Campus clips

Wani Olatunde

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The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs will become Yale’s 13th professional school, the university announced in April. The school is set to open in 2022 if fund-raising goals are met. For more on the new school, see our July/August issue.

Thirteen senior faculty members affiliated with the undergraduate program in ethnicity, race, and migration (ER&M), including the program’s chair, announced in March that they would “withdraw their labor” from the program, citing a lack of support from the administration. With 87 current majors, ER&M is a fast-growing interdisciplinary program, but the faculty say the university hasn’t funded it properly. In a written statement, President Salovey maintained that the program was well supported and that “we remain hopeful that an agreement can be reached that works well for everyone.”

The Divinity School says that, thanks to a recent donation, it expects by 2022 to be able to meet the demonstrated financial need of all students—meaning sufficient financial aid to avoid the loan burden with which many divinity students now graduate.

Award-winning novelist and essayist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ’08MA (above) will give this year’s Class Day address to graduating Yale College seniors. Adichie, who was born and raised in Nigeria and earned a master’s in African studies at Yale, is best known for her novels Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah.

An urban studies major will be offered in Yale College for the first time since 1970. The faculty voted in March to authorize the interdisciplinary major. Until now, urban studies has been available only as a concentration in other majors.