First Week at Yale (A Second Time)

Yale is spectacular.

I made it through the first week of teaching my long-winded named class, “The American Art Form of Standup Comedy: Jokes as Folklore, Self-Expression and Culture” at Yale University. I am late in writing this Substack post due to my own overwhelm about a) teaching a college class b) that class being about standup comedy c) being at yale and d) entering a time portal into my college years.

Freshman year at Yale, I think. Clearly I cut my own bangs. (Also, my standup class takes place in the building behind me, Harkness Hall.)

I arrived to the Yale campus last Thursday clad in my plaid blazer (because you have to). However, my attire was not the only thing blazing, it was also 90 and humid, so I had to take it off. But even so my students called me Professor Castro. This sounds so weird to me. I don’t come from some hierarchical academic environment. I come from a thousand shows and mics filled with guys talking about their schlongs. Either path is not an easy but, please, just call me Solange.

My students are all very bright, as expected. I could not be happier with this gig and am still in disbelief that I am doing this. However, it has not been a breeze.

I did not really go into a portal and wake up in 1994, but I came close. I did eat at Yorkside Pizza, which has somehow survived the onslaught of the uber-wealthy gentrification of New Haven. I also ate with a classmate in the dining hall of my residential college, Berkeley which has not changed. And I was greeted by the same dining hall host of my undergraduate years, Annette, who also has not changed. The food however…that has changed. I used to need to lie down after a meal to wait for the acid reflux to pass. However, sometime in the early 2000’s the daughter of famed chef, Alice Waters entered Yale followed by her mother’s culinary powers and revamped the food from baked zitti and Fruit Loops to sustainable locally sourced organic vegetables and blah blah blah. Weirdly, Alice Waters, the godmother of food culture in Berkeley (where I am ironically from), did the same thing with my junior high school. The mess of weeds where I once smoked weed with budding drug dealers at King Junior High School is now an organic garden. In both cases, I missed the boat by ten years.

Fast forward a hundred years, I am enjoying a taste of what can I only describe as The Best Life Imaginable at Yale University. The only two words I could think of all week to describe my experience was “Spectacular” and “Overwhelmed.”

I mean, Yale is spectacular. It just is. The architecture, the resources, the faculty, the history of leaders, thinkers and artists that honed their minds and talent, and the coffee machine in the dining hall where you push a button that says “Yale Mocha” and a carefully-sugar-balanced caffeinated fluid comes out that not only tastes amazing and but will compel you to read “The Ulysses” in one afternoon. (I was assigned this book three times in college and never once finished…clearly, it did not speak to me or I needed that coffee machine) Mostly, though, what makes Yale spectacular is what I feel to be the general sense of commitment to intellectual, creative and charitable pursuits. I mean, the pursuit obscene wealth is a thing. Pretty sure someone in my class donated 50 million to our class fund. These are the 1%. But the accumulation of wealth and power is not a value that in my opinion dominates the culture of most of my classmates, students and alumni.

The L&B room at Sterling Library. Could it be anymore perfect?

I was not always so glowing about Yale. For many years, I talked about Yale with some disdain for the heavy anvil of white male history and the ways it played out for me as an undergraduate. And to be fair, there are some not great things; Yale only allowed women into it’s hallowed classes in 1975, I had some not great interactions with legacy male and prep school kids; we called the Head of the College “Master,” (which is very southern plantation and BDSM), and there were and still are secret societies that, while more inclusive still pit students in some kind of competition of specialness. The residential college we once called Calhoun was named after the anti-abolitionist who said slavery was a “necessary evil” and funded a college dining hall that featured a stained glass window depicting slaves picking cotton. One day in 2016 a janitor named Corey Menafee took a broom and broke it. This started a chain of events that led to the college being re-named Grace Hopper, after a female naval officer and pioneer of computer science. So Yale has made strides for past sins. Are they great strides. (Shrug.) Maybe? But with the “Supreme” Court granting our “President” the power to fully terrorize non-white people, my bar for America’s ability to right past wrongs seems low enough to trip over.

Nonetheless, I have come full circle to the thinking of Yale as a place excellence. As I have learned, perfectionism will bring me down, but excellence is something I can strive for. I can’t argue with the The Yale Art Gallery, the Yale Drama School, the list of authors and leaders, and all the students and faculty. Wealth is not just money. Yale is wealthy in that too, but they are also billionaires in intellectual and creative resources.

Berkeley Dining Hall taxidermy.

When I was in college it seemed there was a layer of dust over everything. The drinks and snacks at Wawa’s were priced accordingly to a college student’s budget and not Gilded Age Nepo baby prices. Our pizza hang, Naples, was a front for the mafia and if the cheese from your “slaice” fell on your skin before it cooled you would be left with a pizza burn welt, forget about what happened if you put it in your mouth. The heat in our dorms came out of hundred year old furnaces that clanged loudly through the night and you could get locked in the library and not get out till the next day.

That Yale is no more. This Yale, though, it is way shinier and chrome. Sterling library was renovated and is indeed sterling. There are so many cozy leather chairs where you can channel your inner-Michael Keaton and burn through “The Odyssey.” You can also enter a little cubby and have your zoom meeting. The bathrooms are spotless and filled have tampons and pads (as all should be.)

Sterling Library. Sterling, indeed.

The biggest emotional overwhelm though has to do with the reality that my mother is not here to share experience. She would have LOVED the library. She also probably would have come out with me again as she did when I was 18. Weirdly, my first experience of the campus was when we pulled up in rented car a few days before classes started. We stayed at The Duncan hotel, which a friend once described as very “The Shining.” The carpet looked like it hadn’t been changed since the twenties and the elevator needed an operator to move the lever. We took a trip to Mystic, Connecticut because of the movie “Mystic Pizza” and I could not have been more ready for her to leave. I was so excited to start college and I was not sad to be away from home. But I only got to Yale because of her.