geographical dis-tribution of the world’s languages. Another grant from the Brit-ish Council Transnational Edu-cation Partnership Programme, which will award him approxi-mately $50,000 over two years, will aid fieldwork in the Himalayas so Turin can collaborate with stu-dents at Karakorum International University (KIU) in Gilgit, Paki-stan to develop a linguistics cur-riculum for the university.

With these two “quite small” grants, Turin said he hopes to show that a significant amount of money is not necessary to e"ect change in the humanities and social sciences.

He said the prices of documen-tation technology, such as cam-eras and recorders, have fallen in recent years and emphasized the native speakers’ excitement for wireless and internet technolo-gies — a recent change in their lifestyle.

While teaching at the Uni-versity of Cambridge in January 2009, Turin founded the World Oral Literature Project (WOLP) to “collect, protect and con-nect” the world’s endangered lan-guages by digitizing and catalogu-ing decades of linguistic research.

WOLP’s data currently includes over 30 collections from 15 coun-tries across five continents from the 1920s to the present, he said.

The Google grant, formally awarded to the Turin’s WOLP and Language Landscape, will help cover the costs of programming a new online interface for the next year.

Turin said the main program-ming challenge will be finding a sensitive way to represent the world’s linguistic diversity in a way that currently is not possi-ble with Google Maps interface, which uses points and polygons to represent data.

“We don’t yet know the out-come or how we’re going to do it, but we know we’re going to do something,” Turin said. Key to the interface will be the understand-ing that communities are often multilingual and different lan-guages are used in di"erent ways, he added.

The new interface will take advantage of the data hosted by Turin’s WOLP, and will eas-ily allow researchers and native speakers to input new data in the future to “show how and where their languages are spoken,” he added.

Turin’s British Council grant, which will involve more typi-cal field research, also puts an emphasis on giving native speak-ers the tools and technologies to document their own languages. He will work with scholars at KIU to document rare and endangered languages in the Himalayas, a region containing one-sixth of the world’s spoken languages.

As part of the project, Turin will take advantage of KIU’s many master’s students who come from the Himalaya region and are themselves native speakers of endangered languages.

“[We’re going] to train master’s

students in the techniques of lan-guage documentation so that they can go and document their own languages and cultures,” Turin said. “There’s far too much work to be done. I have the pleasure and privilege of supporting them.”

The group hopes to assemble easily usable language surveys and field documentation kits to help students with their documenta-tion, Turin said.

Over the course of the two-year grant, Turin will travel twice to Pakistan and the Himalayas, and the principal researchers from KIU will travel twice either to New Haven or to the United Kingdom.

Alexa Little ’15, who works as Turin’s student assistant, said Turin’s recently awarded grants will fund important and neces-sary linguistics research. Since these rare languages are in dan-ger of disappearing forever, she said research should be conducted immediately to preserve language skills for future generations.

“This is the critical time period to preserve these languages before they disappear,” she said.

With the advent of technology, Turin said he has noticed a shift in the field of linguistics from docu-mentation stuck in the libraries of “traditional ivory towers” to more practical work that can be useful for native speakers.

“No longer [is linguistics research] just terse grammati-cal descriptions that will sit in university libraries,” he said. “Increasingly we are writing in partnership with [native] people.”

Turin said native people are often cited as full co-authors on published papers.

Turin first came to Yale in August.

Contact JOSEPH TISCH at joseph.tisch@yale.edu .

Grants to fund rare language research

BY THE NUMBERS BONE MARROW GAPS

70Percent of cancer patients who will reside in developing countries by 2050

83Percent of African Americans who cannot find a life-saving donor match

70Percent of bone marrow donors in the United States who are white

BULLETIN BOARDYALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 7

Rain, mainly after noon. High near 43, low of 32. Breezy, with gusts as high

as 41 mph.

High of 44, low of 32.

High of 54, low of 34.

TODAY’S FORECAST THURSDAY FRIDAY

CROSSWORDLos Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Lewis

FOR RELEASE NOVEMBER 7, 2012

ACROSS1 Dash, e.g.5 Head-hanging

emotion10 Altoids alternative15 Fan favorite16 Earthling17 Absorbed the

loss18 Tropical

headgear20 Passover ritual21 Dix halved22 Calendar abbr.24 Prior to, in verse25 Low-tech note

