Campus Clips

Yale’s COVID policies changed this spring as the public health emergency officially came to an end. The university no longer requires up-to-date COVID vaccinations for students, faculty, or staff, except for those in healthcare settings; vaccinations are still strongly encouraged for all. The university’s on-demand PCR testing program ended in June; free rapid antigen tests are available on a limited basis to faculty, staff, and students.

Bloomberg Philanthropies and the American Talent Initiative recognized Yale as one of 28 “high-flier” colleges that are “national leaders in college access and success for lower-income students.” Since 2016, Yale has increased its percentage of Pell Grant–eligible students from 13 percent to 18 percent; the university hopes to reach 20 percent by 2025.
 
A course in the Cherokee language will be offered in Yale College this fall, marking the first time an indigenous language will be available to fulfill the college’s foreign-language requirement. A second and third semester on the language will be added subsequently. Indigenous languages have previously been offered on a less formal basis through the Directed Independent Language Study program. Patrick Del Percio, formerly at the University of Oklahoma, has been hired to teach the language.

New evidence from Yale’s archives supports the case that members of Skull and Bones robbed a grave that they believed belonged to the Apache leader Geronimo at Fort Sill in Oklahoma in 1918. Hearst Connecticut reporter Joshua Eaton found two letters from 1918 in which members of the senior society celebrated the theft. In 2006, author Marc Wortman found a similar letter in the archive (“Whose Skull and Bones?” May/June 2006). Wesley Spear ’74, a past president of the society’s governing corporation, told Eaton that he was aware of the letters and that they “will lead you to a dead end, as there is nothing of substance to find.” Fort Sill officials have long maintained that Geronimo’s grave was unmarked at the time.

The Yale University Library has added 3,306 more issues of the Yale Daily News to its online archive of the student newspaper, thanks to a gift from an anonymous donor. The searchable archive, which allows users to download articles in PDF format, now includes nearly 24,000 issues, from the News’s founding in January 1878 up to March 2021—a valuable resource for those studying the university’s history. The archive is available to anyone at https://ydnhistorical.library.yale.edu.