About two hours north of Philadelphia is the small town of Macungie, with a population of less than 4,000. And two weeks ago — Macungie and specifically Emmaus High School — had something big to celebrate.
Indiana University starting Defensive Lineman Mario Landino, who played football at Emmaus High School, is now a College Football National Champion.
Indiana may have been known primarily for its basketball program, with legendary Coach Bobby Knight, and for the 1986 film Hoosiers starring Gene Hackman. Not anymore.
And while 65 NCAA Football Teams have been undefeated since the AP started polling in 1936, Indiana is only one of two teams to finish 16–0. The other — the 1894 Yale Football Team. Indiana ran through their 2025 D1 College Football season, including a 13–10 win over Ohio State.
Yale University said Tuesday it plans to offer free tuition to U.S. households with annual incomes of less than $200,000 starting this upcoming academic year.
The Ivy League school, based in New Haven, Connecticut, said it would eliminate all costs for families making up to $100,000 and offer enough financial aid to meet or exceed tuition costs for households that earn up to $200,000.
In a statement to CBS News, Yale University provost Scott Strobel said the new policy aligns with the school’s mission to “educate exceptional students from all backgrounds.”
Of the roughly 6,800 undergraduate students at Yale, 1,000 currently attend tuition-free, while just over half qualify for need-based aid, according to Kari DiFonzo, director of undergraduate financial aid at Yale.
Without financial aid, Yale’s annual undergraduate tuition could swell to $90,000, including the cost of food and housing, according to the school’s website. The university has offered free tuition for families who make up to $75,000 since 2020.
The median annual household income in the U.S. was $105,800 as of 2024, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows.
Yale joins several other prestigious academic institutions, including Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, that have recently expanded financial assistance in a bid to attract more middle- and lower-income Americans. All three schools announced last year that they would offer free tuition for families with annual incomes of $200,000 or less starting in the 2025-26 academic year.
Emory University, a private research school in Atlanta, will start this fall also offer free tuition for families with incomes below $200,000.
The affordability push from some of the nation’s most prominent schools comes as some younger people question the value of a college degree, given the often sizable out-of-pocket costs. As of 2024, the total cost of attending a four-year college was $30,000 after financial aid awards, according to a New York Federal Reserve Bank study last year.
Nearly 43 million Americans, or 1 in 6 adults, owed federal student loan debt as of fiscal year 2024, according to Congress.gov.
On Feb. 6, 2021, Kevin Jiang, a 26-year-old Yale graduate student and former Army National Guardsman, spent the day with Zion Perry, his fiancée, who was also a graduate student there. The couple went hiking and ice fishing, followed by dinner at her home in the affluent East Rock section of New Haven. Police say that at around 8:30 p.m. Jiang left her apartment and headed off in his Prius to his house, where he lived with his mother.
Kevin Jiang was a 26-year-old Yale graduate student, an Army veteran, and, his friends say, a man of faith who volunteered with the homeless.
Kevin Jiang/Instagram
He barely made it two blocks before his car was struck from behind by a dark SUV in what appeared to be a minor fender bender. Police believe he got out of his car, likely to check on how the other driver was and exchange information. Instead, the other motorist shot Jiang eight times — with several bullets fired so close to his head that the exploding gunpowder left burn marks on his face.
David Zaweski, the lead homicide detective in Jiang’s murder, talked with “48 Hours” correspondent Anne-Marie Green for “The Ivy League Murder.” An encore of the broadcast is streaming on Paramount+.
Zaweski said that one witness told investigators she heard the minor fender bender, looked out a window, heard gunshots and saw muzzle flashes from a weapon. And another witness added that she not only heard the gunshots, but she saw the shooter — dressed all in black — standing over his fallen victim, continuing to fire bullets into him after he was down. Detectives would later recover a chilling home surveillance video that virtually captured Kevin’s final moments alive, confirming the witness’ accounts.
But deepening the mystery was the fact that the eight spent shell casings lying near Jiang were .45 caliber bullets — and they were similar to .45 caliber shell casings found at the scene of four recent shootings in the area.
According to police, a gunman had fired .45 caliber bullets into four homes over the last several months. In those cases, no one had been hurt. Investigators interviewed the homeowners but were unable to find any connection between them.
At first glance, Jiang’s murder had all the earmarks of a violent case of road rage. But Zaweski and his colleague Steven Cunningham quickly began to wonder if there was more.
“It seems a little bit more personal,” Zaweski told Green. “When you have someone laying on the ground and not moving, what would cause someone to continue firing?”
Cunningham questioned the car accident. “Was it deliberate to get him out of the vehicle? Possibly something that was planned?” he said.
“And if he was specifically targeted,” Zaweski continued, “what could have happened in his life to drive someone to do this?
It was a logical investigative avenue to pursue, but after breaking the tragic news to Jiang’s mother and his fiancée, investigators say the portrait that emerged of Kevin was that of a gifted young man who couldn’t have had an enemy in the world. He was living with, and taking care of, his mother, whom he brought from Seattle to live with him. He volunteered to work with the homeless, was deeply religious, and was a former lieutenant in the U.S. Army National Guard. Just a week earlier he had proposed to Perry, which she posted on Facebook, virtually on the anniversary of their meeting at a Christian retreat.
Kevin Jiang and Zion Perry
Facebook
Pastor Gregory Hendrickson summed up the young newly engaged couple for Green. “They clearly shared a lot in common,” he began. “They both loved nature. Zion was a scientist studying molecular biophysics and biochemistry… he was in the School of the Environment. They’re both brilliant and hardworking students,” he said, “and yet they didn’t feel like their accomplishments were what defined them at the deepest level.”
Zaweski and Cunningham knew they faced a daunting investigation. Jiang’s murder may just have been another random shooting by the mysterious .45 caliber gunman. Whoever the shooter was, he was still on the loose.
“The suspect was out there,” Zaweski said. “He wasn’t identified. We didn’t know where he went … and we didn’t know what he would be doing next.”
With few leads to pursue and a vague image of a dark SUV from surveillance footage at the scene, they knew they likely would need a break. And they got one the following day when they received an urgent call from Sgt. Jeffrey Mills of the nearby North Haven police. He provided them with startling information about two different 911 calls.
The first one occurred about a half hour after Jiang’s murder. A motorist had gotten stuck on a desolate snow-covered railroad track outside a scrap metal yard he had accidentally driven into, he said, while looking for a nearby highway entrance. The motorist, Qinxuan Pan, was from Malden, Massachusetts. His record was clean, and he was calm with an excuse that Mills had heard before from others who got lost near that scrap yard. So, he helped Pan get a tow and a nearby hotel room. At the time, Mills was unaware that there had been a murder in New Haven.
But about 15 hours later, at 11 a.m. on Feb. 7, Mills responded to another 911 call at an Arby’s, where employees had found a bag containing a gun and box of .45 caliber bullets. The Arby’s was right next door to the Best Western hotel where Pan had been taken. And by then he knew Kevin Jiang had been murdered, by someone driving a dark SUV similar to Pan’s. That’s when he reached out to New Haven homicide.
It turned out Pan had checked into the hotel but never stayed there. And when Zaweski sent detectives to Malden, where Pan went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and lived with his parents — no one was home.
Zaweski turned to his computer searching for Pan, hoping to find a connection to Jiang. “We’ll use Facebook as a tool to try and get a background on an individual, who they’re friends with,” Zaweski explained. But there seemed to be no connection with Jiang.
“And so, you’re going down the list of names,” Green says, “Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then you’re like, ‘whoa.’”
“There’s our connection,” Zaweski replies. That connection was Zion Perry, who was listed as a friend of Pan. She and Pan had met each other at a Christian group when Perry was an undergraduate at MIT. And although Perry was barely an acquaintance of Pan and hadn’t communicated with him since she left MIT and moved to New Haven to attend Yale, the homicide detectives felt they had more than a break. They had a potential suspect who was missing from his home. And a possible motive: an obsession with Perry.
“It did seem like there was a secret obsession of Pan’s going on behind the scenes that Kevin wasn’t aware of, and that Zion wasn’t aware of,” Zaweski said. After all, Jiang’s murder occurred just one week after Perry posted their engagement on Facebook, along with previous photos of them dating.
Qinxuan Pan
Qinxuan Pan/Facebook
Investigators believe Pan was also responsible for the four .45 caliber shootings, and that the shootings were part of a premeditated plan. They theorized that those shootings were done to mislead them when Jiang was eventually killed, to make them think his death had been just another random incident.
“He planned it, Cunningham said. “And he knew we’d be looking at these other things.”
“This wasn’t a random incident out there,” Zaweski added. “He was targeted.”
Now, their homicide investigation, and the massive manhunt for their brilliant, tech-savvy MIT fugitive took off. U.S. Marshals joined the case and learned that Pan’s family had access to millions of dollars in assets. Pan was missing, and they worried he might be trying to flee the country. The pressure was on.
“This became so high profile so fast,” U.S. Marshal Joe Galvan told “48 Hours.” “It was just heightened.”
The Marshals galvanized their vast resources to track down Pan. They noticed Pan’s parents had withdrawn large sums of cash, and that they had taken a long trip south with their son right after the murder. When the parents had been stopped in Georgia, they were in the car, but their son was gone. They said he’d simply gotten out of the car and walked away, and they didn’t know where he’d gone. Investigators were skeptical.
“They would go to the ends of the earth to help support and hide him,” said Matthew Duffy, a supervisor of the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force in Connecticut. The Marshals focused in on the parents as their way to find Pan. They knew finding him would take patience as they utilized all their surveillance techniques to track the family.
Weeks went by, but eventually, their patience paid off. Pan’s mother finally made a mistake that would lead the Marshals straight to her son. She made a phone call from a hotel using a clerk’s phone. Investigators spoke to the clerk and were able to track that call, leading them to Pan’s location at a boarding house in Alabama.
“They went there with a small army,” Duffy said. “Around 20 guys … he just came out and said, ‘I’m who you’re looking for.’”
At the time of his arrest, Pan had on him approximately $20,000 in cash, multiple communication devices, and his father’s passport. He was charged with Jiang’s murder, accepted a plea deal, and was sentenced in April 2024 to serve 35 years in prison.
Pan’s parents were never charged with anything. “48 Hours” reached out to the Pans, but they did not respond to our request for comment.
Investigators believe that had Pan not gotten stuck on the train tracks on that fateful February night, Jiang’s murder may never have been solved.
“Could he have gotten away with murder?” Green asked Zaweski.
“He very well could have,” Zaweski replied. “If he had not gotten caught up on those tracks … it would’ve been very difficult.”
Though investigators, friends, and family were relieved that Pan had been caught and brought to justice, Jiang’s mother spoke at Pan’s sentencing to say she felt that 35 years was too short a sentence for the man who’d killed her only son.
Perry agreed. “I wanted to address Pan specifically,” she said at the sentencing. “Although your sentence is far less than you deserve … there is also mercy. May God have mercy on you. And may he have mercy on all of us.”
Even four years after Jiang’s death, friends wonder what Kevin, a man of deep faith, might have thought about his killer.
“Do you think Kevin would’ve forgiven Pan?” Green asked Jamila Ayeh and Nasya Hubbard, who served with Jiang in the military.
“Yes, I do,” said Hubbard. Added Ayeh, “Without a doubt.”
It was a cold night in New Haven, Connecticut, in February 2021 when lead detective David Zaweski and his colleague Steven Cunningham arrived at the crime scene.
Det. David Zaweski: The patrol officers had already been out there canvassing the area. They were knocking on doors looking for anyone that might’ve seen anything or heard anything.
Det. David Zaweski: The crime scene detectives were starting to locate all the, uh, shell casings.
Kevin Jiang, 26, was a graduate student at Yale University’s School of the Environment.
Det. David Zaweski: His body was still on scene … covered in a white sheet.
Anne-Marie Green: When you saw the body … what did you see?
Det. David Zaweski: What we could see were gunshot wounds to his upper body and to his head. And you could see stippling on the left side of his head.
Stippling is a burn pattern caused by gunpowder exploding from a weapon fired at close range.
About a hundred feet down the street —
Det. David Zaweski: There was a Prius just parked in the middle of the road with its hazards on.
They quickly discovered the Prius belonged to Kevin. Crime scene detectives noticed a peculiar bit of damage that suggested it had been hit from behind.
Det. David Zaweski: There was an impression that was left on the back bumper that looked like a license plate holder.
Anne-Marie Green: So, this is like a fender bender. It’s not a violent crash.
Det. David Zaweski: No. There’s not much damage.
One witness told detectives she heard the sound of an accident and went to the window to look.
