(Julie Reiter/YH)

Even after Yale abruptly ended its Education Studies and Teacher Prep programs last year, students like Alison Grubbs, BR ’12, are finding ways to look forward in education reform. Grubbs is the Director of Volunteer Recruitment and Selection for The Future Project, a mentorship program developed last year by Andrew Magino, BR ’09, and Kanya Balakrishna, JE ’09. This program was first implemented at Grubbs’s public high school in Washington, D.C., and has since expanded to two schools in New York City and one in New Haven. I sat down with Grubbs this week as she began the process of interviewing potential Future Project student coaches in the New Haven community.

Yale Herald: First off, what is The Future Project?
Alison Grubbs: The Future Project (TFP) is a national movement to inspire America. We partner young adults in the community—college students, graduate students, and young professionals—with high schoolers in each launch city. Over the course of a year the coach and mentee develop a partnership and find a mutual interest or passion, which they then turn into a project addressing an issue in their local community.

YH: How did TFP start?
AG: In the summer of 2009, Andrew Mangino was working in Washington, D.C., as a White House intern. For his service project, he was assigned to work at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School, where I actually went to school! Andrew was mentoring a senior through the college application process.  This student felt bored, unmotivated, and undirected. That mentoring experience hit home for Andrew. He decided that student indifference and alienation from their education was a topic missing from education reform debates. TFP began as a way to address that lack of students in the classroom. We grant each pupil a voice and the chance to find personal meaning in education by using it to make a difference in his/her community.

YH: The mission of TFP is inspiration. What does inspiration look like?
AG: Inspiration is when your eyes light up; it’s caring deeply about an issue and feeling that your care has not only a purpose, but also has the power to make a difference. TFP believes inspiration can be measured. We are working with a team of psychologists, including Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman [adjunct assistant professor of psychologist at New York University] and Yale psychologist Margaret Clark, to develop a survey-based metric for gauging the progress of our partnerships over the course of the year. Those metrics include intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and growth mindset—meaning that if you are faced with adversity you are able to grow from it.

YH: What might a Future Project look like?
AG: A Future Project can be as big or small as the team envisions it. If a student was very interested in radio and specifically its social aspect, she might raise money to produce a podcast where she interviews the man who panhandles on her street corner every night. Or maybe she is thinking bigger and wants to start a radio club or radio series that lasts for six weeks­­—or a year! The more time and energy our fellows and coaches pour into their projects, the higher they can reach.

YH: Why did TFP choose to partner with New Haven Academy?
AG: The partnership between TFP and New Haven Academy emerged organically from our overlapping philosophies. In a lot of ways the Academy has been doing what we’re doing for many years. The school has a highly civic bent, and is working very hard to bring studies out of the classroom by focusing on context-based learning. New Haven Academy requires every senior to create a community action capstone project. This project asks high schoolers to find a social issue that they care about and to take steps to correct it. The size of the school is also ideal for TFP’s purposes. The entire student body is only 250 people. If we meet our target of 80 coaches, we have the power to impact a third of the school right away.

YH: What separates TFP from other experimental education or mentoring programs?
AG: There are two parts to that answer. The first difference is the idea of a call to action. The Future Project has the scope of a national movement. We believe that every young person should give back to his/her community in some way. This means coaches are not only investing in the mentorship of a high school student, but also using their own interests and identities to make a change in the place they live. You don’t have to go overseas or move to another city to make that difference. It’s only 90 minutes a week.  The second unique aspect of TFP is our programmatic approach. We provide the teams with a curriculum that guides the process of trust building as well as exploration and then offers the tools for creating projects that impact the community.

YH: What are some challenges you have faced or foresee?
AG: The challenges can roughly be translated to growing pains. The first challenge was converting this big idea into action: Deciding how to implement it and getting high schools involved. Now we are struggling with the process of expansion to a national level.

YH: Yale is an unlikely place to combat education inequity. How do you reconcile your education here with TFP students’ education?
AG: That inequity is the very reason why this is such a great opportunity. Many students recognize that Yale is isolated from the rest of New Haven. That feeling of social injustice is always a good starting point for wanting to become a Future coach. Most importantly, the feeling of boredom in the classroom and general disenchantment are widespread across the country, not just confined to urban public school districts. You don’t have to share my educational background to understand the issues.

