Yale’s Campus Police Send Terrifying Message to Incoming Students
Protecting the Innocent, eh?
Yale School of Architecture Entrance— photo by Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times, © 2023
That was the NY Times headline in a recent article. Be the first on your block to read it: Yale’s Campus Police Send Terrifying Message to Incoming Students by Amelia Nierenberg, NY Times.
The newspaper article had an accompanying photo of the old entrance to what was called the A&A Building (Art & Architecture) back then. Turning newspaper pages, the photo was what I spotted first. Sonofagun, I recognized that place! Spent many long nights in that place — not a terribly lovely place. Just to the right, you catch sight of the addition built since when I was there in the 70s.
Hard to see in the photo, but the brush-hammered concrete was created the old fashioned way, with brawny laborers, hammers and brute force. Like back in the days when Pharaoh’s men hauled those big ass stones, making him a glorious place to be boxed up in for eternity. Who says the working class can’t do shit?
Before the recent addition, there used to be a narrow tenement building alongside Paul Rudolf’s Gothic creation. Working from memory, it was easily from the 1900s, dark brick with a walk-up porch. I knew that building well — I worked as an orderly, or some such role, taking care of the folks in the subsidized apartments — helped pay the rent on my one bedroom apartment. Now gone.
Willy, the scrawny handicapped black man with a taste for cheap whiskey, needing help getting back into his bed after partying some nights, he too is gone. It wasn’t hard duty taking care of a sweet soul wanting to live longer.
New Haven wasn’t the world’s most beautiful city, though Bridgeport down the road had a worst reputation, and the part of Hartford where you had to exit off one interstate highway, drive a piece through a seedy section to get back on another interstate — that was nothing to write home about.
Yale Police Benevolent Association poster
Wow. Who knew?
Thinking back on arriving at Clemson at seventeen and barely grown, by contrast, five years later when I drove into New Haven, VW Bug stuffed with my possessions, sans adopted cat I’d left with Lewis in Clemson, it didn’t seem so terrifying. I can’t say during my time there I ever felt terrified. The story I wrote, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? had a bit about living around the corner from the Black Panther’s children’s center which was true, and it didn’t seem so terrifying neither. Different scene come Friday night, but even that wasn’t so threatening. Just folks gathered for a Friday night.
Mind, New Haven had a reputation for not loving Yalees — based mainly on a clear distinction of family wealth. Back in the 1800s, the story went, the mayor of New Haven led some folks with a borrowed cannon and threatened to blow the place apart if the punks didn’t quit sitting on a fence making lewd gestures and comments at the townie girls passing by, but what else could they find to do back then? College boys, they just horny and bored. Them thats got, like Ray Charles sang, and all that jazz.
When I was there, the 70s radicals at Yale were in sympathy with the union organizing the campus help — kitchen workers mainly — against the oppression of The Man. Sorta confusing, which side to take, the oppressed or the oppressor?
So the conflict goes back a ways. But really, was the poster necessary?
Online, last year Yale posted “the starting salary for a Yale University Police Officer, Grade C, is $76,306 and increases in two years to $96,358 at Grade A.” So not gonna make a body rich real fast without heavy overtime, but enough to make some ends meet.
Therein lies an irony, the townies being hired to protect the students from other townies. I’m sure it’s a topic of conversation among the union members. However, let’s consider the poster. Here are people in a profession that’s to provide for public safety, to pledge protection, etc. working to scare the bejesus out of teenage college students, some of whom just left their daddies’ Manhattan townhouses.
It’s a common enough conflict, town and gown, enough so it has a cute alliteration. At Clemson the same stuff happened. A football player was stabbed in a redneck bar outside of town. But Yale, to give it its due, is the well known finishing school — breeding ground — for the nation’s power brokers. So maybe the stakes, and resentments, seem higher?
I found it pretty hysterical, me a boy from Sumter walking by the Skull and Bones mausoleum on High Street wearing my US Army jacket with an Airborne patch, with barely enough for a three dollar pizza , still being associated like I was.
I knew for damn sure I was an outlier — even more than Moose from Arkansas with his plaid shirts and bib overalls, sitting a few desks down in the A&A building. Moose struck me as belonging, maybe because he was always working quietly on his beautifully drafted presentations. But also there were students from moneyed families, coming from Princeton and other Ivy League as undergrads.
Yale discouraged its own undergraduate architecture students from applying. When you’re in the Ivy League, one needs a broader education — take a few years off to study in Rome — climb a mountain, like that. But to the school’s credit, they did enroll students from outside the enclave. And gave them scholarships and loans. I didn’t care about much other than that I was studying under internationally known architects, alongside the future internationally known. It was one hell of a kick.
He wanted to name his first architectural firm, Gonzoid Architects. He was in my first year class at Yale. Long shoulder-length hair like mine. Lived down the street in the same crappy neighborhood, and we shared some grass a few times. I wonder, did he ever connect with the Jersey Devils — talk about counterculture creatives. Right after I met him, he’d designed and built an early inflatable space frame, geodesic baby, connected by tunnel back to the large fan that kept the thing inflated, all of which was only the backdrop to the two tanks of nitrous oxide centered inside— set there by someone for the party— the stoned to heaven Yalees huddled, inhaling with the campus cop just the other side of the plastic. Nitrous oxide is not advised, except when trimming brain cells might improve things.
The inflatable was set up in the courtyard at Stiles and Morse — Eero Saarinen’s contribution to the campus. It was my favorite-cut through from the subdivided Victorian near the Gymnasium to the A&A Building. The vertical pier expression, at the right of the photo, is distinctive. Just outside the Dining Hall was where the inflatable had been installed. Way in the distance is the top half of the gym in blue scaffolding
Stiles and Morse courtyard — photo by Tokugawapants, CC BY-SA 4.0
There was a well known bar near the Law School. Well-watered students spent time there. I met a girl from Ansonia one Friday, Ansonia being not too far from New Haven. When she guessed I was a student, things became interesting, and I thought, ‘well OK, best not complain’ since she was cute. Hope she’s doing well.
New Haven is an acquired taste. Fall in Connecticut — even in New Haven, is Gaia’s way of saying ‘pay attention: you’re living near paradise.’ The colors, the crisp cool air. Even on a numbing cold gray winter day, snow piled each side of the street with cut-throughs at the crosswalks, slowly blackened from the street traffic. The city had that northern soul about it, gritty like Boston with less money.
I’ve eaten pizza since, tons of it, mostly pepperoni. But New Haven had the best of the best. New York stole their recipe.
So whether, as the union’s flyer is shouting, Yale is threatened daily by a dangerous New Haven, you could always say the same for times past — like in the 70s. And it strikes me that a university police force essentially threatening the students they were hired to protect, that’s not a bit thuggish?
I had fun at Yale, living on a shoe string, mostly checks from my sister, smoking bad weed and staying up all night, drowned by Coca Cola and smoking cigars to keep dreaming. I sure as hell can’t complain. And after, I was headed to Florida with a clearer eye on what I could do. If they could teach a stubborn southern boy, they could teach anybody.