Campus clips

The word “sissies” on a T-shirt triggered a dispute on and off campus in the fall. The Freshman Class Council created a shirt for the Harvard game that included a quote from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story: “I think of all Harvard men as sissies.” When gay and lesbian groups protested the use of the word, the council scrapped the design at the urging of Yale College dean Mary Miller. This led in turn to an uproar by free-speech advocates. In a letter to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, President Richard C. Levin ’74PhD said that Miller did not intend to suppress speech. However, he said, “it would have been possible, and not unreasonable” for the students to “interpret Dean Miller’s counsel as a directive. This we regret.”

The government of Iran placed Yale “and all its affiliates” on a list of 60 “subversive” organizations with which Iranian citizens are forbidden from having contact. University officials were at a loss to explain why Yale, the only university on the list, was included.

Donations to Yale dropped 24.6 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to a Council for Aid to Education survey. Yale’s drop was the largest among the top 20 fund-raising research universities. Yale’s total for the year was $358 million.

Building a better Pepsi? That’s more or less the goal of a new PepsiCo research lab at New Haven’s Science Park dedicated to making healthier versions of the company’s drinks and snack foods. The company also announced in December that it will fund a fellowship for nutritional research in Yale’s MD/PhD program.