Week in Brief

BY AMY WANG

On a campus where there is never an idle moment, something surreal occurred on Tues., Sept. 11: dozens of meetings were called off, athletic games cancelled, long-awaited reunions and celebrations postponed, and classes ignored. Moments after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, the nation stumbled to a standstill—and along with it, the Yale campus.

CHIP LOCKWOOD/YH Michael Denning, an American Studies professor and the chair of the program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, joined the Yale community at a "Teach-in for Peace" on Thurs., Sept. 20 to support a "peaceful justice" in response to the terrorist attacks of last week. Quoting Mahatma Gandhi, Denning said, "An eye for an eye leaves the world blind."

While a University-issued statement did not require that anything be cancelled, it recommended that events of a celebratory nature be postponed.

"The policy was simply a statement that if classes and things that were academically driven could happen, they should," Jonathan Edwards Master Gary Haller explained. Though Haller had planned to continue with the series of JE-sponsored Tetelman Fellowship Lectures last week, he was forced to reschedule when the guest speaker, a professor at Columbia, was unable to leave Manhattan. With air travel suspended, transportation problems forced many groups to postpone events. Working from nothing, organizers scrambled to fill the void that had appeared and to meet the various needs of the community.

Meetings became vigils. Parties turned into emergency blood drives and counseling and support sessions. Within 72 hours, what originally was a lecture at St. Thomas More Catholic Church became instead a panel entitled "Realism and Morality in an Age of Terror." Panelists included Paul Kennedy, director of international security studies at Yale, and Guido Calabresi, federal judge of the Second Circuit, and former dean and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Yale Law School.

"We have never put together a program in three days like that," Bob Beloin, chaplain at St. Thomas More, said.

"I think, though, that the trauma everybody is experiencing underscores the importance of community, of not becoming isolated in pain but being in solidarity with other people," he said.

As the nation and the Yale community slowly come to terms with the tragedy, the University is carefully adjusting its plans in the wake of the Sept. 11 disaster.

"We're handling it like the rest of the world," Yale spokesman Tom Violante said. "We're just taking it one day at a time." 

Students give Yale dining low marks

BY ELIZABETH BENTON

Yale Dining Services recently posted its spring 2001 customer satisfaction survey online—and the results don't look good. The survey shows a drop from the spring 2000 survey in students' perception of the taste and freshness of food, as well as the variety of menu options.

Students labeled all these factors as "primary areas for improvement." Since students gave similar low marks to these categories last year, many are asking what is being done to remedy the situation, and whether anyone is in fact paying attention to the surveys.

According to Director of Yale Dining Services David Davidson, YDS pays close attention to student input. Major new additions to the dining halls include cook-to-order grills in Branford, Berkeley and Saybrook, and new PanGeos-style cook-to-order stations called "Centerstage" in Jonathan Edwards and Saybrook. The produce delivery company Yale employs has also been changed since last spring.

There has also been a "heightened awareness around food production training" in recent months. "Executive chef John Tureen is working with managers and chefs on food production," Davidson said.

In addition to the surveys distributed each semester, Dining Services takes into account comments from cards filled out at the dining halls, feedback from its website, and information from the staff who observe students' reactions to the food each day.

There is also an advisory committee consisting of students, one Master, and one Dean, which has its first meeting Tues., Oct. 2. Emmet Stokes, BR '02, a member of last year's advisory committee, was pessimistic about the effect of student responses.

"On the surface, they certainly cared about the students' reactions, but I never felt that there were any big changes," he said. He added that although the meetings were "well attended by the dining hall management and well structured," the suggestions the students put forward—such as more variety in the meal plans, more flex dollars, and better food quality—"wouldn't really go anywhere." 

Rearranged bookstore sparks complaint

BY ROBERT JAMES

As the second full week of classes draws to a close, many students are voicing concerns over bookstore space—or the lack thereof. This summer, in an effort to make textbook purchasing more convenient, Yale Bookstore officials moved the coursebook section from the basement to a corner of the second floor—an area students claim is cramped and inconvenient.

Bookstore General Manager Gary Spearow acknowledged the spatial problem and said he is planning a 20-percent in-crease in the textbook department's size by next year.

Along the same lines, many students have noticed a general decline in selection, a problem Spearow attributes to a unique feature at Yale: shopping period.

"The problem with shopping period is that no one knows what he or she is taking," he said. "This makes it difficult for us to predict how many books to order. When we receive book adoptions, we have the word of the faculty member and our four-year history on which to make these judgments."

Fifty-one percent of book adoptions were not finalized until August; thus, books normally on the shelves by August still awaited organization in September.

Auditing students muddle the situation even more by making book-order numbers difficult to predict. The bookstore is penalized for returning unsold books to the publisher, so ordering extra books is not an option. In the future, auto-replenish- ment technology is planned to prevent book shortages.

In 1997, Spearow planned on increasing the used-to-new book ratio from 10:90 to 20:80. Four years later, he estimates this ratio at a stagnant 10:90, largely due to late faculty submission of booklists, which require finalization in May to ensure used book availability in fall.

Spearow defends his store's overall selection, however: "We employ comprehensive shopping designs with development on two floors. We're one of the biggest bookstores in New England and one of the biggest department stores in the city."

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