Det. David Zaweski: When they look out, they see a Prius come to a stop and put its hazards on. They see a dark colored SUV pull up behind it and then reverse back toward the intersection. They see the operator of the Prius walk out and approach the SUV – most likely to see how they were, exchange insurance information. When the operator gets to the black SUV, they hear a round of gunshots and they see the muzzle flash from the gun from the driver’s side of the SUV.
Another witness heard the first round of gunshots and went to her window.
Det. David Zaweski: When she looks outside, she sees a subject, wearing all black, standing over another individual who’s laying on the ground. … she hears another round of gunshots and she can see the muzzle flash from the gun as he’s firing.
Det. David Zaweski: But she sees someone standing over another person, which means the victim is already down. And they’re still shooting.
Det. David Zaweski: Yes.
Anne-Marie Green: What did you think?
Det. David Zaweski: There’s a little bit more to it. It seems a little bit more personal. When you have someone laying on the ground and not moving, what would cause someone to continue firing at them?
The detectives were able to confirm these accounts when they got a look at video from a neighbor’s security system.
Det. David Zaweski: It was located on the inside of a window, facing outward.
Det. David Zaweski: We hear the collision between the two cars.
Det. David Zaweski: And that’s when you see Kevin’s Prius pull into frame … and the SUV pulls up behind him. And then reverses out of frame. You see Kevin exit his vehicle and then walk out of frame to approach the SUV.
Det. David Zaweski: You then hear two gunshots.
Det. David Zaweski: A scream.
Det. David Zaweski: And then six more gunshots.
Moments later, the video shows the SUV driving off into the night.
Anne-Marie Green: Can you make out any details when it comes to the SUV?
Det. David Zaweski: Unfortunately, not. … You could kind of get the idea of the potential make and model of it with the taillights, but you couldn’t discern any identifying features.
WERE RANDOM SHOOTINGS IN NEW HAVEN RELATED?
Investigators soon felt the dark SUV and the .45 caliber shells recovered at the scene pointed to a potential link to earlier shootings around the area that police had been investigating. Four times over a two-month span, someone fired shots into family homes – the fourth incident occurred just one hour before Kevin’s murder.
Det. David Zaweski: We had detectives in the bureau looking into each of the incidents to see if there’s any more of a connection to link them.
Paul Whyte (points out where the bullets came in): Two bullets came in from this window and ended up in this wall.
Paul and Nyree Whyte’s home was the target of the third shooting.
Paul Whyte: We had just finished dinner … I had a fire going.
Nyree, a schoolteacher, headed upstairs to take a shower. Paul — an educator with degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Columbia University — was sitting downstairs.
Paul Whyte: All of a sudden, something comes through this window. … then a second bullet came through – you heard the pop and the glass going everywhere with that one.
Paul shouted a warning to Nyree.
Paul Whyte: Get down. Someone’s shooting.
Nyree Whyte: And then I heard bang-pop again and I turn, and I literally saw the frame of the door just splinter.
Anne-Marie Green: And then she yells back at you.
Paul Whyte: Right, that someone’s shooting upstairs.
It was over in a matter of moments and no one was injured.
Anne-Marie Green: Do you feel lucky?
Paul Whyte: Yes.
Nyree Whyte: Absolutely.
Paul Whyte: Absolutely.
Detectives interviewed the Whytes and the occupants of the other houses.
Det. David Zaweski: There didn’t seem to be any connection between them.
And none of them, investigators say, had any connection to Kevin Jiang. But the shell casings from all the shootings would later tell a different story.
Det. David Zaweski: When the casings are sent to the lab, they all came back as matches to the casings found at the homicide.
The casings matched, but Kevin was the only person murdered, and detectives didn’t know why.
Det. David Zaweski: It could have been a road rage incident that turned a little too violent.
Or was Kevin targeted?
Det. Steven Cunningham: The car accident … was it deliberate … to get him out of the vehicle … Possibly something that was planned.
Det. David Zaweski: And if he was specifically targeted, what could have happened in his life to drive someone to do this?
SURVEILLANCE VIDEO CAPTURES KEVIN JIANG’S FINAL MOMENTS
It was late when detectives Zaweski and Cunningham left the crime scene on Feb. 6. They went to Kevin’s home looking to find a family member to notify about what had happened. His mother, Linda Liu, came to the door.
Anne-Marie Green: It’s got to be the hardest conversation.
Det. David Zaweski: It is. They always are.
Det. David Zaweski: You want to be direct and upfront and make it clear. As horrific as it is … for them. … So, we explained to her that he was shot and killed in the area of Lawrence and Nichols Street in New Haven.
Anne-Marie Green: Can she even comprehend that?
Det. David Zaweski: She’s absolutely devastated. She falls to the ground crying.
The detectives wanted to know everything about Kevin and why he may have been targeted that night. Liu began to tell them about her son.
Det. David Zaweski: It was just the two of them. And he was actually supporting her.
Kevin Jiang
Trinity Baptist Church/YouTube
Det. David Zaweski: She told us that he was a grad student at Yale University and was in the Army National Guard.
Kevin was deeply religious. He and his mother were part of the congregation at Trinity Baptist Church. Pastor Gregory Hendrickson knew them both and says that Liu, a divorced single parent, got Kevin through a tough childhood where he was often bullied.
Pastor Gregory Hendrickson: She was very committed to sort of seeing him come through and eventually he thrived on the other side of that … I think he had a sense of … honoring his mom by, as she had cared for him when he was a child … caring for her as she was getting older.
Kevin bought a house in 2019 and Hendrickson says he invited his mother to come live with him.
Pastor Gregory Hendrickson: She was living alone, she was living on the other side of the country, she didn’t have a lot of family support around her and … he … wanted … her to come and be with him during his studies at Yale.
Kevin Jiang had recently proposed to his girlfriend Zion Perry. “Oh, Kevin. Oh wow, oh yes, yes! Definitely! Wow, this is so pretty!” she replied.
Zion Perry/Facebook
Police also learned then that Jiang had recently gotten engaged to his girlfriend of a year, Zion Perry. She posted the proposal on Facebook. This was just one week before he was murdered.
Nasya Hubbard: He was so in love with Zion — you could tell — he didn’t even have to really say too much.
Nasya Hubbard served with Kevin in the Army National Guard.
Nasya Hubbard: I — oh my gosh. … I remember one time … he was on the phone with her and I was like, wow, like you could hear the genuineness and his love towards her. And I was like, wow. I hope I find someone like that.
Perry grew up in Pennsylvania, where she was an honors high school student. The couple met in January 2020 when Zion was still an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.
Pastor Gregory Hendrickson: He said, you know … I met her at Christian Retreat … she is very kind and we enjoy talking and um, just have great conversations together. … then she, uh, came to do her PhD at Yale.
Pastor Gregory Hendrickson: They clearly shared a lot of common — they both loved nature. … I mean, Zion was … a scientist … she is studying molecular biophysics and biochemistry. … So, you know, he was studying the — in the School of the Environment … they’re both brilliant and hardworking students … and yet … they didn’t feel like their accomplishments were, what, defined them at the deepest level.
Zaweski and Cunningham then interviewed an emotional Perry, and she told them she and Kevin had spent the day together.
Det. David Zaweski: They had gone ice fishing and had dinner at her house … and then he left her house around 8:30 that night.
Kevin Jiang and Zion Perry
Kevin Jiang/Facebook
Kevin didn’t get far. His Prius was struck by the dark SUV just two blocks from Perry’s house — close enough for Perry to hear the gunshots that followed.
Det. David Zaweski: She remembers hearing the gunshots, but she thought there was a good five or ten minutes after he’d left to when she heard the gunshots. So, she didn’t think he was anywhere near the area and didn’t think twice about him potentially being involved in any way.
Anne-Marie Green: Did she have any idea who would have done something like this?
Det. Steven Cunningham: At that point, no. Nothing that she told us that she — she could think of.
After speaking with Perry, detectives were no closer to figuring out why Kevin would be a target.
Det. Steven Cunningham: It seemed like just an innocent — innocent guy.
Anne-Marie Green: Did you think this was gonna be a tough case though?
Det. David Zaweski: That night —
Det. Steven Cunningham: Yes.
Det. David Zaweski: — we had a little bit, but there wasn’t a lot to go on.
But just 15 hours after the shooting, they got a huge break.
Det. David Zaweski: Little did we know that we’d get the phone call …
Det. Steven Cunningham: And it was like, wow.
THE MAN STUCK ON THE TRAIN TRACKS
News of Kevin Jiang’s murder spread among his loved ones and closest friends.
Nasya Hubbard: And I was at home and I actually got a phone call from another soldier … And she was saying, I know you guys were close … And then … like, her voice cracked. … and … she told me that he had passed away … And I was like not comprehending what was going on. … So I text him … And I was like, “answer your phone please.” And obviously, he never answered me.
Hubbard reached out to Capt. Jamila Ayeh. And if sharing the news about Jiang wasn’t tragic enough, someone posted the chilling video of his murder online, and his fellow soldiers now saw and heard Kevin’s final moments alive.
Nasya Hubbard: … to this day. … I can still hear him — hear him screaming … I was like, why did I listen to that?
Detectives Zaweski and Cunningham were back at their desks in headquarters, struggling for answers and leads to pursue.
Anne-Marie Green: Day two … you get a phone call.
Det. David Zaweski: Yes.
The call, from a sergeant at nearby North Haven Police Department, was urgent.
Det. David Zaweski: … two incidents had happened in North Haven the night before and then earlier that morning.
It began with a 911 call from a local scrap metal yard around 9 p.m. – less than a half hour after Kevin was killed.
911 CALL: I’m the, uh, security guard at … Sims Metal Management. … I just had somebody drive through my yard here … they didn’t know where they were going. … So I’ve been chasing them around the yard and, uh, they just pulled way in the back, off the property … it’s like a black minivan, SUV type of thing.
Sergeant Jeffrey Mills and Officer Marcus Artaiz responded and spotted that vehicle stuck on snow-covered railroad tracks, not far from the rear exit of the Sims scrap metal yard. They approached the driver.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: How you doing?
QINXUAN PAN: I’m stuck.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: Oh, yeah. What are you doing back here?
QINXUAN PAN: Stuck here.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: What are you doing back here, though?
QINXUAN PAN: I just got it here accidentally, and I got stuck. … Is there any way to get unstuck here?
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: Uh, the only thing I can do is call you a tow truck.
QINXUAN PAN: OK, cool. Thanks.
A still from police bodycam video shows Qinxuan Pan talking with North Haven police after officers responded to a 911 call about a trespasser on private property.
North Haven Police Department
The motorist was 29-year-old Qinxuan Pan from Malden, Massachusetts.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: OK. Do you have your driver’s license on you?
QINXUAN PAN: Yes.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: Registration?
QINXUAN PAN: Yes. You can take this. OK.
His driver’s license and criminal background were clean. During the encounter, Mills noticed a yellow jacket on the passenger seat. He also saw a blue bag and a briefcase in the backseat, but not much else.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS (bodycam): He took a wrong turn. … He got lost, and he thought the Jeep was probably chasing him, the security guy.
Because Sgt. Mills hadn’t heard about Kevin’s murder, he wasn’t particularly concerned.
OFFICER MARCUS ARTAIZ (bodycam): So, it’s nothing you think?
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: Yeah, he’s —
OFFICER MARCUS ARTAIZ: He doesn’t look like he’s got any scrap on him or anything.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: No.
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: I’ve been on the tracks I don’t know how many times with vehicles that were, you know, called into suspicious or whatever but kids go back there … people always come down there, um, according to the security guard … and they turn around in the front lot and they leave ’cause they missed the highway or something.
Anne-Marie Green: Yeah. Did he look nervous?
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: He wasn’t nervous at all … He was perfectly calm.
QINXUAN PAN (bodycam): So what — what do you recommend I do? … I mean if I can get it off the track, I prefer to drive — drive it myself.
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: He was just like, well sorry. I got stuck on the tracks can you help me get off?
OFFICER MARCUS ARTAIZ (bodycam): So how about you get a hotel for the night. We’ll have the tow truck drop you off at the hotel and you pay with credit card and you can arrange pick it up the car in the morning.
QINXUAN PAN: OK, let’s get the hotel then.
OFFICER MARCUS ARTAIZ (bodycam):: Yeah let’s do that.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: That’s probably the safest thing to do.
QINXUAN PAN: OK.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS: OK.
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: The tow truck came, uh, took a little work, but it got it off the tracks. … he gave, uh, Mr. Pan, uh, ride back to Best Western and I cleared the call like any other call.
But hours later, there was another call to 911.
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: February 7th, around 11:00 a.m.
