Yale grads make New Haven home

By Andrea Lynch

Dushko Petrovich, DC '97, and I-Huei Go, CC '97, who both chose to stay in New Haven after graduating from Yale, are singing me their collaborative commentary on post-graduate life. As they discuss their experiences in New Haven, they oscillate between self-effacing comments about still being here and sincere analysis of their decision to stay. "I have an idea for a headline for your story," Go says. "How about, `What are you doing here?' "

More than a few Yalies have resisted the conventional move to New York or Boston in favor of settling in the Elm City after graduation. The range of what they are doing--getting involved in politics or social action, working for an organization connected to Yale, participating in the artistic culture of the city, or just taking time to figure out what they want to do next--suggests that their decisions to stay stem more from insight than inertia. During a decade when the public conception of young adult zeitgeist seems to center on little more than widespread apathy, New Haven offers more than enough options for action.

Recent graduates who have settled here cite a variety of reasons for their choice, including the myriad opportunities for social and artistic involvement and the potential for personal growth in a place to which they have a strong emotional or professional connection. The decision to stay has affected how they view their pasts, presents, and futures in a number of ways--it has allowed them to discover a great deal more about the city than they initially noticed, helped them resolve their attitudes toward their own citizenship in New Haven, and, in some cases, allowed them to make a lasting contribution to a place they have come to call home.

The question of student citizenship in a college town is a difficult one, especially in a place like New Haven, where town-gown relations are mediated by so many socioeconomic discrepancies. Students often struggle to reconcile their own citizenship in New Haven, and several have been able to integrate themselves into the community in ways that last long after graduation.

...And for New Haven

Jane Chen, JE -97, with members of the Homeless Theater Troupe.

Jane Chen, JE '97, founder of the Homeless Theater Troupe, has remained in New Haven since completing her undergraduate degree in December to train the new director of the troupe. Chen encountered her fair share of surprised reactions from old classmates about her decision to stay, and recognizes a common tendency among Yalies to view New Haven as a kind of inconvenience. "The idea that New Haven is a place where you can actually settle down, get a full-time job, and be a real human being is a novel one to a student and even to me right now, but it's a great one too," Chen said.

Through her involvement in the homeless and theater communities of New Haven during her undergraduate career, Chen often noticed the frustration of her New Haven colleagues regarding Yalies' reluctance to extend their involvement in the community past graduation. "I wish that more Yale alumni stayed in New Haven after they graduated because I think it would make such a difference," she said. "It's definitely a way to give back, and a lot of Yale alumni have founded really powerful organizations that exist in New Haven. It's important for people in New Haven that I stay here and that other Yale students stay here; it shows that people care about more than Yale."

In fact, a rich tradition of Yalies making their homes in the Elm City dates back to graduates such as Eli Whitney, class of 1792, the inventor of the cotton gin. More recent contributions can be seen all throughout New Haven: Paul Bass, JE '82, started the New Haven Advocate; C. Newton Schenck III, DC '44, was one of the founding board members of the Long Wharf Theatre; Frank Logue, BK '48, LAW '51, served as mayor of the city in the 1970s; and Oliver Barton, BK '85, chartered the Common Ground High School and currently serves on the board of the U.S. Grant Program. This list indicates that New Haven is big enough to contain a broad base of residents with a wide range of interests and needs, yet small enough to allow someone with motivation and savvy to make a tangible contribution to the community.

David Lewicki, TC '97

It is precisely the desire to make such a contribution that prompted David Lewicki, TC '97, to stay in New Haven after graduating. Currently a community outreach intern in the Yale Athletic Department, Lewicki is putting together a non-profit organization called Urban Solutions with Jay Ready, MC '94. The project, conceived by Lewicki and Ready during their undergraduate careers, is designed to provide environmental restoration for the city through the creation of jobs for New Haven residents. "A lot of people gauge success as upward mobility--getting up and out, moving on to some place better--but I think that for someone like myself, whose inclination is toward public service and dealing with existing social inequalities, there's a great life to be had here," Lewicki said. "There is a challenge not to walk away from some of the things that you see every day."

A wealth of opportunity

Whether or not graduates made a conscious choice to stay in New Haven for a specific reason (or even anticipated remaining), almost none regret the decision. For Jelani Lawson, MC '96, who currently serves as alder of Ward II in New Haven, the city has provided an opportunity to get involved in hands-on community organizing without getting lost in the flood of bureaucratic Washington politics.

Jelani Lawson, MC '96, is alder of Ward Two.

As alder of Ward II, Lawson represents approximately 4,000 New Haven residents, roughly 1,300 of whom are registered voters. Thus, it is truly possible for him to be acquainted with nearly everyone he represents, a unique situation for any politician. Lawson's choice to pursue a political career in New Haven has given him the opportunity not only to resolve his relationship with Yale and New Haven and their relationship to each other, but also a way to participate in the kind of grassroots community work that originally drew him to politics.

"New Haven is an incredible microcosm of many of the problems facing urban centers across the nation," Lawson observed. "With any type of close analysis or observation in New Haven, you can find tons of things that are going on here that reflect national trends, problems.... And I have to pose the question, where else in the United States can a 22-year-old African American male run for public office and get elected to what is effectively the local city council?"

