If you owned your own restaurant and wanted to create some new signature meals to attract new patrons and increase your competitiveness, how would you feel if you had to wait for state government officials to review your suggested dishes, taste those recipes and approve their preparation before you could offer them to customers? To make matters worse, what if that process could take a year or more and, meanwhile, up the street and in surrounding towns, other restaurants were not restricted from changing up their menus as and when they saw fit? For many of Connecticut’s private non-profit universities and colleges, this hypothetical example of unnecessary government oversight is analogous to a program-development challenge we are facing.
Yale
Posted inCT Viewpoints
Taxes on college endowments: Their time has come in Connecticut
Many of the richest universities in the country, sitting on billions of dollars in tax exempt endowments, receive through the tax laws government subsidies that greatly eclipse the appropriations received by public colleges. Hidden tax subsidies that increase inequality are not good policy. In contrast, Senate Bill 413 is reasonable in scope, fair in its goals, and represents advancement well within the current public policy thrust aiming to reassess the tax codes to help address America’s need for an educated citizenry and a qualified workforce.
Posted inCT Viewpoints
Sports and the campus climate for women: ‘It’s on us’ men
The reported expulsion of a former Yale men’s basketball captain for alleged sexual misconduct that he disputes — and the team’s apology as teammates balance personal loyalty with support for “a healthy, safe and respectful campus climate”— can raise awareness at universities and beyond.
Posted inEnergy & Environment
A shifting ground for artificial turf in Connecticut
A number of cancer cases around the country among young athletes who played on artificial turf fields made with a crumb rubber filler have spurred calls for further research into the safety of the fields.
Posted inHealth
From home quarantine, Yale student decries ‘overreaction’
Ryan Boyko sat by an open rear window late Thursday afternoon, inches from the East Rock backyard he may not enter, continuing by laptop to try to help Liberia contain the Ebola epidemic. Boyko, a Yale public-health doctoral student, would rather have left the house.
Posted inPolitics
Still communicator-in-chief, Clinton offers Malloy a tutorial
As always, Bill Clinton made it simple. He told Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a first-term Democrat with uncertain re-election prospects in a slowly improving economy, he had a good story to tell: Things were bad four years ago. You made them better. Just…tell…your…story.
Posted inHealth, Politics
Yale class-action lawsuit seeks redress for Vietnam vets
Conley Monk was given a choice as a 21-year-old Marine lance corporal struggling with drugs and nightmares after combat in Vietnam: Accept a less-than-honorable discharge or face an indefinite stay in a base brig on Okinawa. He took the ticket home. Now 65 and recently diagnosed with PTSD, he is lead plaintiff in a suit filed Monday on behalf of Vietnam veterans trying to upgrade their discharge status.
Posted inCT Viewpoints
Op-ed: Connecticut’s place in the knowledge economy is linked to higher education
The caliber, vision and ingenuity of higher education places Connecticut in an enviable position, squarely on the lead edge of the accelerating pace of change.
Posted inEducation
Obama taps Yale psychologist for national education panel
New Haven — Modern-day school reformers focus too much on standardized tests and too little on kids’ hearts and minds, a legendary Yale child psychologist said as he prepares to advise the president.
Dr. James P. Comer made the remarks in an interview this week in his office at the Yale Child Study Center. President Obama in January named Comer one of 15 appointees to a new President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans.
Posted inHealth
Yale professor shares in Nobel Prize
Yale University professor James E. Rothman is one of three researchers to share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The award, announced Monday, recognizes the three scientists’ work in understanding how the transport systems in cells work.
Posted inEducation
What college rankings tell us…
Should a university that is more selective in who it enrolls be ranked higher than a university that accepts everyone who applies? If faculty members are paid more, should they be ranked higher? And what if a university’s reputation is more highly regarded than another’s? Should the more popular university be ranked higher?