taker27 Deal-closing aids30 Unblemished31 Line winder32 Baking by-

products33 Creative

enterprise34 On the fence35 Six-stringed

instrument,usually

36 Urbana-ChampaignNCAA team

41 Two pages42 “Zip-__-Doo-Dah”43 Tram car filler45 Totally absorbed48 Hon49 Pontiac muscle

cars50 Powerful pin

cushion?52 “It __ hit me yet”53 Mao follower?54 Scientology’s __

Hubbard55 Sushi bar soup56 Cook-off potful58 False63 Mixer for a

mixologist64 Boyfriends65 Couple in a

rowboat66 Run through a

reader, as a debitcard

67 Footlocker68 Sandstorm

residueDOWN

1 Split2 Org. concerned

with crowns3 Mozart works

4 Pal of JerrySeinfeld

5 Retired seven-foot NBAer

6 “Say that again?”7 “I __ Rock”8 Fisher-Price

parent company9 Follow logically

10 Potluck staple11 Summer on the

Seine12 Turn in for cash13 Spain’s __ de

Campos14 Underline, say19 Trio on a phone

keypad23 Online

shopkeeper25 Place for

pampering26 Area of expertise27 Calligrapher’s

flourish28 Question of time,

to Telemann29 __ me tangere31 Barbecue spit,

e.g.34 “Every Breath

You Take” band35 “Myra

Breckinridge”author

37 Tickled pink38 Scottish Celt39 “As of yet, no”40 Pressing need?44 Inexact fig.45 Throws out46 Reservation

waster47 Spiral pasta48 One of Dancer’s

partners49 Far-from-efficient

vehicle

51 Reservations52 Best-seller55 Perfumery

scent57 Blistex target59 Frat house

letter60 Flee61 The Rams of

the NCAA’sAtlantic 10 Conf.

62 D-Day vessel

Tuesday’s Puzzle SolvedBy James Sajdak 11/7/12

(c)2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc. 11/7/12

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3 1 6 75

SUDOKU MEDIUM

ON CAMPUSWEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 712:00 PM Lunchtime Chamber Music Chamber music ensembles will perform. Free admission and open to the general public. Sprague Memorial Hall (470 College St.), Morse Recital Hall.

8:00 PM Learn to Belly Dance A collaborative workshop with the Yale Arab Students’ Association. Free for undergrads with ID at the door, $5 all others. 8–9 pm: a tour of exciting cabaret, stage and theatrical styles of belly dance; learn some fun moves from each and explore some common belly dance props (veil, Isis wings, skirts, canes, swords). 9–10 pm: learn Shaabi style choreography (flirty, fun, and sassy) at the intermediate level. Morse College (304 York St.), Crescent Theater.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 84:00 PM “Philanthropy and Policy: The Modern Service Movement” A discussion with Shirley Sagawa, Dwight Hall’s 2012 Distinguished Mentor. Sagawa, co-founder of Sagawa/Jospin Consulting Firm, was named a “Woman to Watch in the 21st Century” by Newsweek magazine and one of the “Most Influential Working Mothers in America” by Working Mother magazine. A national expert on children’s policy and philanthropy, she has been called “a founding mother of the modern service movement” in the United States. She is currently a fellow in the Center for American Progress. Dwight Hall (67 High St.), Chapel.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 98:30 PM Fall 2012 Japan Film Series — “Three Outlaw Samurai (Sanbiki no Samurai)” Directed by Hideo Gosha, this 1964 film is among the most beloved chanbara (sword-fighting) films. It is an origin-story o!shoot of a Japanese television phenomenon of the same name, but it is also a classic in its own right. A wandering, seen-it-all ronin becomes entangled in the dangerous business of two other samurai, hired to execute a band of peasants who have kidnapped the daughter of a corrupt magistrate. 93 minutes. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.), Auditorium.

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PAGE 8 YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

AROUND THE IVIES “We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.” DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER 34TH PRESIDENT

OF THE UNITED STATES AND FIVE-STAR GENERAL IN THE UNITED STATES ARMY

DURING WORLD WAR II

OPINION.Send submissions to opinion@yaledailynews.com

Candidates balance Harvard connectionsBY MATTHEW CLARIDA

STAFF WRITER

This past spring, Mitt Rom-ney made an odd accusation of Barack Obama.

“We have a president who I think is a nice guy, but he spent too much time at Harvard per-haps,” Romney told supporters at a rally.

But so had Romney. Like the president, he graduated from Harvard with a law degree; in addition, he received an MBA

from the B u s i n e s s S c h o o l . Neverthe-less, Rom-ney was expressing a skepti-cism and d i s d a i n

that is representative of much of the country’s opinion on degrees from elite institutions.

While there are many proud graduates of Harvard running

for office, around the country some Harvard alums jockey-ing for a seat on Capitol Hill are doing their best to avoid “the H-word.” Sometimes an asset, sometimes a liability, a degree from Harvard has proved to be a touchy subject on the campaign trail.

THE H-BOMBJoseph A. Selvaggi, the

Republican challenging incum-bent Stephen F. Lynch in Mas-sachusetts’ 8th District, was

strolling the paths of Harvard Yard only a few months ago.

Selvaggi graduated from the Kennedy School of Government this past spring and immediately entered the Republican primary.

While Selvaggi acknowledged that “the ink might still be wet on my diploma,” he’s not exactly quick to reminisce about his Harvard days, at least not on the campaign trail.

“I don’t lead with it,” Selvaggi said of his Masters in Public Pol-icy. “I keep it, in a sense, close to

the vest.”Even when people ask directly

about his time in Cambridge, Selvaggi says that he often deliberately refers to HKS as “the Kennedy School,” dropping the Harvard a!liation. “If you can avoid the H-word, and just say ‘the Kennedy School,’” he said, “that solves all your prob-lems.”