For other graduates, the specific features New Haven offers have been conducive to personal growth. "I can't think of a city of this size in the United States that would have a high-powered art school, a Zen Center, two museums within walking distance from the downtown area, and two of the most powerful unions in the country," Petrovich said. He serves as House Master at the New Haven Zen Center. Living at the Zen Center has provided Petrovich with studio space and more time to devote to his painting.

It may also be beneficial to start post-graduate life in a familiar setting, especially if it has a population as richly diverse as New Haven's and offers such a tremendous range of resources and institutions both connected to and independent from Yale. For Petrovich and Go, who works at the Yale University Press and writes on the side, being in New Haven has allowed for a higher degree of reflection on the transition from being students to being on their own.

"Out of college I've put myself in a lot of different situations, like living at the Zen Center with a Korean nun for six months and working on Jelani Lawson's campaign for Alderman, and I've found myself really quickly in really close friendships with a lot of the members of the black and Hispanic political community in New Haven," Petrovich said. "I've had some really frank discussions about race relations at Yale with Jelani--we've found ourselves talking candidly in ways that we wouldn't have done at school since we were still doing a lot of posturing in terms of our social roles. Going through a situation where your social role dissolves while your location stays the same has allowed for a lot of honesty and quick, frank friendship-building around legitimate interests."

"I've always maintained," added Go, "that there's programs like Yale-in-China and Yale-in-London and then there's these de facto programs after graduation like Yale-in-Manhattan, Yale-in-Boston, and Yale-in-D.C. Being in New Haven, I have to make things seem new and relevant in an old place instead of making things seem old in a new place." Petrovich agreed. "We still have contact with the stuff all of our friends who went elsewhere are starting to romanticize. You can't romanticize Old Campus if it's right there," he said.

Making sense of four years

For some graduates, the decision to stay in New Haven made perfect sense for both personal and professional reasons. Michelle Anderson, MC '97, is a grant writer for L.E.A.P., an organization with which she was involved during her years as a Yale student. "New Haven is the city where I came to care about urban social issues, and the only city where it made sense to work for them," she stated. "I love this city; it's the first place that I've had a feeling of being part of a community. I've gained a relationship to place that I've never had in my life."

Like many other Yale graduates who become New Haven residents, Anderson never anticipated making a post-graduate home in New Haven when she first arrived on campus. But after getting involved in environmental education through a program called Fertile Ground and writing an article on welfare reform for the New Haven Advocate, leaving New Haven simply because her undergraduate career had ended began to make less and less sense.

For Anderson, staying in New Haven has allowed for a graceful synthesis of personal and professional goals. "I have neither animosity nor nostalgia toward Yale now," she said. "Yale takes a lot of credit for urban renewal but it's really inaccurate--there's a whole range of people in all sorts of municipal organizations who are totally engaged in a new vision of what New Haven can become.... To be part of a network of career professionals as a Yale student but still be autonomous from the university is great. In many ways, this is an articulation of what I've been studying for four years."

Michael Morand, SY '87, DIV '93, the assistant secretary of the Yale Office of New Haven Affairs, has not lived away from New Haven since the summer after his freshman year in 1984. "When I first came to Yale in 1983, I didn't know where I'd be four years later, but by the time I was near graduating I was very sure I'd stay in New Haven and less sure what I'd do," he commented. "I really do feel blessed and privileged to have the best of the two greatest worlds; both [Yale and New Haven] are extraordinarily rich and wonderfully diverse."

Anderson shares Morand's conception of the benefits of being a New Haven Yalie, but is troubled by the way that Yale presents New Haven to its prospective students. "Yale is making a crazy mistake not to sell New Haven and be proud of what this city offers," she said. "More than just providing a way that students can get involved in community service, New Haven is an extraordinary microcosm of American urban change and the university really doesn't promote the city or even endorse it in any way."

Morand has played a variety of different roles in both Yale and New Haven over his 14 years of residence. He has worked for the Chaplain's Office and the U.S. Grant program, he has participated in the formation of Local 34 and witnessed the union's 1995 strike; and he has seen over a decade of gradual evolution in both the urban character of New Haven and the relationship between the city and the University.

"In the last five years, there has been an articulated sense of institutional citizenship on the level of sustained partnerships between the city and the university," he said. "Right now, this sense of citizenship is at its highest since the early 1700s."

As Morand indicates, the future of New Haven is intrinsically tied to the future of Yale, and the people closest to bridging the gap between them are those who have had the experience of being both students and citizens. Whether it is through involvement in community work, participation in New Haven's artistic culture, or simply the personal growth engendered by starting post-college life in a familiar location, remaining in New Haven in a new context may be the best way to reconcile the problem of citizenship. As Anderson reflected, "My legacy at Yale now has a much larger scope of experience than it would have had if it had been just about Yale. Deciding to stay in New Haven is not in any way a sacrifice or a loss."

Photos by Patrick McGarvey and Liz Oliner.

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