YH: What advice do you have for Yalies who are interested in education reform?
AG: Be an advocate! And get to know the community you are advocating for. The coolest part of the Future Project is that it targets an aspect of ed. reform that is too often overlooked.  There are so many theories in play for solving the achievement gap—none of them are wrong and none of them are all right. Many say teachers aren’t doing their jobs, others push from the political side to reform mandated curriculum; there is even substantial parent involvement through active PTAs.  What’s missing is the student voice in the reform debate. This is our time and our chance to strengthen that voice.
—This interview was condensed by the author

CORRECTION: The Sept. 16 interview “Sitting Down with Alison Grubbs” incorrectly stated that The Future Project, launched at Wilson Senior High School in Washington, D.C., in 2010. In fact, The Future Project will be launching for the first time this fall at four public schools in New Haven, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

When I mentioned that I was writing this column, a friend pointed out to me that whatever its problems are, the residential college system helps more people than it hurts. No doubt. This column is not an indictment of the residential college system as a whole. Safety, friendship, identity—nobody here needs me to explain what’s awesome about it, and I’m also not in the mood to rewrite my Common App. But everything that we love—education, health care, the environment—needs reform, including the residential college system. I’m not saying we’d be better off without the colleges. I just think we’d be best off if they worked a little differently.

Yesterday I overheard my suitemate explaining the residential college system to a group of her friends visiting from University of North Carolina. One of them asked if you could request to be (or not be) in a particular college, and my suitemate told her yes, but only if you’re a legacy. Every person in the room made an audible sound of surprise. “Wait, really?” someone said. “That’s crazy.”

We all take this system for granted. I assume it’s in place as an alumni plea$er, but its negative effects may outweigh its monetary value. I won’t go so far as to call it an injustice, but it’s pretty unfair. Yale alums who are old enough to have undergraduate children would have been, for the most part, here at a time when Yale was still not accessible to the range of people that it is today. Of course, one day this will change; still, it means that right now the choice is not equally available to students, and some colleges end up with a disproportionate composition of students from certain demographics.

Fortunately, official reporting was not a requisite for this article, so I will go ahead and say that unpopular colleges like Morse and Stiles tend to have fewer legacies, while others have, well, a lot of them. (When I conducted a very informal survey on which colleges people thought have the most legacies, the unanimous decisions were JE and Davenport. Even I have enough journalistic integrity not to state this as fact, but it’s still significant that everybody assumed the same thing.) I’m not saying I think it’s better to live in a college with legacies or without them, but either way, demographic imbalances mean that not every college is, as promised, a microcosm of Yale College.

The elephant in the room is that not all colleges are created equal, at least in terms of facilities or reputation. So it’s one thing if you get randomly sorted into a college with a bad gym or a small library (or a terrible stigma), but, for very obvious reasons of fairness, it then becomes imperative that anyone in Yale College be able to use the facilities of any college.

I’m not saying that Morse students (who, in a YDN survey last year on satisfaction with the residential college experience, gave their college an average rating of 6.01/10) should be allowed to go on the ski trip subsidized by Davenport (which, by the way, got an average rating of 8.45). I’m not even saying that Morse students should have access to Davenport entryways. But Morse students should really have access the Davenport library, buttery, etc., just as they have access to the Davenport dining hall. College libraries are the only ones open all night.

Facilities also just differ between colleges. JE has a darkroom, but not every photographer is in JE. And if they’re not going to completely forbid us from using the facilities in colleges we’re not in, they might as well make them easily accessible.

A couple of weeks ago, I showed up at 10:01 p.m. for a 10 p.m. Just Add Water show in Saybrook. The door to the Saybrook common room was obviously locked, and, since I’m not in Saybrook, I couldn’t get in. By the time somebody opened it for me, the show was a quarter of the way over and the doors were locked. JAW has absolutely nothing to do with Saybrook. I am a Yale College student, but I missed a Yale College show because I didn’t have access to a Yale College facility.

Finally, I take issue with the transfer process. Everyone says that every college is “about the people,” an adage that seems to inform the transfer system. But every college is about much, much more than the people. It’s about the dean, the master, the facilities, the location, and a number of other factors that yield subjective preferences based on people’s individual situations. For the campus majority that chooses to live on campus all-four years, these things are hugely important. An athlete with winter practice in Payne Whitney should not be forced to live in TD for more than a year. And yet, it seems that the only surefire way to switch is to quickly find a group of friends in another college with room in their suite, and ask the dean before anyone else does.

The college system is such an inherently good thing, and it seems like a waste not to do it fairly and correctly. Sometimes, the setup can even be blind. One friend lied on his housing form that his father was a graduate of Davenport, and now he’s in Davenport.

If only I’d thought of that first.

At the beginning of this semester, I became increasingly uncomfortable with how disturbingly ambivalent I felt about almost everything at Yale. I had just returned from a trip to Poland and found the pierogi, dirt-cheap antiques, and proximity to Belarus charming. I decided that I had to study in Krakow next fall. When there was no program in Poland to be found, I moved West to Prague—a kitschy, bizarrely commercialized place that still shares an Eastern European veneer of authenticity. But I ultimately decided it was too small—the kind of place where, even after four months, you’re still an American tourist. A mortal enemy of stability, I began frantically scouring the Center for International Experience website for anything and everything.

