Campus clips

A $160 million gift from Edward Bass ’67 will help fund a major renovation of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. The museum will update its exhibits, increase exhibit space by 50 percent, improve facilities for visiting school groups, and add on-site classrooms for Yale students.

The federal government is investigating allegations that Yale discriminates against Asian Americans in its undergraduate admissions process. The Asian American Coalition for Education filed a complaint with the Departments of Justice and Education in 2016, claiming that Yale “participate(s) in a covert and insidious scheme to enforce race-based quotas in college admissions,” violating the Civil Rights Act. In a statement, President Peter Salovey ’86PhD defended the university’s “whole-person” approach to admissions and declared, “Yale does not discriminate in admissions against Asian Americans or any other racial or ethnic group.”

James Kirchick ’06 was unsuccessful in his effort to win a place on the ballot for the annual election of an alumnus to Yale’s Board of Trustees. Alumni who are not nominated by a Yale Alumni Association committee can seek a place via petition; they must collect signatures from at least 3 percent of the qualified electors (Yale alumni who graduated five years ago or more). Yale announced in October that Kirchick collected 2,246 of the 4,266 signatures required.

Fifteen new faculty members joined Yale last year as part of the Faculty Excellence and Diversity Initiative, bringing the total number of hires in the program’s three-year history to 65. The five-year, $50 million program provides matching funds to departments and schools for appointments that “enrich diversity or contribute on another dimension of strategic importance to the university.”

The School of Public Health will offer a new two-year master’s degree program in health informatics beginning in the fall of 2019. Health informatics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the use of data to improve health care.

Sterling Memorial Library is converting all its collections to the Library of Congress classification system, ending a decades-long split between the Library of Congress system and Yale’s own method of classification (which the library’s own Gazette described in 1953 as “mysterious and baffling to readers and staff alike”). The reshelving should be complete by January 2019.