Campus Clips

The spring semester saw protests on campus over the Hamas-Israel War, with pro-Palestinian protesters calling for Yale to divest itself from investments in weapons manufacturers. On April 22, after a group had camped out on Beinecke Plaza for three nights, Yale Police arrested 48 people, including 44 students, after warning them to leave. On April 28, protesters occupied Cross Campus with tents and created a “liberated zone”; police cleared the encampment two days later with no arrests, after the group declined the Yale administration’s offer of a meeting with two Yale trustees. On May 1, four protesters, two of them students, were arrested after a rally.

A former MIT graduate student, Qinxuan Pan, was sentenced in April to 35 years in prison for the murder of Kevin Jiang ’21MESc. Jiang, who was a student at the School of the Environment, was shot to death on a New Haven street in February 2021. Pan pleaded guilty to the crime and apologized in court. Jiang, who had recently become engaged to be married, was 26 when he was killed.

The Yale School of Medicine ranked fourth among US medical schools in National Institutes of Health funding in fiscal year 2023, up from seventh the year before. Yale received grants totaling $571,450,883, according to figures from the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research. The University of California, San Francisco, was ranked first, followed by Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Pennsylvania.

Two incarcerated students were awarded bachelor of arts degrees and ten more received associate’s degrees at a Connecticut prison in May through the Yale Prison Education Initiative. YPEI brings courses taught by Yale and University of New Haven faculty into prisons; degrees are conferred by UNH. (Read more about the program here.) Since the program’s founding in 2018, students had previously earned associate’s degrees, but these were the first bachelor’s degrees.

Estonia took the top spot in the 2024 Environmental Performance Index, which ranks nations based on their progress on climate change, environmental health, and protecting ecosystems. The index is published annually by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network.