Melinda Beck

First.

Some hold major roles in higher education, like Yale’s senior vice president for operations, or the Harvard professor who became president of Morehouse College. Some are judges, including one who sits on the US Supreme Court. Some entered business—PepsiCo, Disney, McKinsey. An extraordinary array of Yale graduates were first in their families to earn college degrees, blazing a trail into academic and professional achievement from a background in which higher education was more a pipe dream than
HISTORY •

Why Suffragists Helped Send Women Doctors to WWI's Front Lines

The unlikely band of American women who crossed the Atlantic into war-torn France in February 1918 included six doctors, 13 nurses, a dentist, a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter and a mechanic. They were the first wave of women determined to build hospitals to treat the war-wounded and help the Allied effort in World War I. But they had an ulterior motive as well: to prove beyond doubt that women were just as brave, competent and self-sacrificing as men—and thus deserved the right to vote ba
Filters & Sorting
Yale Alumni Magazine •

“We wouldn’t have known if we hadn’t looked.”

“We wouldn’t have known if we hadn’t looked.” A fund at Yale is jump-starting new research on gender and health. WHRY director Carolyn M. Mazure with the center’s recent undergraduate fellows. Left to right: Dhikshitha Balaji ’18, Kaveri Curlin ’19, Mazure, and Haleigh Larson ’18. View full image Compared with men, women recovering from bypass surgery had lower levels of functioning, more pain, higher rates of infection, and more than twice the rate of rehospitalization. This WHRY-funded discove
Yale Alumni Magazine •

Meanwhile, back on the farm

It spans only about an acre at the north end of campus, but the Yale Farm brings a world of food experiences, issues, and ideas to the Yale community. Student interns and volunteers learn to grow vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers, care for honeybees and free-range hens, and manage soils for long-term health. Russian literature classes come to thresh Ukranika wheat, a variety much like a kind of wheat mentioned in Anna Karenina. Moreover, the farm serves as a forum for studying the complexi
Yale Alumni Magazine •

Eating at Yale has changed. Drastically.

Alumni who remember Salisbury steak with brown sauce might not recognize Yale dining today. The cafeteria steam tables have been replaced with “action stations,” where chefs in white coats prepare dishes such as Kogi Beef Tacos and Jerk Chicken Skewers with Mango Drizzle in front of waiting students. The introduction of spa water, infused with fruit slices and prominently displayed in glass canisters, has brought soda consumption down. Trays are gone. Students carry individual dishes to their s
Yale Alumni Magazine •

No time to lose

Michael Wishnie ’87, ’93JD, was just leaving a Celtics game in Boston when he got the emergency phone call. It was Friday night, January 27, and President Donald Trump’s executive order barring refugees and halting immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries was only a few hours old. Rebecca Heller ’10JD was on the phone. A former student of Wishnie’s, and director of the nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project, she had learned that an Iraqi man her group was helping had been separ
Yale Alumni Magazine •

Review: “Keep the Damned Women Out”

Melinda Beck ’77, a longtime columnist and editor at the Wall Street Journal, is a writer in New York City. As yet another male president takes the oath of office this month, it’s bracing to recall that once, gaining entrance to the nation’s elite colleges was also a struggle for women. “Keep the Damned Women Out”—as one alumnus implored the Dartmouth trustees—is a meticulously researched, deftly written look at how coeducation happened at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and elsewhere in the 1960s