One day I saw myself studying Indian art in Delhi, the next learning Turkish in Istanbul. One particularly dark Sunday I even considered Semester at Sea, the round-the-world booze cruise, effectively a glorified Yacht Week. I told my friends about a new plan almost daily until finally I landed in Berlin, envisioning a semester of perfectly symmetrical Aryan bone structure and industrial techno. I was momentarily hindered during a meeting with Karyn Jones, a study abroad adviser, who pointedly asked me if I spoke any German. Unfortunately, she didn’t find my rendition of “Danke Schoen” endearing, but told me I could apply to have an English language program approved. I found NYU in Berlin, a program conducted entirely in English, and petitioned for Yale’s approval. Confident of success, I assumed that my biggest hurdle would be surviving Lufthansa’s narrow seats.

One morning over spring break I woke up to a curt email from the Study Abroad Committee rejecting my petition. I was pissed off and desperate; I took great pleasure in constructing an email to Karyn, somewhat lacking in restraint: “I remember a comment you made during our conversation that if I could show the committee that my reasons were legitimate, there should be little or no problem with approval of my petition. I am saddened that either this was not the case or my intentions were somehow misunderstood.” But it was done, and I had to choose whether I wanted to pursue a program in Prague or stay put.

Before I left my friend’s house, where I was staying when I got the news, I attended a Yale event where Mary Miller spoke about growing interest in study abroad. I ended up speaking with a man whose son was in China for a year about my situation. I told him that I felt Yale was blatantly hampering my education. He was likewise skeptical of Yale’s alleged support of term abroad. He said something along the lines of, “If only one hundred people go abroad, a ten percent increase isn’t very hard to achieve and even easier to advertise.” On a flight later that night, I could only think about how Yale was falsely advertising its international presence and forcing students to buy into a prescribed, myopic brand of education that propagates elitism. I reveled in contempt for a few more days.

Even though I was unhappy with the seeming contradiction between promise and policy, I was no less fickle than before. I started the application for Prague but never finished it. But then, on another flight (thanks, Air Jamaica), I realized how utterly ridiculous I was being. I was willfully ignoring the fact that most abroad programs don’t offer anything close to intellectual rigor that Yale students tend to take for granted. I had tried convincing myself that it would be a lot of fun—something I halfheartedly felt entitled to after years of intellectual masochism. Programs abroad promise a cultural experience that is just not offered in a small Connecticut city. What they don’t advertise is that “going abroad” is a euphemism for a four-month bender with a few field trips on the side. That’s not to say that all abroad experiences are worthless, but the popular conception of study abroad at American universities doesn’t quite compare to an academically demanding liberal arts education. And that undeniable reality begins to explain why just 164 Yale students spent a term abroad last year.

Last week I came across a Facebook album of two girls from my high school who are currently in Prague for a semester abroad. Their pictures are exclusively of bros and biddies taking shots at clubs on cheap leather banquettes. If you’re not careful, going abroad can mean spending a semester surrounded by girls for whom everything is either “yummy” or “so fun!” and boys who evoke Ashton Kutcher circa Just Married. Like all things vapid, it gets old fast. No one wants to feel like Clark Griswold driving in endless circles and shouting to his family, “Hey look kids! There’s Big Ben! There’s Parliament!”

In the wake of these three incidents, individual responses were varied. Gay rights groups demanded disciplinary action from the NBA, and consequently, Kobe was hit with a 100,000 dollar fine. Broadcasters have already apologized profusely for Andretti’s Sunday gaffe, but as of Monday, further punishment was unclear. However, if Andretti’s slip is treated like Melissa Leo’s f-bomb then it is likely that little will come of it in the long run (or maybe “fucking” is kosher—Biden got away with it).

Nikki Finke (Deadline.com’s Editor-in-Chief) published an article that examines the merit of discontinuing all live broadcasting in favor of a seven-second-delay format, which would permit the filtering of expletives and other inappropriate commentary. She also remarked (read: criticized) people for condemning those in showbiz for similar gaffes, while allowing sports figures to remain relatively untouched. She wrote, “I find it interesting that the groups complaining the loudest about the increasing bad language on TV take aim at scripted shows or live programming and at foul-mouthed writers, actors, musicians, and other celebrities. But sports heroes appear exempt.”

My first reaction to Finke’s article was that sports figures are the only ones punished for vulgar language. Kobe received a 100,000 dollar fine while Melissa Leo and NBC (the network that broadcasts the Golden Globes) did not even receive a slap on the wrist. On a similar note, one might also cite the ludicrous sums of money the government spends to prosecute professional baseball players for using steroids.

My second reaction was that Nikki’s priorities seem misplaced. I understand the movement to expunge obscenities from programming designed for all audiences. Some people may argue that kids hear profanity every day at school, or in their own homes; still, these arguments are untenable because one, despite our increasingly crude culture, it is still our responsibility to educate children about propriety, responsibility, and civility rather than perpetuate the devolved culture to which we have become accustomed and two, saying that “fuck” or “shit” or “faggot” is just another word misses the point of profanity or biggotry entirely.