911 OPERATOR: Hello. Can I help you? … This is the police department.
CALLER: Uh hello, I work at Arby’s here in North Haven.
911 OPERATOR: Mm hmm.
ARBY’S EMPLOYEE: … we found a gun … and probably like, uh, 10 boxes of, um –
911 OPERATOR: Bullets?
ARBY’S EMPLOYEE: … bullets.
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: An employee found a couple of bags on the grass at the north entrance here. When they brought ’em in …
Fifteen hours after the first 911 call, Sgt. Jeffrey Mills responded to another 911 call at an Arby’s, where employees had found a bag containing a gun and box of .45 caliber bullets. The Arby’s was next door to the Best Western hotel where Qinxuan Pan had been taken.
North Haven Police Department
OFFICER #1 (bodycam): There were three bags … this one, that one, and this.
OFFICER #2: Got it.
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: I took a better look at the bags that it came in … And here’s a … blue retail bag with the Massachusetts logo on it and a small leather black briefcase. And it instantly hit me. These are the bags that were in Mr. Pan’s car the night before.
The Arby’s was right next door to the Best Western where Pan was dropped off. And by then, Mills had heard about the murder in New Haven.
Anne-Marie Green (with Mills outside Arby’s): What’s going through your brain?
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: At that point … knowing … that New Haven had a homicide … they were looking for a dark-colored GMC SUV. Um, now, we’ve got a firearm. And then Officer Bianchi shows me a yellow jacket that was in it … And the suspect was wearing a yellow jacket.
SGT. JEFFREY MILLS (bodycam): So, he might be at Best Western right now.
OFFICER #1: Let’s go over there.
OFFICER #2: I’m gonna go over there.
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: And when we got here I went in to the front desk and spoke with the attendant there and asked if Qinxuan Pan had checked in. Which they checked and said yes he did … I mean he hasn’t checked out yet.
That’s when Mills alerted New Haven homicide about Pan.
Anne-Marie Green: Do you immediately think there might be a connection with the homicide?
Det. David Zaweski: There’s a very good chance. … the vehicle matched. And … the items that were left behind at the Arby’s restaurant … it included a .45-caliber handgun and that matched the casings that were at the scene.
Zaweski immediately sent detectives to meet Mills at the Best Western.
Sgt. Jeffrey Mills: Uh so we got a key, went to room 276 … We knocked on the door, we entered the room. And the room was clean. … Nothing in it. It didn’t appear that anybody stayed in it for the night. … At first, we were like, oh, we lost him.
Qinxuan Pan, 29, was a graduate student at MIT studying artificial intelligence
Qinxuan Pan/Facebook
New Haven police sent investigators, including Detective Joe Galvan, to track down Pan. Galvan went to Malden, Massachusetts, where Pan lived with his parents and was a graduate student at MIT.
—
Det. Joe Galvan: … right outside of Boston …very affluent homes … There’s no one there. … so we knock on the door. … So … the day after the homicide, we were unsure if, uh, maybe the family, um, was on vacation. … out of state, out of the country.
But police were also worried.
Det. Joe Galvan: … were they — given the heinous act that occurred in New Haven the day before, were they potentially kidnapped by their own son? Were they victims of another … hor-horrible crime?
WAS AN OBSESSION A MOTIVE FOR MURDER?
With Qinxuan Pan and his parents missing from their home, Detective David Zaweski turned to his computer searching for Pan.
Det. David Zaweski: The first thing I wanna know is, who he is … and if there’s any connection between him and Kevin. … I see that he has a Facebook page.
Anne-Marie Green: What was his page like?
Detectives searched Qinxuan Pan’s Facebook account for possible clues.
Qinxuan Pan/Facebook
Det. David Zaweski: There was not much activity at all. His last, uh, post was back in 2016, and he had a few photos with some other students, but that was it.
Anne-Marie Green: Is that when you first found out that he’s an MIT grad student?
Det. David Zaweski: Yes that was the first time we got the connection between him and MIT.
Det. David Zaweski: So, I check his friends list to see if Kevin is in there.
Anne-Marie Green: Is he?
Det. David Zaweski: Kevin is not listed, but I do notice that Zion Perry is listed.
Zion Perry, Kevin’s fiancee, who also went to MIT.
Det. David Zaweski: Now we have a connection … I got in contact with her. … she explained that they had met at MIT back in, uh, 2019. And they were more associates than friends.
Anne-Marie Green: Nothing romantic?
Det. David Zaweski: No. … She said that they never dated, they never had any romantic relationship.
Det. David Zaweski: The last time she spoke with him was May of 2020 … he reached out to her through Facebook Messenger … to congratulate her on graduating. … He asked to FaceTime with her and she politely declined it.
Anne-Marie Green: She must have been wondering why you asking me so many questions about this guy. What’d you say to her?
Det. David Zaweski: She was, and that’s when I told her that he was a person of interest in this and she was completely shocked. … he was barely a part of her life. … and why he would’ve been involved with this in any way.
Anne-Marie Green: What did she have posted on her page?
Kevin Jiang and Zion Perry after Kevin’s proposal.
Zion Perry/Facebook
Det. David Zaweski: The last things that she had posted were the engagement between her and Kevin.
Anne-Marie Green: Are you starting to formulate a theory about the case that goes a little beyond possible road rage?
Det. David Zaweski: Yes … It did seem like there was a secret obsession of Pan’s going on behind the scenes that Kevin wasn’t aware of and that Zion wasn’t aware of.
The next day, Zion Perry joined Kevin’s mother, Linda Lui, and father, Mingchen Jiang, and nearly 700 people on a virtual vigil for Kevin. Perry addressed the mourners.
ZION PERRY: One day, I — I will get to see … Kevin again, yeah, in heaven and then everything is made right … I thank Miss Liu and Mr. Jiang for raising such a fine young man and for, yeah, bringing him into the world.
LINDA LIU: He gave me a lot of joy. He’s very thoughtful, warm boy taking care of me. And, uh, I miss him.
MINGCHEN JIANG: He’s a nice boy. Everybody likes him. (CRYING) Thank you. … Thank you, you all.
That week, Pastor Hendrickson eulogized Kevin at his funeral.
Pastor Gregory Hendrickson:We come to you today, remembering Kevin, grateful for his life, grieving over his loss.
Perry read a poem Kevin wrote to her. It began –
Zion Perry: “If this world falls apart, it will be all right, because we have each other’s hearts.”
A medical officer also trained to operate tanks, Kevin was buried with full military honors, just two days before his 27th birthday, on Valentine’s Day.
Meanwhile, Galvan, a member of the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force in Connecticut — along with supervisor Matthew Duffy and Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault — were utilizing their vast resources to urgently gather intelligence on Pan.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: MIT graduate … not socially active … degree in computer science.
Lawyer William Gerace.
William Gerace: … grad student … in artificial intelligence.
Anne-Marie Green: Genius?
William Gerace: Genius. … socially not a genius.
The Marshals discovered Pan had three active phones, and they noticed that in the months before Kevin was killed, Pan was using one of those phones to contact car dealerships.
Det. Joe Galvan: He would tell them all the same thing. … um, said he was going for a test drive. I believe he said he was going on a camping trip.
Investigators were able to match the date of Pan’s test drives with each of the .45 caliber shootings in New Haven, including Kevin’s murder. It was all part of a plan, investigators say. They believe that Pan likely fired shots into those homes to ultimately mislead them, hoping that they would think Kevin’s murder was just another random shooting.
Det. Steve Cunningham: … he planned it … and he knew we’d be looking at these other things.
Det. David Zaweski: Yeah he did his best to … to mislead us.
Det. David Zaweski: Now we knew that, yes, this wasn’t a random incident out there … That he was targeted.
They also discovered that not long after Kevin’s murder, Pan called his parents, and they made a cash withdrawl of about $1,000.
William Gerace: They had tremendous assets somehow from Shanghai.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: Access to large sums of money … several million dollars.
The Marshals zeroed in on Pan’s parents and picked up a ping on their phone at a North Carolina gas station.
Det. Joe Galvan: Our task force … found it on — on the … on the ground.
The cellphone was crushed.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: Like a car ran over it.
Three days later, investigators caught up with Pan’s parents driving near Atlanta, Georgia.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: Georgia state police pulled them over.
Anne-Marie Green: He’s not in the vehicle.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: Nope.
Police told them they suspected their son had killed someone.
Anne-Marie Green: Were they shocked?
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: No.
Anne-Marie Green: They weren’t shocked that their son was being investigated in connection with the cold-blooded murder.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: They may have been, but they didn’t — they didn’t lead on to us at all. They didn’t lead on to us at all.
Det. Joe Galvan: The father said our son called, said he was in Connecticut and needed help. He asked us to bring cash. Then once we picked him up in Connecticut,he took the wheel. … they take this very long drive down south …
Pan’s father didn’t say why his son was heading that direction.
Det. Joe Galvan: And he says he is quiet, acting weird. Doesn’t really say what’s going on. … they make it down to Georgia and … he pulls over … and he gets out of the car and walks away. … he said, no words to them, just walked away from the car. … That was their story
Pan’s parents agreed to be photographed. Pan’s mother declined to answer any questons without an attorney, but she later volunteered that her son walked away from her and his father and likely killed himself. The Marshals were skeptical.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: We knew after talking to the parents that they would go to jail for him. … knowing the degree that the parents were helping him … And his resources, his intelligence, we had to take a different approach on it …
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: … we needed to focus in on the parents … they probably would lead us to him.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: … they would go to the ends of the earth to help support and hide him.
Anne-Marie Green: And what does that mean?
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: Patience.
And they would need plenty of it. Weeks went by without an arrest. They wondered if they missed something — and if their murder suspect had outmaneuvered them?
UNRAVELING QINXUAN PAN’S PLOT
Five weeks passed without a solid lead on the MIT student wanted for Kevin Jiang’s murder.
Anne-Marie Green: Can you give me a real sense of the pressure.
Det. Joe Galvan: Yeah, because this became so high profile so fast … it was — it was just heightened.
Then the manhunt for Pan suddenly heated up. Police said his mom told them she suspected her son killed himself. But they noticed his parents had a lot of banking activity.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: We start to see large sums of cash being withdrawn.
Anne-Marie Green: How much?
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: At that time it was about $5,000, $10,000.
Det. Joe Galvan: That’s a large sum of money that someone could use to get out the country.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: They still have family in China.
And then Pan’s parents rented a car.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: And they start traveling south again.
But the vehicle’s GPS system the Marshals were tracking went dark.
Anne-Marie Green: Did they turn it off?
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: It was disabled.
By then, investigators said they knew that their son had disabled GPS systems in several cars he drove in the runup to Kevin’s murder.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: Counter tactics.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: Counter tactics …
At one point, surveillance cameras at a Georgia mall recorded Pan’s father purchasing a computer.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: Now this is during COVID. So everybody has their masks on. … We see the father walk in. … And probably about 10 minutes later, we see an individual fitting the description of the son. … So, the story of the suicide out in the woods … that’s — that’s not true.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: So from there … the parents end up traveling back north and —
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: Once they’re in Connecticut, the GPS comes back on.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: We felt — we felt the clock was really ticking.
And it ticked away for nearly two more months until May 4, 2021, when Pan’s parents drove off for a third time. But there was a difference.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: They were traveling with another couple …
Anne-Marie Green: What do you think the deal was with the other couple?
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: Yeah, make it appear that it’s a regular trip … There’s no big deal, we’re just going on a trip, meet some friends … we’re not here to help our son.
Pan’s parents and their unwitting companions were eventually placed under surveillance at a North Carolina hotel, where Marshals interviewed a clerk after the Pans checked out.
Det. Joe Galvan: At one point … Quixuan Pan’s mother. … came to the clerk’s desk late at night and asked to borrow his phone.
This is a picture of Qinxuan Pan’s mother Hong Huang making the call at a Georgia hotel that broke the case wide open.
U.S. Marshals
Det. Joe Galvan: After she used his phone, she deleted the number from his phone.
Anne-Marie Green: Were you able to find that number?
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: Yes.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: We were.
The Marshals tracked the phone to a boarding house near the University of Alabama in Montgomery.
Anne-Marie Green: So, you guys are closing in —
Det. Joe Galvan: Yeah.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: They went there with a small army, around 20 guys … they ended up finding his room and they knocked on it and he just came out and said, I’m who you’re looking for.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: He had, uh, approximately $20,000 cash on him. He had his father’s passport … And he had had multiple communication devices on him.
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: Seven SIM cards —
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: Seven SIM cards and um —
Supervisory Marshal Matthew Duffy: — and the computer.
