Campus clips

Yale has faced budget deficits since the 2008 financial downturn, but President Salovey said in an e-mail to the university community in August that the 2015–16 budget will likely be a balanced one, for the first time in eight years. He added, “If we adhere to our budget plans, we can expect small budget surpluses in the years following.”

Not long after President Peter Salovey ’86PhD endorsed campus freedom of expression in his Freshman Address (see “Free Speech at Yale”), a controversy arose over a guest speaker. The Muslim Students Association and other campus groups objected to the William F. Buckley Jr. Program’s choice of activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a vocal critic of Islam, as a lecturer; MSA argued that she lacks expertise on the religion. Hirsi Ali’s speech, attended by about 300 people, proceeded without incident.

More housing for graduate and professional students is on the drawing board. To accommodate demand for additional university-sponsored housing, Yale plans to construct an apartment building on Elm Street between York and Park, on a site now used as a parking lot.

In other building news, the biology department’s decade-long quest for a new home has taken another turn. After two aborted schemes to erect a new building on Whitney Avenue north of the Peabody Museum, the latest plan is to demolish J. W. Gibbs Laboratory on Science Hill and replace it with an interdisciplinary science building that would include space for the molecular, cellular, and cellular biology department.