I can’t help but remark upon the inconsistency between the call to censor live broadcasting based on language and the fact that gratuitous violence, explicit sex (actual “fucking”), and car crashes are all shown in films, TV programs, and news programming—all readily accessible to today’s youth.
While I’m not sure Vegas will allow it for gambling reasons, and while I in no way support increased censorship, Nikki’s proposal of a ubiquitous seven-second-delay is agreeable because the only difference in coverage would be the deletion of the expletives which cause unneeded controversy.

However, a better solution would be to dispense with the close-court cameras that networks love to install precisely to catch these unscripted moments, since they crucify the athletes in order to generate higher ratings with the material anyway. These are testosterone-fueled men competing at the highest conceivable level for millions of dollars and the promise of legacy—of course tempers will lead to profanity. To begin with, these are not the people that we should be looking at as role models.

At any rate, Finke’s focus on the deleterious effect of language pales in comparison to the effect that the consumption of violence, real or simulated, has on children. Whenever supporters of further censorship make this argument, they point to graphic video games like Grand Theft Auto or an add-on to Half Life 2, which allows gamers to insert themselves into a school-massacre scenario à la Columbine. But what is equally or more disturbing is the coverage of the Indy or Nascar races. Announcers apologize for Andretti’s curse words while they comment on disturbing, fiery car crashes shown over and over, from every angle and in slow motion. Anyone with a remote can literally watch the tragic deaths of dozens of people on ESPN as they recap the worst crashes from the week. And their target audience is no surprise: young males.

But, I would not expect change anytime soon. Violence is too profitable and language too easy to prosecute or censor. I would guess that the networks welcome this nuisance because it distracts from the violence they produce, which would otherwise generate detractors. Not even the Finke, who Hollywood champions as a transparent and fearless reporter, would dare attack these producers because they are the people she must keep happy, the people she must glad-hand, and the people who provide her with the scoop. It helps to be in at the top, but they always find a way to keep you there.

Opinion graphics by Jinjin Sun

Wow, Yale. It’s the last week of classes, last time Wikipedia-ing a historical event in order to ask a “poignant” question in section, last time the Herald asks me for an Opinion column. Boy, this is hard. Unfortunately, I can’t control the fact that I’m graduating despite the fact that I am no closer to knowing “what I want in life” and still have trouble finding the Berkeley dining hall. But this week I decided that if I am really going through with this whole graduate-and-move-on thing, I should probably start to grow up.

Amidst this lovely springtime (?), I turned to the holy and wholly enjoyable Passover Seder for help. I decided that perhaps part of being an adult is beginning my own traditions: It was time to make a brisket. I went into New York City on Monday evening to celebrate the first night of parsley and prayer with my family. Before coming back to New Haven on Tuesday, I did what any hopeful young Yale chef would do: I bought a huge seven pound hunk of beef from top-notch butchery Lobel’s on the Upper East Side (holler!). Yes, I have tried to buy a brisket in New Haven, and, despite the number of Jews on Yale’s campus, it is difficult to find. So instead I slipped a vacuum-sealed and ice-packed steak into my backpack and boarded Metro North. Oh, I also bought onions there. Everything is better in the city, right?

Part of being a proud “cultural” Jew is having culinary traditions like Great Aunt Tsippy’s cheese blintzes or Ruth’s salmon cake (have both recipes up my sleeve—let me know if you’re appetized). When it came to brisket, my Grandma Blanche made a world-class, dynamite-tender brisket with a depth of flavor that she loved to brag about. She made it clear that no one—literally no one—could match her brisket. Unfortunately, Blanche was so proud and protective of her special secret brisket that she took the recipe to the grave. So I Googled and settled my culinary visions on “Tyler’s Ultimate Brisket” from Foodnetwork.com. Tyler is clearly not a Jew, but I didn’t tell any of my guests. This was my tradition now, and I really, really like Tyler Florence’s television show. My future children will eat his brisket, dammit.

On Wednesday morning, I sent out an adorable invitation to the friends I felt would most appreciate my efforts as a burgeoning, independent Seder-hostess. Most of these guests had full faith in me—they’d eaten my roasted Brussels sprouts and Asian-style chicken noodle soup. They knew I had potential. Here’s the thing: I am actually not a good cook. A good cook can just “throw a dish together.” Unless I’m scrambling eggs, I hold a recipe in my hand and have a mild panic attack throughout my entire cooking experience. I brace myself on the counter and measure out ingredients, then double and triple check to make sure I read “Tbsp.” and am actually holding a tablespoon in my hand. I don’t estimate, ever. I want a set of those tiny glass bowls so I can have everything perfectly measured and prepared and never have to worry. Trust me, I wish things were different and my neuroses didn’t extend into the kitchen. Or that I was baking a cake, which I can easily pass off as “an exact science.” But this was the day of unleavened bread and brisket.