Pan was arrested for the murder of Kevin Jiang and brought back to Connecticut. He maintained his innocence, but a judge ordered him held on $20 million bond.
Deputy Marshal Kevin Perreault: Huge relief …
His case was delayed by the pandemic, but investigators had amassed a trove of evidence.
Remember that license plate imprint on Kevin’s car? Police say it matched the plate on the bumper of the SUV Pan was driving when Kevin was rear ended.
And forensic tests revealed that Pan’s DNA was on the gun and ammo found outside Arby’s…and Kevin’s blood was also on Pan’s hat, and on the gear shift of the SUV pan was driving the night Kevin was murdered.
Anne-Marie Green: Was there anything missing?
Stacey Miranda: The murder weapon.
Turns out, the gun recovered at the Arby’s was not the gun that was used to kill Kevin.
“Who knows where that murder weapon ended up,” said Supervisory Assistant State’s Attorney Stacey Miranda.
But there was so much other evidence that Pan’s lawyer William Gerace recommended he cut a deal.
William Gerace: Overwhelming evidence. Overwhelming evidence.
Qinxuan Pan was charged with Kevin Jiang’s murder, accepted a plea deal, and was sentenced in April 2024 to serve 35 years in prison.
U.S. Marshals
On Feb. 29, 2024, three years after Kevin’s killing, Pan pleaded guilty to his murder in exchange for serving 35 years in prison without parole.
Stacey Miranda: … and had he not been stuck on the railroad tracks, this still might not be a solved case. We might not know who did this.
At his sentencing in April, Pan sat silently as Kevin’s loved ones and friends described their loss. By court order, the camera was fixed on him. Some of Kevin’s mother’s remarks were read by a family friend.
ESTHER: I was dreaming that Kevin will have a few beautiful children after getting married. … this beautiful and joyful dream is destroyed. I am left alone by myself. … I will never see Kevin smile again. (emotional)
Then Kevin’s mother decided to speak.
LINDA LIU: To charge the murderer, Pan, 35 years in prison is too short and too light …
Qinxuan Pan, who sat with his head bowed during sentencing, looks up in court when Zion Perry rose to address him.
CBS News
Pan never explained why he killed Kevin, but the only time he looked up was when Zion Perry rose to speak.
ZION PERRY: I wanted to address Pan specifically. … Although your sentence ifs far less than you deserve … there is also mercy. May God have mercy on you. And may he have mercy on all of us.
Then Pan briefly addressed the court.
QINXUAN PAN: Your honor, um, what I’m thinking about is my action and the horrible consequences. … I feel sorry for what my actions caused and for everyone affected … I fully accept my penalties.
JUDGE HARMON: Court is gonna impose the agreed upon sentence of 35 years.
Finally, Judge Harmon passed sentence, and Pan was led away in handcuffs.
Anne-Marie Green: Did you ever consider charging his parents?
Stacey Miranda: We couldn’t charge them … because we couldn’t prove that they knew when they picked him up that he was — had committed a murder.
Anne-Marie Green: So they might be lucky that they didn’t find themselves charged as well.
Stacey Miranda: 100%.
“48 Hours” reached out to Pan’s parents for comment but did not hear back.
Now Kevin’s friends are left to wonder what Kevin, a man of deep faith, might have thought about his killer.
Anne-Marie Green: Do you think Kevin would’ve forgiven Pan?
Nasya Hubbard: Yes … I do.
Capt. Jamila Ayeh: Without a doubt.
Nasya Hubbard: Yeah.
The officers visited Kevin’s grave after they spoke to “48 Hours.” Hubbard recalled her first time there when she says she felt Kevin’s presence.
“He gave me a lot of joy,” Linda Liu said of her son.
Kevin Jiang/Instagram
Anne-Marie Green: And did something happen?
Nasya Hubbard: It’s just like wind blew, you know? And I was —
Anne-Marie Green: Did you feel like it was him?
Nasya Hubbard: Um, I felt like it was definitely different, as if like a peace kind of like, I want you to carry on, don’t be — don’t be sad that I’m gone. … Just keep going.
Qinxuan Pan is scheduled to be released in 2056, when he is 65 years old.
Produced by Murray Weiss. Emma Steele is the field producer. Elena DiFiore, Marc Goldbaum and David Dow are the development producers. Gary Winter and George Baluzy are the editors. Patti Aronofsky is the senior producer. Nancy Kramer is the executive story editor. Judy Tygard is the executive producer.
Tesla’s fading momentum may have less to do with its cars and more with its CEO’s politics. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
How did Tesla go from the world’s fastest-growing automaker to a company beleaguered by slowing sales and shrinking market share? According to a team of Yale researchers, the answer lies in the polarizing and partisan behavior of CEO Elon Musk.
Sure, Tesla has faced headwinds from aging models, rising competition, and a saturated customer base. But an analysis of county-level data shows that its declining demand is also linked to Musk’s increasingly political actions. The study’s authors estimate that Tesla would have sold between 1 million to 1.26 million more cars in recent years without what they call the “Musk partisan effect.”
During the most recent quarter, Tesla’s profit plunged 37 percent year-over-year. Revenue fell for two consecutive quarters this year. (The most recent quarter saw a rebound thanks to tax credits-fueled buying rush.)
The Yale researchers argue that much of Tesla’s decline stems from the alienation of its traditional consumer base. Drawing on vehicle registration data from S&P Global and county-level voting records, they found that Tesla’s customer base has long leaned Democratic and environmentally conscious.
That began to change in 2022, when Musk acquired X and rolled back content moderation policies. The shift deepened amid his involvement in the 2024 U.S. presidential election and his subsequent appointment as head of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Musk’s actions antagonized his most loyal customer base,” the authors wrote.
The trend has only grown more pronounced. Between October 2022 and April 2025, Musk’s partisan behavior caused Tesla to lose between 67 percent and 83 percent of its potential car sales, according to the study. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, that figure jumped to 150 percent.
Musk himself has acknowledged the backlash. During an April earnings call, he said his DOGE role had led to “blowback” and announced plans to scale back his time with the agency to refocus on Tesla.
The fallout hasn’t even benefited Tesla’s competitors. The study found that, absent Musk’s partisan behavior, sales of other EV and hybrid models would have been 17 to 22 percent lower over the past three years and 25 percent lower in early 2025, suggesting his actions helped rival automakers.
Musk’s controversies have also had unintended policy consequences, the researchers noted. In California, which aims for zero-emission vehicles to make up 25 percent of new sales by 2026, 68 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035, progress has stalled. The study estimates that without Musk’s partisan impact, California would have added 139,700 more EV sales in the first quarter of 2025. The reality is that California fell short by 28,000 vehicles in that quarter to stay on track.
This study highlights just how impactful a CEO’s partisan actions can be,” the authors concluded.
Fears are mounting of mass killings in the key Sudanese city of el-Fasher after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) captured it from government forces.
In a address on Monday evening, Sudan’s military chief Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said he had approved the withdrawal of troops in response to the “systematic destruction and killing of civilians”.
The UN said there were credible reports of “summary executions”, while Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab referred to satellite imagery of “piles of bodies executed en masse”.
The RSF has denied accusations of killing civilians and targeting non-Arab ethnic groups, despite evidence presented by the UN and human rights organisations.
The fall of el-Fasher in the Darfur region could mark a significant turning point in Sudan’s civil war, which has killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly 12 million people since April 2023.
RSF fighters had been besieging el-Fasher for 18 months, trapping hundreds of thousands of civilians in the city and sparking a hunger crisis.
Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab told the BBC that since the city was captured, satellite images have shown “piles of bodies executed en masse, or shot by snipers attempting to breach” the city’s perimeter wall.
And in a post on X, the research group’s executive director described his shock at being able to see “apparent pools of blood” via satellite imagery.
“The horror, scale, and velocity of killing happening now [is] unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a quarter century of doing this work,” Nathaniel Raymond said.
Similarly, a UN humanitarian team in Sudan said it was “horrified” by reports of atrocities like “summary executions”, attacks on civilians along escape routes, sexual violence and house-to-house raids.
The Joint Force, an alliance of Darfuri armed groups supporting the military, said 2,000 civilians had been killed since the city fell. There is no independent confirmation of this.
Meanwhile, residents who managed to flee el-Fasher have told the BBC they are fearful and distressed after losing contact with relatives still stuck in the city.
One man said several of his relatives were “massacred”, but he has not been able to contact any surviving members of his family as communication lines have been cut since the RSF took over.
“They were gathered in one place and all killed. Now we have no idea what has happened to those who are still alive,” he said.
On Tuesday, the European Union said it wanted “all warring parties to de-escalate” the conflict, while the African Union condemned “alleged war crimes and ethnically targeted killings of civilians”.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said the only hospital still functioning, albeit partially, in el-Fasher was attacked on Sunday.
A nurse was reportedly killed in the assault, it added.
UN head Antonio Guterres said he was “gravely concerned” over the current situation in the city, and condemned the reported “violations of international humanitarian law”.
On Monday, after confirming the army had withdrawn from el-Fasher, Sudanese military chief Gen Burhan denounced inaction by the international community to end the RSF’s atrocities and vowed to fight “until this land is purified”.
“We can turn the tables every time, and we can return every land desecrated by these traitors to the nation’s fold,” he said.
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[Getty Images/BBC]
Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.
The annual ranking evaluates over 1,700 colleges across the country by using 17 factors to measure academic quality and graduate success, including cost of attendance, graduation rate and student-faculty ratio.
In this year’s ranking, Yale University represented Connecticut in the top 10, finishing in a tie for fourth place with Stanford University.
Here’s why.
Why Yale University is a top college
Yale University view, New Haven, Connecticut, United States
According to U.S. News & World Report, Yale placed fourth for its prestigious 4% acceptance rate, its 5:1 student-faculty ratio and its value, with an average salary of $81,765 six years after graduation. In fact, Yale ranked third overall for best value school, just one place behind its longtime rival Harvard.
Yale also ranked sixth for undergraduate research and eighth for undergraduate teaching, with its economics program tying for second-best in the country.
If you’d been a die-hard football fan in Philly in the early 20th century — attending games at Franklin Field — you would have almost certainly not expected to spend Sunday’s routing for an NFL Franchise.
It would be 1924 before Philadelphia actually had an NFL Team and another eight years before the Eagles.
Philly still has the oldest stadium in operation today: Franklin Field.
Dating back to April 1895, Franklin Field first opened as a location for 5,000 fans to see the Penn Relays. No college football stadium in America has seen more.
On Friday night — in a college football matchup that was first played one hundred and forty-five years ago in 1879 and then renewed again after 1893 — Yale played the University of Penn. Yale has the lead in the series 51–37–1 and won the game 31–10 while stifling Penn’s offense. Quarterback Aiden Sayin left the game with an injury in the first quarter, giving way to Liam O’Brien and freshman Karson Siqueiros-Lasky.
PHOTO: William Bretzger/Delaware News Journal/USA TODAY NETWORK/Imagn Images
For Garnett Valley High School football standout and Glen Mills, PA native Shane Reynolds — playing football for the Naval Academy isn’t just a chance to play — it’s a chance to serve; until this week — the Navy and Army were both ranked for the first time since 1960 and undefeated in football — a feat that hasn’t been done since 1945. While Army sat idol after a 45–28 win last week against East Carolina — #24 Navy was throttled by #12 Notre Dame — and saw Philly native Shane Reynolds gain only six yards of offense.
If you were a young football fan in Philly, you may have witnessed the 1899 Army-Navy Game at Franklin Field.
The City that’s hosted the most meetings of the last regular-season college football games each year?
“Energies” is an international group exhibition at the Swiss Institute and numerous partner locations in the surrounding East Village community. Photo Daniel Perez
At a time when the climate crisis dominates public discourse but concrete solutions remain elusive, a new exhibition, “Energies,” at the Swiss Institute in New York revisits a pivotal history of community-driven sustainability actions that made a real impact in the neighborhood. The exhibition centers on an episode from the 1973 oil crisis when the city’s first equity co-op at 519 W 11th Street installed a two-kilowatt wind turbine paired with solar panels. This setup not only powered the building but also fed electricity back to the grid in a moment of continuous power cuts. Con Edison (ED), seeing this as a challenge to its almost absolute monopoly, threatened legal action, but with support from the Attorney General, the co-op unexpectedly won the case. This victory forced all utility companies to accept decentralized energy production, reshaping the rules for energy generation.
“We felt it was very visionary, not only for the time, but also being in this very urban context of New York, of the Lower East Side, or what is now known as the East Village,” Stefanie Hessler, one of the exhibition’s curators, told Observer. Hessler, alongside the team at the Swiss Institute, found people involved with this history and unearthed extensive documentation, including lawsuit files and letters from Con Edison, which, as she notes, “made concessions, but reluctantly.”