The negative associations with Harvard can come from both sides of the aisle, accord-ing to Selvaggi. “As a Republi-

can coming from the Kennedy School, some people are sus-picious, like I’m a Manchurian candidate if I’ve even set foot in Cambridge,” he said.

There is also a concern from Republican Party leaders that a candidate with a Harvard degree might not be conservative enough on certain issues. “[Peo-ple worry] that you’re not will-ing to beat the drum of partisan-ship if you’ve spent enough time in Cambridge, [that it might] soften your perspective.”

HARVARD

WORLDYALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 9

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction … It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same.” RONALD REAGAN 40TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

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BY GILLIAN WONGASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING — During her 30-hour train journey to Beijing, Wang Xiulan ducked into bath-rooms whenever the conductors checked IDs. Later, as she lay low in the outskirts of the capital, unidentified men caught her in a nighttime raid and hauled her to a police station. She assumed a fake identity to get away, and is now in hiding again.

Wang’s not a criminal. She’s a petitioner.

She’s among many people attempting to bring local com-plaints directly to the central government in an age-old Chi-nese tradition that has con-tinued during the Communist Party era. But police never make that easy, and this week, as an all-important leadership tran-sition begins, a dragnet is aimed at keeping anyone perceived as a threat or a troublemaker out of Beijing.

“There is no law in China, especially for us petitioners and ordinary folk,” Wang, 50, said in an interview with The Associ-ated Press. “Even common gang-sters and hoodlums get to leave after they serve time for crimes, but for us, if we get locked up, we

never know when we might be freed.”

Authorities want no sur-prises as the handover of power begins in the capital Thursday. The transition already has been rocked by the party’s messi-est scandal in decades, involv-ing a former high-flying politi-cian now accused of engaging in graft and obstructing the inves-tigation into his wife’s murder of a British businessman.

Rights groups say the wide-ranging crackdown on crit-ics bodes poorly for those who hope the incoming generation of leaders will loosen restrictions on activism.

“China’s top political leaders are very nervous, as they have since early this year been con-sumed by one of the most desta-bilizing and disharmonious power struggles in decades,” said Renee Xia, international direc-tor of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders. The group estimates that hundreds or thousands of people have come under some kind of restriction in preparation for the party congress.

Lawyers have been held under illegal house arrest, dissidents sent back to their hometowns and activists questioned. Inter-net users report difficulties

accessing many websites and the failure of software meant to bypass Internet filters.

Veteran activist Huang Qi, who runs a website on petition-ers like Wang, said nearly 1,000 people have contacted him over the past few weeks to complain that authorities have hired thugs to harass and beat them.

“I hope that the Chinese authorities will face up to the social problems,” Huang said in an interview. “Using violence will only escalate the resistance.”

The crackdown reflects the leadership’s nervousness as

slowing economic growth exac-erbates public outrage over cor-ruption, social injustice, pol-lution and favoritism toward state-run agencies and the elite at the expense of ordinary peo-ple.

Under normal circumstances, petitioners are relatively safe once they reach Beijing’s out-skirts, though in their home provinces they are almost per-petually on the run from hostile local o!cials or thugs-for-hire who want to nab them before they can get an audience with central government agencies.

China cracks down on activistsBY SHAWN POGATCHNIK

ASSOCIATED PRESS

COOKSTOWN, North-ern Ireland — Thousands of mourners lined the main street of a central Northern Ireland town Tuesday to bid farewell to a prison o!cer slain by Irish Republican Army militants, the first killing of a guard in nearly two decades — and a reminder that the British territory’s peace is not yet complete.

David Black, 52, was shot several times from a passing car as he drove to work at Northern Ireland’s main prison. His car went o" the road and landed in a ravine.

No group claimed responsi-bility, but police and politicians have pinned it to an IRA splin-ter group based in the nearby town of Lurgan. That faction has been blamed for dozens of shootings and bombings since the 2007 formation of North-ern Ireland’s unity government — the central achievement of a two-decade peace process.

Although that coalition of British Protestants and Irish Catholics has thrived, North-

ern Ireland at grass-roots level remains a bitterly divided land.

Black’s family asked politi-cians from the major Catholic-backed party, Sinn Fein, to stay away from Tuesday’s Prot-estant service. Sinn Fein for decades was the public face of the Provisional IRA, the major anti-British paramilitary group that killed nearly 1,800 people, many of them from the province’s Protestant major-ity, before renouncing violence and disarming in 2005.

An honor guard of prison o!cers in dark-blue uniforms carried Black’s coffin down the broad main street of Cook-stown. Family members then carried it into a small Presby-terian church, accompanied by a bagpiper’s lament. The casket was covered in a Union Jack flag and topped by Black’s service cap and a single white rose.

Inside, his teenage children paid tribute to their father. His 17-year-old daughter Kyra offered a tearful poem, his 21-year-old son Kyle a per-sonal tribute — and a message to his killers.

Thousands mourn Irish guard

ALEXANDER F. YUAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Chinese paramilitary policemen guard the bridges leading to Tiananmen Gate in Beijing.

PAGE 10 YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com