You can only imagine how disturbed I was when my brisket wasn’t as “fork tender” as Tyler told me it would be after four hours in the oven and consistent basting. Distraught, I panicked, basted for like ten minutes straight and pushed dinner back a half hour in hopes that something miraculous would happen to the meat. But no. It smelled great, but the fork just didn’t “pull away effortlessly.” Grandma Blanche was surely smirking down at me. Meanwhile, my guests were texting me to remind me just how hungry they were, so I finally relented, told them it was ready, and prepared for their disappointed faces. They walked in and gathered around my cutting board as I carefully sliced the meat. They gasped and ogled and giggled and told me that my brisket and I were amazing. They nibbled at the hard-boiled eggs on the nearby Seder plate and discussed the meaning of bitter herbs for fifteen minutes. And then I remembered that it was 4/20.

We began our Seder service courtesy the Kosher Penguin iPad app, which served as our Haggadah, then unanimously decided to continue with the four questions while eating. I served my not-tender brisket and waited. I gazed around and watched my doubly-celebratory friends chew, grunt, smile, take more bites, point at me with their forks and nod happily. I was downright proud. Maybe I’m not actually an adult nor a natural in the kitchen, but serving a less-than-perfect dish to a crowd of super happy, hungry, and high kids is one hell of a way to start a culinary tradition. Ultimately, the holidays that overlapped on this evening are both celebrations of the communal experience. No matter your beliefs—whether you celebrate one, both, or neither—we can all rejoice in the fact that the best traditions are those that can be enhanced by friends and loved ones. I can only now hope that the communal spirit I’ve found and cherished at Yale will remain a part of my life in the coming years.

There’s an undeniable allure to selectivity, and Yale never fails to provide outlets for us to strive to join another elite group. On Tuesday senior societies selected their new classes with all the usual spectacles. Recently, the Jackson Institute informed the sophomores selected for the new Global Affairs major. Each semester, a slew of type-A gunners win coveted spots in creative writing seminars and small classes with rock-star professors.

This selectivity is symptomatic of a particular kind of education. My parents are bewildered when I try to explain applying or preregistering for seminars. They always got to take whatever they wanted when they attended college in the Midwest. Yale instead aspires to be more meritorious rather than egalitarian in its distribution of resources. That arrangement can be damaging to the self-esteem of its students, especially those on the margin.

The status quo threatens to create a toxic competitive atmosphere. A quick scan of YaleFML can bring that to the surface. Posted one user, “Two of my best friends got tapped for the only society I got an interview with. I want to be happy for them. FML.”

Some people might say that exclusivity is unnecessary and hurtful, and we should work to have a more inclusive campus culture. If Yale has the resources (and it probably does), then they would argue it should at least make the hidden corners more accessible to all of its students. And even if Yale can’t force us all to be friends, the argument persists, it can ask us not to fracture a campus often divided along socioeconomic, racial, and sexual lines.

But I disagree. This doesn’t mean that Yale should ban selective majors or societies. We just need to change our perspective. After graduation, we can expect others to pass judgment on us. Our bosses and our coworkers will evaluate us on a variety of metrics that will lead to or not lead to invitations to particular functions, pay raises, promotions. Both during and after Yale we need to recognize, however, that the outcome of any written form of evaluation or interview is not a judgment on us as people. It might seem obvious, but it’s worth restating that the EP&E Department (probably) doesn’t think I’m a worthless person.

There should be an effort to alleviate the anguish that comes with rejection, but students need to take the initiative. It needs to start with a recognition that success after Yale does not always correlate with success at Yale, and that success at Yale can and should be defined more broadly. Though it might seem an insurmountable setback to receive a rejection, it is only an obstacle to a very narrow conception of success. Yale is not a two-year sprint to Cognitive Science as part of a four-year plan to get tapped for Skull and Bones and take Grand Strategy.

We have a right to be upset about our failures. But at some point we have to accept that exclusivity and rejection are part of life. I don’t mean to discredit feelings of despair or frustration, but rather to ask us all to create a campus culture that recognizes how certain definitions of success at Yale limit us.

The ultimate problem is the external locus of our success and happiness, not the institutions themselves. There’s nothing inherently wrong with societies or selective majors or big-name seminars; the problem arises when we often surrender our agency to standards of success that dictate what we should want when we should be asking ourselves what we actually want. If you seek external success in life, then go for it, but even these goals should arise from self-reflection. Until we learn we can derive success from the internal, it’s not clear we can treat each other with the respect we deserve.

This is not a problem unique to Yale: For the rest of our lives we will undoubtedly pursue notable life courses. The question we must ask is why. It’s impossible to be completely free of societal influence, but these impulses should be subordinate to our personal desires. Having good friends, a healthy relationship, or a Wenzel in hand can be a success.

I’ve had a mixed bag of application results: I didn’t get into the major I wanted as a sophomore, and I plan on spending next year’s Thursday and Sunday nights in the library. But I know that no acceptance or rejection can make or break my Yale experience. And the next time I’m feeling down, I’ll see you at Alpha Delta.