Through archival materials and works by various artists displayed at the Swiss Institute and offsite locations, the exhibition fosters an open dialogue on potential solutions to the current ecological and energy crisis. It also highlights the power of community-driven initiatives. As Hessler recounted, “One person, an architect named Travis Price, was invited to testify before Congress, which helped generate the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act.” She was struck by how this group of activists—comprising recent graduates from Yale and MIT in fields like engineering, architecture, and urban planning—managed to enact meaningful change across the United States.
The exhibition also explores the complex intersections between green energy and social justice, featuring historical works and new commissions that examine the socio-political implications of ecological and energy issues at both local and global levels.
In 1973, during the oil crisis, residents of the sweat equity co-op at 519 E 11th Street installed a groundbreaking two-kilowatt wind turbine, providing electricity and lighting for the community amid widespread power outages. Photo Travis Prince
Atop the Swiss Institute, Haroon Mirza’s large solar panel sculpture echoes the 1970s energy experiment by powering other works in the exhibition, including Méret Oppenheim’s semi-permanent audio installation and Ash Arder’s ephemeral butter-based sculpture housed in a refrigerator. The piece alludes to the Dyson sphere, a sci-fi concept from 1937 describing a massive sphere in space that harvests vast amounts of solar energy, reflecting speculative approaches to reimagining not just technology but its application.
“Energies” spans local and global concerns, addressing energy inequalities tied to socio-economic dependencies. Jean Katambayi Mukendi’s Afrolampe (2021) highlights the disparity in energy access, using the example of Lumbashi, a copper-rich city that suffers frequent power outages while its resources are funneled to the Global North for renewable energy production, even as Africa deals with insufficient energy provision. Similarly, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, a vocal advocate for Peru’s Indigenous culture and well-known for her works tracking the impact of natural resource exploitation on different social groups, explores the devastating effects of foreign mining policies in her two-channel video Yacimientos (2013), which documents the long-term environmental degradation and social displacement caused by U.S. extractivist practices.
“It was important for us to look both at a very local history and context, the one that we are in at Swiss Institute and to extend outward and connect to other geographies and locals as well,” Hessler said. The relations between industrialization, global trade and energy consumption and disruption are further explored in Liu Chuang’s single-channel video Untitled (The Festival), which portrays the rapid decline of Dongguan, China’s “world’s factory,” as it shifts from traditional manufacturing to high-tech electronics and A.I., with the artist metaphorically depicting its return to primordial energy sources like fire amid abandoned factories. Vibeke Mascini’s provocative installation Instar (2024) makes the energy generated from burning confiscated cocaine and crystal meth in Rotterdam perceptible, critically examining the links between extractive economies and their geopolitical impacts.
“Energies” explores global energy-related issues through a lens rooted in local history. Photo Daniel Perez
Some artists in the show advocate for a return to Indigenous technologies, seeing them as a more sustainable and symbiotic alternative to current development models. Joar Nango, an architect and artist of Sámi descent, exemplifies this with his installation Skievvar #2 (2024), a structure made of translucent, dried halibut stomachs, a material traditionally used by Sámi communities for its insulating properties in construction. Sharing this belief in ancestral technologies, Cannupa Hanska Luger presents his water shields, first created for a performance supporting the Standing Rock water protectors, used as a peaceful form of protest to defend land. According to Hessler, Hanska Luger plans to further explore this project in the exhibition, placing additional shields around Mirza’s solar panel as a speculative way to “amplify” the captured energy. “He proposed using mirror shields to share energy across the neighborhood’s rooftops. This is a speculative project, it wouldn’t work, but I love how artists make us think differently about what might be possible. Cannupa suggests that a more communal approach to energy creation could reshape how we view building ownership and who can generate energy. It’s a very speculative but also very positive approach.” The Lower East Side Art Center is currently working on developing Hanska Luger’s proposal.
One of the most inspiring aspects of this exhibition is how it extends beyond the Swiss Institute, potentially engaging public spaces and connecting this rich recent history to present-day communities still fighting for these causes. The show also features seminal works by pioneers of “institutional critique” art, such as Gordon Matta-Clark, including drawings from his Energy Tree project, which eventually led him to plant a rosebush in an enclosure at St. Mark’s Church as a gesture of land regeneration. To commemorate the exhibition, a new rosebush has been replanted at the original site. “We found the enclosure, but the rosebush was gone, so we replanted it in the churchyard, and we’re also exhibiting his original drawings alongside his 1976 proposal for a Resource Center and Environmental Youth he made for the John for the Lower East Side in 1976, to show his involvement and activation of the neighborhood,” Hessler explained.
Otobong Nkanga, Social Consequences I: Segregation – Encroaching Barricade – Entangled – Endangered Species – Rationed Measures – Intertwined.Photo Daniel Perez
One of the major large-scale projects involving the neighborhood, and specifically the current residents of the building where the original co-op community at 519 E 11th Street once stood, is a mural conceived by internationally celebrated artist Otobong Nkanga, titled Social Consequences I: Segregation – Encroaching Barricade – Entangled – Endangered Species – Rationed Measures – Intertwined (2009-2024). “We had a lot of conversations with everybody to ensure that what their needs were and what they felt they wanted was being met,” said Hessler. “Eventually, together with the artist, we proposed this mural, and I loved it.” In keeping with Nkanga’s practice, which often reveals complex systems of interdependencies, the mural presents a diagrammatic scheme illustrating the existential links between human systems and nature.
This is just one of many interventions and initiatives in this rich exhibition program, presented in partnership with various local organizations. Another is the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in a squat on Avenue C, also known as Lozada Avenue, which organized an exhibition documenting neighborhood activism in terms of environmental justice in the neighborhood. “Then there’s another location, the Loizada Inc, a Puerto Rican community center, and their exhibition Equilibrium is about citizen engagement and activation of environmental knowledge building in the neighborhood,” Hessler added. “I think it’s essential to acknowledge this and the existing community. A whole symposium and public program are happening throughout the fall, and the program is ongoing. It’s all on our website, and there’s a map in the booklet distributed at the exhibition.”
“Energies” is on view at the Swiss Institute through January 5th, 2025. The entire program is also available on the Swiss Institute website.
Award-winning legendary film and television actress and director Angela Bassett (above) received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree during Spelman College’s 137th Commencement exercises Sunday afternoon in College Park. Photo by Julia Beverly/The Atlanta Voice
COLLEGE PARK, Ga. – The woman behind the podium answered her own question immediately after she asked it to the room full of Spelman College soon-to-be graduates.
She said, “Could the day be any more glorious and could you be anymore beautiful?’” She answered, “I think not.”
Multi-time award-winning actress and director Angela Bassett, star of stage and screen, delivered the commencement speech during the 2024 Spelman College graduation exercises on Sunday afternoon in College Park. The exercises took place inside the Georgia International Convention Center.
Upon taking the stage to immense applause following an introduction by Spelman College President Dr. Helene D. Gayle, Bassett had the crowd in the palm of her hands. Her many messages to the graduating class of 2024 ranged from recounting her youth in St. Petersburg, Florida and the empowerment and high expectations for excellence that her mother had set for her and sisters to keeping your head high out in the world after you walk across the stage as a Spelman College graduate.
“There will be times when you may feel like the unnamed Black women, this is especially true when you come across people in your work place and in your community, and your own home, who may not see your full humanity and all of your glory. But it’s in those moments that I want you to remember who you are, raise your head and embody the queen that you have been prepared to be.”
A graduate of Yale University and the school’s School of Drama, Bassett made a point of emphasizing using the education that the graduates received at Spelman College, while also following their dreams. She told a story about seeing a play while in high school on a trip to Washington D.C., being moved and knowing at that moment that she wanted to make people feel the way she felt when she watched people perform the arts.
She would go on to begin her acting career at a local theater in her hometown, go on to Yale and when she told people she would be pursuing acting she recalled a not so positive response from some of them.
Angela Bassett. Photo by Julia Beverly/The Atlanta Voice
“I was supposed to go to law school, or become a scientist, or a doctor,” she said. “Anything but an artist.” During the early portions of her career she told the graduates, their families, and the Spelman faculty assembled in the room that she worked “odd jobs” in between acting auditions. The message: All of those little steps got her to where she is today.
“Every single opportunity matters,” she explained.
Bassett, a wife and mother who is preparing to begin the collegiate journey with her children, called Spelman College “the Mecca of Black excellence and Black womanhood. She even took a moment to compare it to a fictional country from one of the more popular movies she starred in.
“Spelman College is the higher education equivalent of Wakanda,” Bassett said to thundering applause. “This special place has prepared you for greatness” and “When the world tells you to be quiet, speak up.”
She closed her time on stage with, “Your tomorrow starts today.”
Actress and director Angela Bassett (not shown) and Supreme Court Justice Dr. Kentaji Brown Jackson (center) were awarded honorary degrees during the commencement exercises on Sunday, May 19, 2024. Photo by Julia Beverly/The Atlanta Voice
Bassett and Supreme Court Justice Dr. Kentaji Brown Jackson were awarded honorary degrees. Bassett received a Doctor of Fine Arts degree and Brown Jackson received Doctor of Laws. WABE personality and the host of “Closer Look” Rose Scott was also honored. She was awarded the National Community Service Award which is given by the Spelman College Board of Trustees.
The invocation was delivered by The Reverend Dr. Neichelle Guidry, Dean of Chapel at Spelman College. During the prayer Guidry spoke of the graduates being in this place at this time to honor God.
“We are gathered in this place at this appointed time to say thank you,” she said. “You have been present God.”
Guidry would also deliver the benediction before the recessional ended the exercises.
Yale University on Thursday said it is reversing a pandemic-era policy that made standardized test scores like the SAT exam optional for applicants, joining other top colleges such as Dartmouth and MIT.
In a statement posted to its website, Yale said it is abandoning the test-optional approach that it began four years ago, when the pandemic shut down testing centers and made it difficult for many high school juniors and seniors to sit for the exams. Many other colleges became test-optional for the same reason.
Yale accepted about 4.5% of applicants last year, making it one of the nation’s most selective universities.
At the same time, standardized exams such as the SAT have come under fire from critics who point out that higher scores are correlated with wealth, meaning that richer children tend to score higher than poorer ones, partly as high-income families can pay for tutoring, test prep and other boosts. But Yale said it decided to reverse its test-optional policy after finding that it may actually hurt the chances of lower-income applicants to gain admissions.
“This finding will strike many as counterintuitive,” Yale said in its post.
During its test-optional admissions, applicants could still submit scores if they wished, but weren’t required to do so. Yale found that its officers put greater weight on other parts of the application besides scores, a shift that the university found “frequently worked to the disadvantage of applicants from lower socioeconomic backgrounds,” it noted.
The reason is due to the fact that students from wealthy school districts or private schools could include other signals of achievement, such as AP classes or other advanced courses, Yale said.
In contrast, students from schools without deep resources “quickly exhaust the available course offerings, leaving only two or three rigorous classes in their senior year schedule,” Yale noted. “With no test scores to supplement these components, applications from students attending these schools may leave admissions officers with scant evidence of their readiness for Yale.”
Providing a standardized test score, even one that’s lower than the median SAT range for Yale students, can give Yale admissions officers confidence that these applicants can succeed at the school, it added.
Yale said its new policy will require that students submit scores, although they can opt to report Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exam scores instead of the ACT or SAT.
Does wealth gain access?
The decisions of Yale, Dartmouth and MIT to require SAT or ACT scores come amid a debate about the fairness of admissions at the nation’s top universities.
Last year, the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college admission decisions, effectively ending the use of race as a basis for consideration in whether to accept an applicant. At the same time, critics have pointed out that top universities often provide advantages to certain types of students who tend to be wealthy or connected, such as the children of alumni who have an edge over other applicants through legacy admissions.
The “Ivy plus” colleges — the eight Ivy League colleges along with MIT, Stanford, Duke and University of Chicago — accept children from families in the top 1% at more than double the rate of students in any other income group with similar SAT or ACT scores, an analysis found last year.
There’s a reason why so many people are focused on the admissions policies of Yale and other top colleges: the Ivy-plus universities have collectively produced more than 4 in 10 U.S. presidents and 1 in 8 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
For its part, Yale said its research has found that test scores are the single best predictor of a student’s grades at the university, even after controlling for income and other demographic data.
Still, the school added that it will continue to examine other parts of a student’s application, noting, “Our applicants are not their scores, and our selection process is not an exercise in sorting students by their performance on standardized exams.”
Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.
Newswise — New Haven, Conn. — The immense popularity of electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, among young people has led many policymakers to restrict the sale of flavored varieties. But rather than nudging people away from “vapes,” as these e-cigarettes are called, such measures could backfire by driving users to instead buy conventional cigarettes, a much more dangerous product, according to researchers at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH).
In a large-scale, long-term analysis of policies and sales data, the researchers found that for every 0.7 milliliters of “e-liquid” (the consumable content inside e-cigarettes, also known as vape juice) that goes unsold due to flavor restrictions, 15 additional traditional cigarettes are sold. The substitution was especially evident among cigarette brands popular with young people aged 20 and under, suggesting that flavor restrictions may increase smoking among youth as well as adults.
The results suggest that this type of policy, which is intended to curb nicotine-related harms, may instead magnify them.
“While neither smoking nor vaping is entirely safe, current evidence indicates substantively greater health harm from smoking than vaping nicotine products,” said first author Abigail S. Friedman, an associate professor in the YSPH Department of Health Policy & Management. “These policies’ public health costs may outweigh their benefits.”
Tempting flavors While randomized clinical trials show that e-cigarettes can be effective tools for quitting smoking, their availability in a wide range of flavors such as strawberry banana, breakfast cereal, lemonade, bubblegum, and cheesecake can make them especially tempting to youth.
A 2019 outbreak of vaping-associated lung injuries led to thousands of hospitalizations and at least 68 deaths. While the outbreak’s primary cause was eventually identified as an additive most common in cannabis vaping products, its initial attribution to e-cigarettes — as well as worries that nicotine e-cigarettes may be an on-ramp to youth tobacco use — led hundreds of localities in the U.S. to restrict the sale of flavored vapes.
Previous studies of such policies have mostly examined local or temporary post-2019 state policies. The Yale study was the first to assess how flavor restrictions across most of the United States influence sales of both vapes and cigarettes.
Laws and consequences The authors used rigorous statistical tools to estimate long-term effects of e-cigarette flavor restrictions on electronic and conventional cigarette sales in jurisdictions across 16 states. They also examined how these effects varied between brands disproportionately used by underage youth versus adults.
The authors first created a comprehensive database of tobacco product flavor prohibition and restriction laws across the United States, including both state and local statutes. They reviewed each policy to identify which tobacco products were covered —including vapes, cigars, and conventional cigarettes — which flavors were restricted, when the policies would take effect, and any exemptions for certain types of businesses, such as adult-only tobacco stores.
They compared this information against vape and cigarette sales data over four-week intervals from January 2018 through March 2023, a period during which flavor restrictions went from affecting 1.3% of the U.S. population to affecting 38%. The sales data came from ordinary brick-and-mortar establishments like gas stations, groceries, and convenience stores. Statistical analyses took into account a host of other factors that may affect tobacco product sales, such as concurrent restrictions on flavored cigar and menthol cigarette sales, tax rates, cannabis availability, and unemployment rates.
The primary outcome of interest was volume sales of conventional cigarettes and e-cigarettes per capita, during each four-week period, both overall and by type of flavor. Cigarette volumes are measured in packs, while e-cigarettes are standardized to 0.7-milliliter units, given past industry claims that one 0.7-milliliter vape pod is equivalent to 20 conventional cigarettes, or one pack.
These methods had limitations. Sales data did not include e-cigarette sales made online, in vape shops, or via illicit markets. However, the data did capture most sales of conventional cigarettes. While the study was not a randomized experiment, the analytical methods used were robust enough to identify causal relationships.
Swapping cigarettes for vapes During the study period, hundreds of localities and seven states restricted or prohibited flavored e-cigarette sales. While these policies did reduce per-capita vape sales, they also substantially boosted cigarette sales.
For each 0.7 milliliters of e-cigarette e-liquid not sold due to these policies, the authors calculated that 15 additional cigarettes were purchased. Similar results emerged when they excluded individual states with statewide policies from the analysis, showing that no one state was driving this effect. Bans on all vapes, including both flavored and unflavored, also resulted in more cigarette sales.
Of the increase in cigarette sales, 71% were of non-menthol cigarettes, suggesting that restrictions on menthol cigarettes would not counteract this effect.
Where e-cigarette flavor restrictions had been in effect for at least a year, sales of cigarette brands favored by adults went up by 10%, while sales of cigarette brands that disproportionately attract underage smokers saw a 20% bump.
In light of these results, policymakers might want to consider other approaches to protect public health where tobacco is concerned, the authors wrote in the study.
“Some leading scholars have advocated for regulating tobacco products proportionate to their risk,” they wrote. “This approach would avoid giving more lethal combustible products [such as cigarettes] a competitive advantage over less lethal alternatives…[and] could mean more flavors being available in [vapes] than cigarettes.”
The authors report that they have no conflicts of interest. The research was funded by National Institutes of Health awards from the National Cancer Institute and Food and Drug Administration, as well as the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Newswise — New Haven, Conn. — Music can take on many forms in cultures across the globe, but Yale researchers have found in a new study that some themes are universally recognizable by people everywhere with one notable exception — love songs.
“All around the world, people sing in similar ways,” said senior author Samuel Mehr, who splits his time between the Yale Child Study Center, where he is an assistant professor adjunct, and the University of Auckland, where he is senior lecturer in psychology. “Music is deeply rooted in human social interaction.”
For the new study, published Sept. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Yale researchers played 14-second snippets of vocals from a bank of songs that originated from a host of cultures to more than 5,000 people from 49 countries. The research team included subjects not only from the industrialized world, but more than 100 individuals who live in three small, relatively isolated groups of no more than 100.
They then asked the listeners to rank the likelihood of each sample as being one of four music types: dance, lullabies, “healing” music, or love music.
Unlike most psychology experiments, which are conducted in one language, this experiment was performed in 31 languages. Yet regardless of the language used in the survey, people from all cultures could easily identify dance music, lullabies, and, to a lesser extent, even music created to heal. Recognition of what the researchers identified as love songs, however, lagged these other categories.
For instance, when we they analyzed responses based on language groupings, they found that 27 of the 28 groups correctly rated dance songs as more appropriate for dancing than other songs. All 28 of the groups were able to identify lullabies. But only 12 of the 28 groups were able to identify love songs.
Why the difficulty in identifying musical themes about love?
“One reason for this could be that love songs may be a particularly fuzzy category that includes songs that express happiness and attraction, but also sadness and jealousy,” said lead author Lidya Yurdum, who works as research assistant at the Yale Child Study Center and is also a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam. “Listeners who heard love songs from neighboring countries and in languages related to their own actually did a little better, likely because of the familiar linguistic and cultural clues.”
But other than love songs, the authors discovered, the listeners’ “ratings were largely accurate, consistent with one another, and not explained by their linguistic or geographical proximity to the singer — showing that musical diversity is underlain by universal psychological phenomena.”
“Our minds have evolved to listen to music. It is not a recent invention,” Yurdum said. “But if we only study songs from the western world and listeners from the western world, we can only draw conclusions about the western world — not humans in general.”
Newswise — Two to three weeks after conception, an embryo faces a critical point in its development. In the stage known as gastrulation, the transformation of embryonic cells into specialized cells begins. This initiates an explosion of cellular diversity in which the embryonic cells later become the precursors of future blood, tissue, muscle, and more types of cells, and the primitive body axes start to form. Studying this process in the human-specific context has posed significant challenges to biologists, but new research offers an unprecedented window into this point in time in human development.
A recent strategy to combat these challenges is to model embryo development using stem cell technologies, with many valuable approaches emerging from research groups across the globe. But embryos don’t grow in isolation and most previous developmental models have lacked crucial supporting tissues for embryonic growth. A groundbreaking model that includes both embryonic and extraembryonic components will allow researchers to study how these two parts interact around gastrulation stages—providing a unique look at the molecular and cellular processes that occur, and offering potential new insights into why pregnancies can fail as well as the origins of congenital disorders. The team, including Berna Sozen, PhD, and Zachary Smith, PhD, both assistant professors of genetics at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), published its findings in Nature on [tk].
“This work is extremely important as it provides an ethical approach to understand the earliest stages of human growth,” says Valentina Greco, PhD, the Carolyn Walch Slayman Professor of Genetics at YSM and incoming president-elect of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), who was not involved in the study. “This stem cell model provides an excellent alternative to start to understand aspects of our own early development that is normally hidden within the mother’s body.”
“The Sozen and Smith groups have achieved a milestone in developing in vitro models to study the earliest stages of human development that are unfeasible yet so important for understanding health and disease,” says Haifan Lin, PhD, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Cell Biology, director of the Yale Stem Cell Center, and president of ISSCR. “I commend their exceptional accomplishment as well as their sensitivity to ethical issues by limiting the model’s ability to develop further”
The ethical questions are profound, including whether these models have the potential to develop into human beings. Sozen, the principal investigator of the study, emphasizes that they do not. The published paper demonstrates that this model lacks trophectodermal cells, which are required for an embryo to implant in the uterus. Sozen says this model also represents a developmental stage beyond the time frame in which embryos can implant. “It is very important to focus on the fact that our model cannot grow further or implant and therefore is not considered a human embryo,” she says. But as a reductionist strategy to mimic and study aspects of natural development, its potential is immense, especially where universal guidelines severely limit scientists’ ability to study actual embryos.
New Model Contains Embryonic and Extraembryonic Tissues
All embryos have two components—embryonic and extraembryonic. The tissues we have now in our adult bodies grew from the embryonic component. The extraembryonic component includes the tissues that offer nutritional and other support, such as the placenta and yolk sac. The majority of previous embryo models of developmental stages around gastrulation were single-tissue models that only contained the embryonic component.
In the new study, the Yale-led team grew embryonic stem cells in vitro in the lab to generate their new model. They transferred these cells into a 3D culture system and exposed them to a conditions which stimulated the cells to spontaneously self-organize and differentiate. The cells diverged into two lineages—embryonic and extraembryonic precursors. The extraembryonic cells in this model were precursors for the yolk sac. The researchers grew these cellular lineages in the culture for approximately one week and analyzed how they guided each other as they developed. “We started looking into very mechanistic details, such as what signals they are giving each other and how specific genes are impacting one another,” says Sozen. “This has been limited in the literature previously.”
The Need for Models of Human Development
While researchers have learned a great deal from embryos of other species such as mouse, the lack of accessibility to human embryos has left significant knowledge gaps about our development. “If you want to understand human development, you need to look at the human system,” says Sozen. “This work is really important because it’s giving us direct information about our own species.” Not only does this model give access into the human gastrulation window, but will also allow for a greater quantity of research. The ability to generate as many as thousands of these models will allow for mass analysis that is not possible with human embryos. “I’m one scientist with one vision,” says Sozen. “But thinking about what other scientists are envisioning globally and what we can all accomplish is just really, really exciting to me.”
The new model has over 70% efficiency—in other words, the stem cells aggregate correctly over roughly 70% of the time. As noted by the authors, there are some limitations to the strategy, and it is challenging to benchmark some findings against the natural embryo itself. Sozen hopes to continue to work on the models so that they become more standardized in the future.
The team believes the models will transform scientists’ knowledge around human developmental biology. In their latest publication, the team explored some of the molecular paths underlying human gastrulation onset. In future studies, they hope to delve even deeper into the developmental pathways, including whether pregnancy loss and congenital disorders may stem from failures during gastrulation stages. Sozen believes her model can be used to look at some of these disorders and learn more about what is going awry. “Previous model systems have been able to look at this, but our model is unique because it has this extra tissue that allows us to analyze a bit deeper,” she says.
U.S. News & World Report published its law- and medical-school rankings on Thursday after several delays and a boycott of the magazine’s data gathering.
Over this past fall and winter, a fleet of law and medical schools announced they would no longer cooperate with U.S. News’s rankings efforts. Often they cited “perverse incentives” that the rankings created — for example, to admit more privileged students, who have lower debt loads and higher test scores. The publication of this year’s rankings shows the impact of the law-school boycott: U.S. News unveiled details of a new methodology that now places much more emphasis on graduates’ employment and much less on a school’s reputation.
This year’s lists also offer a hint of how widespread the rankings revolt was. Seventeen medical schools and 62 law schools — nearly a third of the law schools U.S. News ranks — didn’t turn in data to the magazine this year. (It’s not clear what nonparticipation rates have been in the past. Reached by email to request historical context, a spokesperson for U.S. News pointed to webpages that are no longer online. U.S. News ranked law and medical schools that didn’t cooperate this year by using publicly available and past survey data.)
