Campus Clips

Yale is one of 15 universities that have signed an amicus brief defending the consideration of race and ethnicity as a factor in college admissions. Filed in August, the brief concerns two pending Supreme Court cases. A group called Students for Fair Admissions is the plaintiff in both of those cases; the defendants are Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In a statement about Yale’s participation in the brief, President Peter Salovey ’86PhD wrote that “student diversity is essential to the missions of American universities and promotes educational excellence for all students.”

The cultural treasures of Yale’s libraries, archives, and museums will be more readily available online next spring, when the university launches LUX: Yale Collections Discovery. The platform will feature more than 15 million objects in Yale’s collections, thereby unifying the online catalogs of the Library, Art Gallery, Center for British Art, and the Peabody Museum.

Blockchain technology is the focus of a new center in the engineering school. The Center for Privacy, Accountability, Verification, and Economics of Blockchain Systems (known as PAVE) will work to advance blockchain systems with a multidisciplinary approach that includes computer scientists, economists, and legal scholars. The center will be funded by a five-year grant of $5.75 million from the Algorand Foundation.

Medieval studies has been a graduate program at Yale since 1962, but until last year, there was no formal undergraduate program in the field. Starting with the Class of 2022, Yale College students can earn a certificate in medieval studies by taking five courses and attending three lectures on medieval topics. The program includes courses and faculty from history, English, religious studies, and several other language and humanities departments.