Campus clips

Mark Zurolo ’01MFA

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The Yale Law School is battling the state of Connecticut over building code rules that require a certain number of bathrooms to be designated for each gender. In response to student demand for more gender-neutral bathrooms, the school asked the state for permission to designate some existing single-occupancy bathrooms—currently labeled either for men or women—as gender-neutral. The state’s Codes and Standards Committee rejected the proposal, so in June the school filed an appeal in Connecticut Superior Court.

Former Yale associate professor of Spanish Susan Byrne is suing Yale, alleging that she faced sexual harassment from Spanish and Portuguese department chair Roberto González Echevarría ’70PhD, and that she was denied tenure in retaliation for speaking out. Byrne is now a professor at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. The department has faced conflict in recent years, and faculty disagreements and complaints by graduate students about a “hostile environment” led to a university review. A director of graduate studies was appointed from outside the department, and a one-year moratorium on new graduate students was imposed for 2016–17; a new class of students has been admitted for 2017–18. The university declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Ninety years’ worth of theater programs from the School of Drama have been scanned and posted online as part of a crowdsourced theater history project called Ensemble@Yale. Anyone can join the project at ensemble.yale.edu and go to work marking and transcribing the programs to build a digital history of performance at Yale.