Campus clips

An ironworker was killed on September 13 in an accident at a Yale construction site. Robert Adrian of Coxsackie, New York, died, and three other workers were injured, when a steel beam collapsed on the site of a chiller plant the university is building at Science Park.

Yale's endowment produced an 8.9 percent return during the fiscal year ending June 30, lower than the S&P 500's 12 percent gain over the same period. Harvard posted an 11 percent return. Yale's real assets—real estate, timber, and oil and gas—lost 4.5 percent; private equity, the endowment's largest asset class, earned 18 percent. As of June 30, theendowment was worth $16.7 billion.

A Texas jury awarded $625.5 million to a software company founded by Yale computer science professor David Gelernter '76, '77MA, in a patent-infringement suit the company brought against Apple Inc. The federal jury found that Apple willfully infringed on patents granted to Mirror Worlds LLC in the design of its Time Machine, Cover Flow, and Spotlight features. Apple says it will appeal the verdict.

A last-minute petition campaign to put attorney Michael Horowitz '64LLB on the ballot for the Yale Corporation fell short of the necessary signatures. Horowitz needed 3,808 signatures to run alongside the university's candidates for a six-year term on Yale's board of trustees, but he says he got "just under 600." Horowitz says he's troubled by Yale's "politically correct" and "intellectually rigid" environment. He plans to help find another candidate to run next year—and to start earlier.