Donald Trump is providing his own serving of “Jesus food” to the political universe with his recent flirtation with candidacy for the 2012 presidential election. This has been validated by a recent poll by CNN/Opinion Research, which showed him tied for first in popularity with Mike Huckabee, each garnering 19 percent of the vote in the poll. But we all know Trump is unlikely to run for President. We’ve been through this before. Before both the 1988 and 2000 presidential elections, Trump teased the public with talk of running, and both times opted to stay in the private sector. Somehow, the media is still infatuated with the idea that Trump might run. Maybe this time will be different. The field of potential GOP contenders is so fallow as to be fertile for the Trump speculation.

The political elite have not been shy to broadcast their concerns about the other potential candidates. One supported a health care mandate, one hasn’t gained traction outside of the southern evangelical community, one has some of the highest unfavorable ratings of any U.S. politician, and many of them are failed 2008 candidates. From a mass media perspective, the field is relatively bland; the names simply don’t sell. Looking to inject new interest into their broadcasts and newspaper articles, the media is reaching for the Trump card, and Trump has been more than willing to help them out.

Certain factors are presented to the mainstream media consumers that lend some legitimacy to the news story: Trump is a multi-billionaire and would be willing to sink over 600 million dollars into a presidential campaign and would even consider an independent candidacy if he was unsuccessful in the Republican primary. In February, he clarified his positions on the top issues, announcing that he is pro-life, pro-gun rights, and anti-Obamacare, all of which are favorable positions among the Republican base. As a result of his popular reality show, his brand and his wealth, his name is highly recognizable among voters. His business acumen, coupled with his quasi-rags-to-riches story, could play well in a campaign. One school of thought is that Trump has the credibility to be a serious contender. It would be hard for the media to disregard this potential.

Despite the relatively rational basis in favor of a Trump candidacy, there are overriding factors that virtually eliminate the feasibility of a viable campaign and lend support to the notion that the Donald doesn’t want anything more than attention. In addition to his conservative positioning, Trump has been rallying the extremes of the Republican base. He is quickly emerging as a leader among the tea partiers, birthers, and social conservatives. He is pro-American and anti-China, taking a strong protectionist position and wanting to put high tariffs on Chinese goods. Even disenchanted neo-cons can support the Trump ticket: he favors taking a strong stand against OPEC and believes we haven’t exploited Iraq’s oilfields to our advantage. Cutting all foreign aid is also something Trump would support. Most recently, he made headlines by demanding validation of the President’s citizenship and hiring investigators to go to Hawaii in order to collect proof that he was born in the U.S. These positions are not positions that an electable presidential candidate would promote. They’re outrageous.

If the Trump story is any example, Americans have an unhealthy addiction to infotainment. It is disappointing that reasonable discussion of presidential contenders is usurped because a reality television personality says he wants to be President. Serious news coverage is being commandeered as a result of the Trump drama (although thankfully the recent report about Israeli Prime Minster Netanyahu cancelling his meeting with Justin Bieber got through). Moreover, in case his true motive wasn’t clear enough to the public, Trump recently signed on with Fox to host a segment each Monday morning. It is almost as if he is mocking the public’s inability to refocus. Even though we all know that Trump is not running for president, that it would probably be horrid if he ran for President, and that he clearly has a conflict of interests (i.e. his brand benefits from the coverage), we obsess over it anyways. If this is the environment in which we select the leader of the free world, we should have major concerns. Modern America is a disciple of the new era of “infotainment” and the 24-hour news cycle, but maybe we need to reform the way we do business. We need to give up the “Jesus food” and see the light: Elections have more on the line than who makes it to next week’s episode of Celebrity Apprentice.

“Taxation without representation”—prevention of this violation of liberty is supposedly the cornerstone of our Congress. Yet, it completely fails. Members of Congress represent the interest of their voters. Non-voting constituencies depend on the benevolence and generosity of the electorate to defend their rights and interests. Illegal immigrants, foreign aid recipients and future generations have no say at the polls. They get nothing more than what Congress decides to leave for them. The House of Representatives has control of the budget to ensure that no person’s property is taxed without some say in the matter. And yet by Bulldog Days, the average pre-frosh already has nearly 46,000 dollars in public debt according to an ABC poll. The system is awry.

Legislators love debt for a few reasons. The most important reason is that the voting generation receives the benefits of current spending at the expense of their children. Even among eligible voters, the elderly are nearly twice as likely to vote as the youth, they command nearly twice the attention of politicians. Furthermore, incumbents have an incentive to borrow: Higher government borrowing tends to boost current employment, and legislators are reluctant to cut jobs on their watch. Finally, when each legislator can add a pet project to the budget bills, accountability is dispersed. Every legislator can tout a favorite program that he or she funded to his or her constituents. But most of the time, no particular legislator gets the credit or blame for the deficit.

