School Notes: Yale College
November/December 2011

ROTC returns to Yale College

After a 40-year separation, Yale and the armed forces are getting back together. In the fall of 2012, Naval and Air Force ROTC units will resume operations on Yale’s campus. The university has already fielded a number of calls from high school seniors interested in joining ROTC at Yale, confirming the prediction that Yale’s culture of “public service” will attract plenty of recruits. And the expansion of that culture is exactly why Dean Mary Miller finds ROTC so necessary in the first place: “We have not had an easy and obvious route for our students who seek to serve their nation at the very highest levels. And we want to make sure that it is one of the categories our students consider.”

Stiles College renovation complete

With construction in Ezra Stiles finished in time for the 2011–2012 school year, a thirteen-year cycle of college renovations is complete. The new Stiles boasts suites reconfigured from singles and two-room doubles; a restored common room, library, and buttery; the only brick pizza oven on campus; and a basement area shared with Morse College containing a theater, weaving studio, dance studio, digital media room, and gym. Unconventional angles remain. Swing Space, built to house students throughout the renovations, now serves a split function—part annex housing for juniors, part offices and meeting spaces for the Yale Law School.

Consent and communication

Fall 2011 marked the launch of the Consent and Communication Educator program, which aims to foster a culture of respect and understanding at Yale. This peer-based program, designed to help the Yale community prevent and respond to sexual misconduct, focuses on building community skills for risk reduction and bystander intervention. Led by Melanie Boyd ’90, lecturer in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and special adviser to the dean of Yale College on gender issues, a group of 40 undergraduates, known as CCEs, has been selected to run campus-wide workshops, as well as small-scale events within their own residential colleges.