Despite the upheavals, one important aspect of the rankings remained almost the same. The membership of the top 14 law schools, considered in the field to be the most prestigious, was similar to previous years’, though some institutions swapped places. It was the middle of the list that saw big swings in fortunes. All law schools that rose or fell by more than 20 places were ranked well below the top 14, according to an analysis by Law.com.
The schools whose placement changed drastically and those that didn’t, which schools cooperated with U.S. News and which didn’t — all underscored power dynamics among the schools themselves, inequalities that rankings reinforce. Here are three takeaways from this year’s law list and what they say about the rankings enterprise.
The law schools that opted out clustered at certain places on the list. Of the 15 top-ranked law schools, all but one, the University of Chicago, declined to provide data this year. Several schools at the bottom of the list also didn’t return U.S. News’s survey. In the middle, opt-outs were scarcer.
That pattern reflects the schools’ relationships with the rankings, based on their position on the list. Top schools aren’t thought to “need” U.S. News. “Their reputations are bigger than the rankings,” Michael Sauder, a sociologist at the University of Iowa and co-author of the book Engines of Anxiety: Educational Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability, said in a previous interview. “No one’s going to question that Yale is a good law school.” Midlist schools, by contrast, “rely more on the rankings to solidify their reputations.”
We decided it was better for the school to ensure that they had the most accurate information that we could provide.
Antony Page, dean of Florida International University’s law school, said he agreed with many common arguments against the rankings, including that they hampered the legal field’s efforts to open opportunities to lower-income students. Still, he submitted data this year. “We decided it was better for the school to ensure that they had the most accurate information that we could provide,” he said. Florida International rose 38 places, to No. 60, and advertised that fact on its website.
“We are a relatively new law school,” Page said. Its first J.D.s graduated in 2005. “There are still people out there that don’t know about this public law school in south Florida. We benefit from any additional attention.”
Meanwhile, at the bottom of the list, Malik C. Edwards, dean of the North Carolina Central University School of Law, said he hadn’t participated in the last three years, because he didn’t see it as worth his time. It wouldn’t be good for the school, either, he said. One straightforward way to rise in the law rankings is to increase the average LSAT scores of incoming students, which used to form 11 percent of the ranking score. (It’s now 5 percent.) But, Edwards said: “If you just increase the LSAT, it’s going to exclude people who we know, from experience, can successfully complete law school, can pass the bar, and can become practitioners.”
He was concerned about a statistic that suggests about half of African American applicants don’t get into law school anywhere. He didn’t want North Carolina Central, a historically Black institution, to become more selective in pursuit of a higher ranking.
The top 14 law schools stayed nearly the same. Historically, U.S. News rankings were designed to change only modestly year to year. Editors feared large shifts “could have undermined the credibility of the project,” Alvin P. Sanoff, an early and influential editor, wrote in 2007. Keeping the most scrutinized part of the law-school list — the top 14 — largely the same reflects that dedication to stability.
In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that Robert Morse, U.S. News’s lead data analyst on the higher-education rankings, told an audience of law-school administrators that the data team didn’t commit to a methodology ahead of time. Instead, analysts ran several scenarios and saw what different hypothetical lists looked like before deciding on a method, which contradicts the usual process in social science. But that practice at U.S. News appears to have a precedent. Sanoff wrote that when U.S. News revamped its undergraduate-program methodology in 1996, editors “pretested the change in weights to make sure that it would not produce an upheaval.”
“Our expert data team is always modeling to determine the impact of new metrics and data outliers,” Eric J. Gertler, U.S. News’s chief executive officer, told The Wall Street Journal. “We never adjust our methodology to prioritize one school over another in our rankings.”
Did the rankings protest help right inequities in law education? That was the point of the boycott. Did it work?
It did and it didn’t, Edwards said. On the one hand, top law schools’ criticisms of U.S. News helped draw public attention to points that law deans had long made to one another, and drove real change in the methodology. On the other hand, problems persist.
Except for Howard University, no historically Black college or university’s law school ever ranks outside of the unnumbered bottom, Edwards said. But this year, U.S. News decided to give numerical ranks to the top 90 percent of law schools, instead of just the top 75 percent, as was the practice before. North Carolina Central, previously part of the undifferentiated lowest quartile, this year got a rank: No. 175.
Press materials from the magazine said that giving numbered ranks to more law schools was a move toward transparency. For Edwards, it presented a new worry. Seeing that number, he thought: OK, should I start playing the rankings game?
“For me, it’s not something I want to do,” he said. But he thought the leaders of other law schools might feel differently.
Newswise — New Haven, Conn. — When new COVID-19 vaccines were first administered two years ago, public health officials found an increase in cases of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, particularly among young males who had been vaccinated with mRNA vaccines. It was unclear, however, what exactly was causing this reaction.
In a new study, Yale scientists have identified the immune signature of these heart inflammation cases.
These findings, published May 5 in the journal Science Immunology, rule out some of the theorized causes of the heart inflammation and suggest potential ways to further reduce the incidence of a still rare side effect of vaccination, the authors say.
Myocarditis is a generally mild inflammation of heart tissue which can cause scarring but is usually resolved within days. The increased incidence of myocarditis during vaccination was seen primarily in males in their teens or early 20s, who had been vaccinated with mRNA vaccines, which are designed to elicit immune responses specifically to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), among males aged 12 to 17, about 22 to 36 per 100,000 experienced myocarditis within 21 days after receiving a second vaccine dose. Among unvaccinated males in this age group, the incidence of myocarditis was 50.1 to 64.9 cases per 100,000 after infection with the COVID-19 virus.
For the new study, the Yale research team conducted a detailed analysis of immune system responses in those rare cases of myocarditis among vaccinated individuals. The team was led by Carrie Lucas, associate professor of immunobiology, Akiko Iwasaki, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology, and Inci Yildirim, associate professor of pediatrics and epidemiology.
They found that the heart inflammation was not caused by antibodies created by the vaccine, but rather by a more generalized response involving immune cells and inflammation.
“The immune systems of these individuals get a little too revved up and over-produce cytokine and cellular responses,” Lucas said.
Earlier research had suggested that increasing the time between vaccination shots from four to eight weeks may reduce risk of developing myocarditis.
Lucas noted that, according to CDC findings, the risk of myocarditis is significantly greater in unvaccinated individuals who contract the COVID-19 virus than in those who receive vaccines. She emphasized that vaccination offers the best protection from COVID-19-related disease.
“I hope this new knowledge will enable further optimizing mRNA vaccines, which, in addition to offering clear health benefits during the pandemic, have a tremendous potential to save lives across numerous future applications,” said Anis Barmada, an M.D./Ph.D. student at Yale School of Medicine, who is a co-first author of the paper with Jon Klein, also a Yale M.D./Ph.D. student.
After the rulings are handed down in sexual-misconduct lawsuits against colleges, a second legal battle quietly begins.
Determining who pays the legal fees and settlements — which, in the most sweeping cases, can total hundreds of millions of dollars — often leads to behind-the-scenes squabbles as colleges and their insurance carriers parse general liability policies.
That tension is playing out between Baylor University and Lexington Insurance Company, which sued in January to stop covering claims against the university in a vast sexual-assault scandal.
In higher education, insurers and institutions have typically been a united front: Colleges pay premiums, carriers pay up after a crisis. Now, cracks in the relationship are forming, especially as more sexual-misconduct lawsuits are lodged and settlements grow larger. Insurance companies and colleges are increasingly concerned about risk — both financial and reputational.
In response, many insurers are simply walking away from higher-education coverage. Those that remain are taking precautions to avoid the financial fallout of sexual misconduct, putting the burden of legal fees and payouts more squarely on the shoulders of colleges.
The Penn State Effect
The tipping point came in the case of the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky at Pennsylvania State University, which led to one of the first public rifts between a college and its insurer.
The abuses perpetrated by Sandusky involved hundreds of victims over the more than four decades he was employed by Penn State. Thirty-two victims sued the university for damages, and settled for $93 million, as reported by PennLive.
But neither Penn State nor its then-insurance company, Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association Insurance, wanted to pay.
In 2016, after a three-year court case, a judge ruled on the “interpretation” of the contracts between PMA and Penn State — in essence, how the university’s insurance policies could be triggered by claims of sexual misconduct, and if the policies applied to Sandusky-related claims.
Complicating the case was that, as is typical, Penn State’s insurance policies often changed year-to-year, and many victims were abused by Sandusky multiple times over several years. The judge’s opinion stated that claims made by each victim would trigger the policy of the year when the first incident of abuse occurred.
But for some years, the university’s insurance coverage didn’t apply in certain situations — letting PMA off the hook. Penn State’s insurance policies in the mid-1990s, for example, did not cover sexual abuse or molestation. After 1998, PMA did not need to cover Penn State because the policies no longer applied when university officials first learned about Sandusky’s abuse and did not act to prevent it. And, beginning in 2005, only one claim related to Sandusky could be filed each year, according to the policies.
While the public does not know how much of the multimillion-dollar settlement was paid by Penn State or PMA, the case touched off a new era in higher-ed insurance, said Kyle D. Logue, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who’s an expert in insurance law.
As a result, general liability policies are narrowing to exclude sexual abuse, said Logue. This pattern is common in insurance, he said: As insurers realize that certain risks are extremely large, or largely under the control of the institution that’s being insured, exclusions are added to protect against that risk.
Sexual-misconduct coverage in general liability policies might only be approved if the colleges meet certain requirements. United Educators, an insurance company that works exclusively with schools and colleges, requires applicants to have policies in place on sexual-misconduct prevention and ways to report and investigate incidents. Other insurers simply no longer offer sexual-misconduct coverage.
Claiming Otherwise
With Penn State in recent memory, Lexington Insurance is following a similar playbook at Baylor and hoping to pre-emptively steer clear of a big payout. The pending sexual-misconduct lawsuit brought by 15 former students alleges that the plaintiffs were sexually assaulted by other students and staff members between 2004 and 2017 and that the university didn’t act to protect them.
At Baylor, as at Penn State, the insurance policies were triggered for the year an incident occurred; a policy from 2014, for example, was triggered by a claim filed two years later.
Filed on January 10, Lexington’s lawsuit alleges that Baylor’s policies didn’t cover sexual misconduct between 2012 and 2016, when the majority of the alleged sexual abuse occurred. For the remaining alleged assaults, the sexual abuse does not meet the definition of an “occurrence” — namely, an accident — because the university may have failed to prevent the incident under the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX, Lexington argues.
(A spokesperson for Baylor University said the university “continues to work with Lexington regarding previous claims” but switched insurers for its general liability coverage “a few years ago.”)
Amid such high-profile scandals, many insurers want to minimize their risks, opting for a different approach known as a claims-based policy. Under that system, when universities file claims with their insurer, that triggers the current year’s policy, which often no longer covers sexual abuse — no matter what year the misconduct occurred.
“The shift to claims-made policies provides more general protection for the insurer than the specific exclusion does,” said Logue, in an email response to The Chronicle.
United Educators maintained its occurrence-based coverage because it is “preferable for our members,” according to a spokesperson.
Striking Out on Their Own
As outside insurance companies become more wary of higher ed, many colleges are joining the ranks of corporations and creating a new structure to insure their risks.
That new structure — known as a captive insurance company — is a separate legal entity, but the university is involved in its main operations, including creating policies and managing claims. Yale University, the University of California system, Rutgers University, and the University of Minnesota are among the colleges that self-insure with captive insurance companies.
Michigan State University created such a company, called Lysander Series, after settling a lawsuit with the 300-plus victims of Larry Nassar, the former university sports doctor who abused women and girls under the guise of performing medical treatment. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, Michigan State rejected a policy with reduced coverage from its longstanding insurer, United Educators, and created Lysander instead.
In 2019, at the time of its creation, a Michigan State spokesperson told the Journal that the policy from Lysander Series “broadly excludes insurer liability for sexual misconduct.” A United Educators spokesperson said the company does not “publicly disclose member or insurance policy details.”
MSU also took to court its 13 former insurers to cover the $500-million settlement with Nassar’s victims. As of last September, Michigan State had recouped around $100 million, according to the Lansing State Journal. In November, a judge found that the American Physicians Assurance Corporation was not obligated to pay $31 million for costs related to the Nassar case under a 2000-2001 insurance policy.
Sealing the Cracks
The Nassar case was “one of the worst of the worst,” said Bryan Elie, vice president for underwriting at United Educators.
But the conflicts in college insurance are only going to increase as more victims come forward about abusive behavior and sexual-misconduct lawsuits proliferate, experts say.
In 2014 a report compiled by United Educators of publicly available cases involving sexual misconduct listed one case that topped $1 million. In 2022 that number jumped to five. Settlements within the University of California system and at the University of Southern California topped $615 million and $852 million, respectively.