The clearest analogy to fiscal policy is monetary policy. Fiscal policy is decision-making on levels of government spending and borrowing. Monetary policy is decision-making on levels of money supply. Together these are a country’s main tools for maintaining macroeconomic stability and growth. In both fiscal and monetary policy, there is a short-term incentive for legislators to make bad decisions with long-term consequences. As a result, the independent Federal Reserve was created in 1913 to control monetary policy instead of Congress. All the same reasons fit fiscal policy. The election incentives are similarly skewed to bad decisions. And yet, almost a century after the creation of the Federal Reserve system, we still have done nothing to fix the fiscal policy problem.

The way to fix the fiscal problem is to divide the decision on how much to borrow from the decision on how to spend it. To get deficit accountability, there must be a single body directly accountable for proper fiscal decisions and little else. One could imagine a board of economists deciding debt levels, a senate committee or elected officials with very long terms. What is important is to separate those who decide America’s deficit levels from those who actually allocate the money. One group with a long-term view decides how much to borrow. Then another group, with a commitment to short-term responsiveness to the people, decides how to spend it.

Congress is much better equipped to determine the relative allocation of money than overall borrowing. Take, as an example, the continuing deficit debate between Republicans and Democrats. You’ll likely get a reasonable opinion if you ask a man on the street to compare the Republican plan to cut spending vs. the Democratic plan to combine spending cuts with tax increases. In fact, you may even get a reasonable answer if you ask the same question to a congressional representative. Most of the coming debate will focus on the best mix of tax increases and spending cuts to bring the deficit down. Almost none of the debate will focus on how much to reduce the deficit. The Republican plan advocates 4.4 trillion dollar reduction over ten years. Obama’s plan advocates 4 trillion dollars in savings over twelve years. I have no opinion on the relative benefits of an extra two years and .4 trillion dollars. The man on the street likely has no informed point of view on the subject. And almost certainly our congressional representatives have no idea either. Let them argue about tax hikes and spending cuts. Leave the borrowing decision to somebody else, ideally a person elected to make just that decision and that decision alone.

Any deficit decision-making must abide by certain stipulations. The most important rule is that the decision makers are accountable, but only in the long-term. Second, deficit levels must be chosen a few years in advance. This is the only way to ensure that the borrowers are ignorant of which political party that will control the allocation of funds. Third, there must be some limited wiggle-room for reconsideration. A deficit level chosen during boom years or peacetime might be edited to cope with an unexpected recession or war. Or a Congress that finds its funding insufficient could renegotiate the deficit level with this independent committee just as the House and Senate shuffle bills today.

Creating a new committee may require a constitutional amendment. The power “to borrow money on the credit of the United State” is an enumerated power of Congress. Making the change we need to our system will require serious political will and a serious reconsideration of how democracies work. To me, the answer is clear. To economists and political scientists, the answer may be murkier. But the final decision ultimately rests with the American people.

YCC has claimed ownership of the issue of mental health because it seems important but no one actually wants to deal with it. We all know intellectually that, as a whole, Yale probably isn’t the most mentally healthy place.  There’s a lot at stake—grades, relationships, careers, THE-REST-OF-OUR- LIVES (?)—and it probably doesn’t help that we don’t sleep enough, eat properly, or even take deep breaths.

We’ve all either seen or been that person standing outside of Bass on the phone, tears welling up or drying up. Hell, I am that person almost every week. Suffice it to say that being a Yale student is one of the more mentally draining adventures out there. You know this, I know this—but the only people I see doing something about it are those who have campaign stickers and are canvassing with their friends on Cross Campus.

Most of us don’t want to touch the topic of “mental health” with a ten-foot pole. And that comes as no surprise: Culturally, mental health has been tabooed. And even though we like to think of Yale as a generally progressive place, this mental health taboo pervades our campus.  Take as an example what 300-plus Yale undergrads learned in the “anxiety disorders” lecture in Intro Psych a few weeks ago.  Professor Chun talked about the theories and etiologies of these disorders, a relatively dreary topic, so he wanted to give us a flavor of what having an anxiety disorder actually means. He showed a video of a girl with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She had developed a phobia of germs (a pretty run-of-the-mill phobia, if such a thing exists) and avoided germs by touching doorknobs, drawers, hangers and faucets with her feet instead of her hands. The entire auditorium, including yours truly, erupted in laughter—it looked pretty damn funny—and the lecture progressed. However, I didn’t forget about the video. It occurred to me that for 300 or more of our peers, this girl, who was closing doors with her toes and was absolutely debilitated by her disease, would be the face of OCD. She might even become the face of anxiety. This isn’t Marvin Chun’s fault—he warned us this was a severe case, and really was just trying to give an interesting lecture.

The problem is that it’s only the extreme cases that become visible cases. We can see an emaciated girl bundled up in the hot sun and suppose she has anorexia. We can learn of a tragic suicide and assume severe depression. And we can see someone who closes doors with her feet and say she has OCD.  But can you see a girl like me, sometimes visibly upset, but usually cheerful and functional and say OCD? Or depression? Do my thoughts pop up above my head like they would in a cartoon? Can you see those? I didn’t think so.

