Updates

Yale files motion in Korean university lawsuit
A month and a half after Dongguk University filed a $50 million lawsuit against Yale for mistakenly verifying the falsified Yale credentials of a professor hired by Dongguk (see May/June 2008), the university filed a motion in May to stay discovery in the suit. Yale's attorneys argued that the court will almost certainly grant Yale's yet-to-be-filed motion for dismissal of the case and that the collection of evidence in the case will be "burdensome to the parties and to the court." Yale's 17-page motion does not dispute the facts as laid out by Dongguk in its suit, but it suggests that Dongguk was negligent in failing to check the credentials of Shin Jeong-ah before hiring her.

Senior in art controversy submits alternate project
Aliza Shvarts '08, who caused a media storm when she announced that she had repeatedly inseminated herself and induced miscarriages as part of her senior art project (see May/June 2008), submitted a different work in late April to fulfill her project requirement. Yale officials insisted that Shvarts had told them privately that she had never been pregnant, and they would not allow the project to be displayed in the senior exhibition unless she admitted in writing that it was fiction. (They also required that Shvarts not use her blood in her project, as she had proposed.) The alternate project was not publicly displayed but was evaluated by the faculty.

Student pleads guilty in forged credentials case
Akash Maharaj, who forged a Columbia transcript and recommendation letters in order to transfer to Yale College (see May/June 2008), pleaded guilty on May 30 to larceny charges. He was prosecuted for taking $31,750 in financial aid from Yale. Maharaj did not admit wrongdoing but invoked the Alford Doctrine, maintaining his innocence but acknowledging that there is sufficient evidence to convict him. The crime carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and $15,000 in fines, but Judge Richard Damiani indicated that Maharaj could avoid jail time if he makes full restitution.

Hopes for a Doodle revival look dimmer
Three months after the much-loved Yankee Doodle Coffee Shop closed (see March/April 2008), third-generation owner Rick Beckwith says that plans to revive it in another location are still in the works, and some alumni are hopeful that they can help make it happen. But five prominent alumni who were supporting the idea have given up, according to one of them, architect Richard Nash Gould '68, '72MArch. "In my view, it is a lost cause and not worthy of any more effort," Gould told the New Haven Register in May. Yale's retail real-estate arm, University Properties, says it is not in discussion with Beckwith or alumni about a Yale-owned location for the Doodle.