“Those trends have just been growing and growing,” said Kimberly Pacelli, a partner at the Title IX consulting firm TNG.
Invariably, while conducting trainings for colleges’ Title IX coordinators, Pacelli notices that administrators realize the nature of their work is inherently risk management.
“We always recommend that [Title IX coordinators] interface with their finance and administration folks to really understand who’s their insurer and what the insurance covers,” said Pacelli.
Meanwhile, insurers are getting more invested in training colleges on Title IX policies to further minimize their risk. “From our perspective, our goal is to help the institution,” said Elie. He added: “Don’t let a serial predator take root.”
Newswise — New Haven, Conn. — Lockdown measures aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19 had the unintended benefit of curtailing violence by the insurgent group ISIS, according to a new study led by Yale political scientist Dawn Brancati.
The study, published on Jan. 30 in the journal American Political Science Review, found that government-imposed curfews and travel bans instituted to protect public health in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt were significantly associated with a reduction in ISIS attacks, especially in urban areas and locations outside the militant organization’s base of operations.
“Although ISIS leaders vowed to ramp up attacks during the pandemic, our analysis found that pandemic lockdown measures likely reduced the group’s attacks by depleting its financial resources, reducing high-value civilian targets, and making it logistically more difficult for ISIS to conduct attacks by reducing its cover,” said Brancati, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Our findings provide important insights into the effects of public health measures on violence by non-state actors like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram, as well as the general effectiveness of curfews and travel restrictions as counterinsurgency tools.”
In examining the effects of the lockdown measures on violence by non-state actors, Brancati — along with coauthors Jóhanna Birnir of the University of Maryland-College Park and Qutaiba Idlbi of the Atlantic Council — focused on ISIS due to the group’s explicit pledge to accelerate violence during the pandemic and because its large financial reserves, rural base, and preference for targeting government installations over civilians make it less vulnerable to the effects of curfews and travel restrictions.
The researchers analyzed data on more than 1,500 ISIS-initiated violent events in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt — the countries where the group launches most of its attacks — compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project covering a 78-week period between Dec. 31, 2018, and June 28, 2020. In March 2020, pandemic-related curfews and travel bans were imposed in all three countries and were in place for three to four months. The researchers also mapped the number and location of ISIS attacks within and across Iraq’s governorates using geographic information system (GIS).
The public health measures significantly reduced violence, especially in cities and areas outside of the militant group’s rural bases, the study showed. For example, the number of violent events was about 30% lower in Iraq and 15% lower in Syria when COVID-19 related curfews were in place in these countries.
The researchers found that the higher a governorate’s population, the more effective curfews were in reducing violence. For example, the number of ISIS-initiated violent events in the governorate of Baghdad, which has a population of 8.1 million, was 11% lower when the curfews were in place. There was no change in the Iraqi governorate of Najaf (a center of Muslim pilgrimage, surpassed by only Mecca and Medina), which has a population of 1.5 million people.
Based on interviews with government officials, military leaders, policy experts, and residents of places covered in the study, the researchers concluded that the curfews and travel restrictions reduced the number of high-value civilian targets and made it more difficult for ISIS militants to move about without being noticed. While there is evidence that the public health measures also strained the group’s financial resources — for instance, by limiting its ability to collect money from locals or operate its commercial businesses — the group’s financial reserves, which amount to hundreds of millions of dollars by most estimates, likely allowed it to keep funding its cells, the researchers concluded.
Given that pandemic lockdown measures seem to have hindered ISIS’s ability to initiate violence, they likely have similar or greater effects on other violent non-state organizations, the researchers said.
“Most non-state actors lack ISIS’s financial resources, tend to target civilians more heavily, and operate in urban areas, which suggests they would be more vulnerable to the effects of lockdown measures than ISIS is,” Brancati said. “This does not suggest that lockdown measures are a magic bullet in fighting insurgencies since they have harsh side effects on society, especially in developing countries where militant groups operate.”
A lawsuit filed last week against Yale University has reignited a debate about how colleges should best help students who are going through serious mental-health crises.
The complaint against Yale reflects a larger shift in which colleges are under increasing pressure — from the federal government, court rulings, advocacy groups, and students themselves — to accommodate students with mental-health conditions so they can stay enrolled while they receive treatment.
The new lawsuit centers on colleges’ withdrawal policies, which have been the subject of scrutiny by mental-health advocacy groups in recent years. The plaintiffs, two current students and a nonprofit that’s pushing for mental-health reform at the university, argue that Yale’s policies are punitive and violate the Americans with Disabilities Act by depriving students of access to an education.
The complaint recounts students’ “traumatic” experiences of being pushed out of college after disclosing symptoms of distress and facing barriers to reinstatement. (According to a joint filing on Wednesday, the lawsuit had been put on hold while the parties try to come to an agreement out of court.)
A similar lawsuit filed against Stanford University in 2018 resulted in a settlement and policy changes that were hailed as a model of student-centered, compassionate, and transparent practices. At Stanford, forced mental-health leaves are now supposed to be a last resort, and students can apply to stay in campus housing even if they do go on leave.
The Stanford and Yale lawsuits are part of a broader push in recent years to make campus mental-health policies more flexible and student-centered.
College officials say that involuntary leaves are rare, and that most students are accommodated and stay enrolled while they’re going through mental-health treatment. But in some severe cases, administrators say it’s best for students to pause their studies until they’re ready to return to campus. Drawing that line, however, is a challenge.
Colleges and universities need to explore all potential reasonable accommodations that might enable the student to safely remain on campus and meet the college’s academic standards without resorting to exclusion.
Mental-health advocates say colleges often don’t get it right. Colleges should — and are legally obligated to, the lawsuit against Yale argues — provide reasonable accommodations to students with mental-health diagnoses so they can continue their education. And if withdrawal is necessary, advocates stress that the process for a student to re-enroll should not present financial and academic roadblocks.
Monica Porter, the policy and legal advocacy attorney with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, which is one of the law firms involved in suing Yale, said students and their families are becoming more aware of their rights for reasonable accommodations.
Part of the shift, too, is that mental health is becoming less stigmatized, said Asia Wong, director of counseling and health services at Loyola University New Orleans. For students, instead of feeling the need to hide their mental-health conditions, there’s been a shift to “this is an illness I’m living with, and I believe that it’s within my rights to be accommodated for that,” Wong said.
Exclusion as ‘Last Resort’
There has been renewed interest from the Biden administration’s Education and Justice Departments in protecting the legal rights of students with mental-health conditions, as well as from lawmakers.
Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, sent a letter to the two departments last week, encouraging federal officials to scrutinize colleges’ use of involuntary leaves and issue guidance on the matter.
Federal investigations have forced several colleges to change their mental-health protocols. Recent landmark settlements include Brown University’s from August 2021, which required the university to modify its leave of absence and readmission policies. It also required the school to pay more than $600,000 in damages to students who had been denied readmission.
In 2018, Northern Michigan University had to overhaul a policy that threatened to punish students if they discussed thoughts of self harm with their peers as part of a Justice Department settlement. And in 2016, the department reached an agreement with Princeton, requiring the university to communicate the accommodations available to students before going on leave.
“Before resorting to exclusion or putting a pause on a student’s formal relationship with the university, colleges and universities need to explore all potential reasonable accommodations that might enable the student to safely remain on campus and meet the college’s academic standards without resorting to exclusion,” Porter said. “Exclusion should be a last resort and only resorted to in extremely rare cases if no reasonable accommodation can be identified.”
Victor Schwartz, a psychiatrist and the senior associate dean for wellness and student life at the City University of New York School of Medicine, spent eight years as medical director of the Jed Foundation, a suicide-prevention organization, advising colleges on how to handle students who might pose a threat to their own or others’ safety.
As the mental-health landscape has changed, Schwartz said there’s a sense among critics that colleges’ policies have not followed the larger cultural shift toward becoming more transparent and student-friendly. He thinks that in the last 15 to 20 years, as advocacy around the issue has increased, more colleges are seeing the virtue in being as reasonably flexible as possible.
Still, “it’s a complicated balancing act,” he said.
Sometimes, it is in a student’s best interest to take a break from college, Schwartz said — especially if they can’t get access to the treatment they need on or around campus, or if they can’t keep up with their academic work. There are also rare instances where students pose a risk to the community. But there are other scenarios in which returning home would have a negative impact on a student, he said.
“Ideally, you need to be taking a holistic picture,” he said.
Finding That Balance
Wong, the counseling director at Loyola New Orleans, said the question of whether a student should take a leave of absence boils down to a key issue: Can the university reasonably accommodate the student? Or is the student better served by taking some time off?
“If the second case is the case, then the university should be working to make it as easy as possible for the student to return,” Wong said.
Schwartz thinks reinstatement policies like Yale’s — which was updated in the past year but previously required coursework, an interview, and letters of recommendation — were created in good faith. Colleges want to make sure that students are in a position to succeed in terms of their health and academics when they return to campus.
For many students, the loss of tuition dollars can end their higher-education opportunities.
But when the bar is too high, rigid policies have the unintended consequences of making students hesitant to take leave, and frightened about the implications of alerting their university when they are experiencing a crisis, Schwartz said.
“When students believe it’ll be costly and hinder their academic progress to leave school, or if there will be hurdles to coming back, they might not leave when they ought to,” he said. Ideally, there should be a flexible system of tuition reimbursement or making students aware of tuition insurance, he said. Because “for many students, the loss of tuition dollars can end their higher-education opportunities.”
The recommendations made by Elis for Rachael, the nonprofit involved in the lawsuit against Yale, include eliminating roadblocks to reinstatement and allowing for the possibility of continued access to campus healthcare, facilities, and housing while a student is on leave. Schwartz said these recommendations are by and large sensible and in line with what a lot of colleges are doing.
Ben Locke, chief clinical officer at Togetherall, a peer-to-peer forum for students that’s monitored by mental-health professionals, worked in counseling services at Pennsylvania State University for two decades. It’s a good thing, Locke said, that colleges are rethinking their mental-health policies to have more parity with general health leave, and eliminating some of the barriers to re-enrollment.
But he stressed that involuntary-leave policies exist for a reason. There are severe instances, he said, where keeping a student enrolled — or in student housing — poses a danger or disruption to other students and their learning.
“One of the huge challenges in reporting on and understanding these things is that due to confidentiality rules, you’re generally going to be missing the entire side of the story that holds much of the detail,” he said. “And that doesn’t mean that institutions haven’t done things wrong and should be held accountable, but it does mean we need to be really cautious about drawing very firm conclusions that institution has done X, Y or Z wrong, and we have no idea what actually happened with the student.”
He also said that calls for continuity of healthcare and housing for students on leave are contractually complicated.
“The school’s responsibility to a student who is no longer a student changes dramatically,” he said. “And I think that that really does complicate some of these requests.”
Harvard and Yale officials said Wednesday they would withdraw their law schools from the U.S. News & World Report rankings, a seismic shift in the college ranking system.
In separate statements, leaders from the two programs said they believed the rankings — which are used by students to select schools and by the colleges to entice applicants — were unreliable and “profoundly” flawed.
“They disincentivize programs that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession,” Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken said in a statement Wednesday. “We have reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession. As a result, we will no longer participate.”
Harvard followed suit. The law school dean, John Manning, said it had become “impossible to reconcile our principles and commitments with the methodology and incentives the U.S. News rankings reflect.”
“It does not advance the best ideals of legal education or the profession we serve, and it contradicts the deeply held commitments of Harvard Law School,” Manning said of the rankings, adding they “can create perverse incentives that influence schools’ decisions in ways that undercut student choice and harm the interests of potential students.”
Both Manning and Gerken said they were concerned with U.S. News’ heavy ranking of LSAT scores and GPAs, which they said could disincentivize diverse applicants. They said despite bringing those concerns to the for-profit magazine, not enough had been done.
The departures are significant. Yale’s law school has held the top spot in the U.S. News rankings since the company began releasing its list in 1990. Harvard, currently ranked 4th, has also retained a prominent place on the list alongside other well-regarded programs.
The head of U.S. News and World Report, Eric Gertler, said the company would continue to release its rankings. It’s unclear if Yale and Harvard will remain a part of the list, as much of the information used for the ranking system is publicly available.
“As part of our mission, we must continue to ensure that law schools are held accountable for the education they will provide to these students,” Gertler said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
Other schools at Yale and Harvard can continue to submit data to be included in the U.S. News rankings.
PHOTO: William Bretzger/Delaware News Journal/USA TODAY NETWORK/Imagn Images