When you only really think about the worst-case-scenarios, everything else is invisible even when it’s a serious problem. Mental health can become a ghost problem.  You get silence when people are depressed. You get people who don’t want to get out of bed in the morning but refuse to go to the doctor—because its not like they have the flu or something actually wrong. (PLEASE note the sarcasm.) And then discussion of “mental health” among our peers is limited to a few bulletin points in a one-hour meeting during Camp Yale.

Yale’s mental health issue goes way beyond the scope of whatever the YCC can do. Imagine that we were talking about an obesity problem instead of mental health. Essentially, the analog of the candidates’ proposals for improvements in mental health services would be adding ten personal trainers at Payne Whitney, or an open-late “healthy” alternative to Alpha Delta. Does this mean that our whole campus will start exercising and stop ordering Wenzel’s? Probably not. It’s not that the reforms YCC candidates are suggesting are bad ones—they just aren’t enough.

Change will come from the bottom-up.  It will come when we as a campus start talking about mental health as a personal and real thing—when we stop with all the hypotheticals and extreme cases. It will come when the face of a disease like OCD looks more like me and less like the girl with the nimble toes.  Even if your “all-star” ballot won the YCC election, we all have a duty to be open and honest when it comes to mental health. This column is just a start.

For many at a forward-thinking university like Yale, this kind of bigotry can seem as far-fetched as it is hateful. After hearing the story, I found myself claiming that something like that could never happen here. Yet, a similarly hateful and incendiary act took place last Friday when a LGBTQ Co-op poster was deliberately torched in Vanderbilt hall.

Such acts, like the belief systems they espouse, are both repulsive and spineless. They are also, from a First Amendment standpoint, acceptable forms of expression. When it comes to hate speech, the First Amendment can be a jagged pill to swallow, but the alternative is even harder to stomach.

Responses by both Yale and the U.S. government to these cases have been underwhelming.

On campus, the punitive recourse from the Yale administration to the blatant act of hatred in Vanderbilt is an investigation conducted by the fire marshal (who is, incidentally, about as intimidating as the muffin man). To be fair, there is enormous support of all kinds on campus for individuals of all races, creeds, genders, and sexual orientations who are victims of harassment. But the take-home message from the University’s reaction is, “We’re as upset as you are, but outside of moral support, there’s not all that much we are prepared to do.” Unfortunately, like all authoritative bodies walking a fine line between moral sensibility and First Amendment rights, Yale faces a ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’ scenario when it comes to restricting free speech. Yale was recently voted the fifth-worst school in the country for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education due to our censorship of everything from controversial political cartoons to potentially derogatory anti-Harvard T-shirts at last year’s Yale-Harvard football game.

The Obama Administration faces a similar dilemma on a much larger scale in responding to the ill-advised actions of Terry Jones. In 1919, the Supreme Court established a precedent for restricting free speech during wartime in the case Schenck v. United States, coining the term “clear and present danger” to describe the necessary criteria for the language Congress has a right to prevent. In another case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, this criteria was clarified. According to Brandenburg, expression can be restricted when it is both intended to “incite imminent lawless action” and has the legitimate influence to do so. Since then, cases upholding restriction of free speech have been few and far between.

So what power do these gray verdicts have to mediate free speech in an age when an isolated domestic incident of utter intolerance can spark violence and endanger our troops abroad? At this point, the message from the Obama Administration is very clear: not much. The President himself condemned the action as an “extreme act of violence and bigotry,” yet admitted that right now, laws concerning the correlation of domestic expression and violence abroad simply don’t exist.

So in the end, Terry Jones gets a slap on the wrist. The perpetrator of the LGBTQ poster burning gets a slap on the wrist. But where does this leave the vast majority of us who find these acts intolerable, who cannot restrain ourselves from demanding justice?

In a recent interview with Larry King, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer lamented, “It’s so often I hear people say—and particularly college students—‘Well, that’s just so terrible what he’s saying.’ I say, ‘Oh, you think that free speech is only for people who don’t say things that are terrible?’”
While complaints about the inaction of those with the ability to regulate hate speech are legitimate, free expression doesn’t exist so we can argue over its restriction. Political and judicial gridlock will always stand in the way of silencing those who find creative ways to express their abhorrent views.

Ultimately, neither the government nor the university has the true power to deliver the justice we are looking for­—but we do. The beauty of the First Amendment, especially at a place like Yale, is that it gives those of us who believe in openness and dialogue the ability to drown out hate speech ourselves. Many of us have strong opinions, both reasonable and compassionate, that we never truly share. But voices of hate and intolerance, such as those heard in recent weeks, are only audible when the rest of us remain silent, waiting for someone else to speak out compassionately. Now, go tell someone what you really think.