Campus Clips

Data-driven economic research will be the focus of the Tobin Center for Economic Policy, a Yale initiative announced in June. Named for Nobel laureate and Yale professor James Tobin (1918–2002), the center’s programs will launch in the spring of 2019. The university plans to build a home for it by 2022. Yale says the center will “address a need in the United States for nonpartisan, policy-relevant research by first-rate academic economists.”

Some 119,000 people, including Yale alumni, faculty, and staff, were informed by the university in July that their personal information had been compromised in a data breach sometime in 2008 or 2009. The incident, involving a Yale database, was discovered in a security review this June. The information extracted included names, Social Security numbers, and in some cases dates of birth, e-mail addresses, and physical addresses. Yale says there is no indication that the data were misused, but the university offered a year of free identity-monitoring services to those affected.

Yale is one of 16 colleges and universities that filed an amicus brief in July in support of Harvard’s undergraduate admissions policies. Harvard is being sued in US District Court by a group called Students for Fair Admissions; the suit charges that the school’s admissions policies discriminate against Asian Americans by unconstitutionally favoring other racial minorities. Yale and the other 15 schools argued that a ruling for the plaintiff “would compromise [the schools’] efforts to attain diverse student bodies, and it would be inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence.”

The skeletal remains of eight Maori and Moriori people were repatriated from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa at a ceremony at the Peabody in June. Representatives of both museums, Maori and Moriori elders, and Native Yale students were present for the transfer. The remains were taken from their original homes and donated to Yale in the nineteenth century.