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Yale and Peru Resolve Machu Picchu Dispute
November/December 2007
by Marc Wortman
Would Hiram Bingham III be happy? “No doubt at all,” says Yale
president Richard C. Levin, referring to an agreement between the university
and Peru to end a dispute over the ownership of some 5,000 artifacts from Machu
Picchu. Bingham excavated the items from the fifteenth-century Inca city and
brought them back to Yale in the early 1900s. Now, many of the objects will go
back to Peru, with Yale’s blessing—if the two sides can turn a memorandum
of understanding into a binding agreement.
The agreement came in September, after Hernan Garrido-Lecca,
representing Peruvian president Alan Garcia, traveled to New Haven to complete
negotiations begun in Peru last summer. “It was almost a euphoric exercise to
come up with something we all thought was a great outcome,” says Levin, who
hosted the negotiators at Yale’s official President’s House. “This government
agreed on the basic approach that Yale had been proposing all along, which was
a basis for collaboration.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Peru will own the artifacts, but Yale
retains the right to keep most of the material from the collection on campus
for a term of 99 years. The great bulk of this material comprises several
thousand pottery and stone fragments, bones, and other objects invaluable to
scholars but uninteresting to laypeople and tourists. Yale will retain a few
exhibit-worthy artifacts at the Peabody for display, but most of the
museum-quality objects—some 380 of them—will be transferred to
Peru. Some of these, along with a number of items from collections in Peru,
will be seen in an international traveling exhibit to be launched jointly by
Yale and Peru next year. The new exhibit will use dioramas and interactive
materials created by the Peabody for its recent exhibit, “Machu Picchu:
Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas.”
By the end of 2010, most of the museum-quality artifacts currently at
Yale will be installed in a new museum and research center in Cuzco, Peru, the
jumping-off point for visitors to Machu Picchu. The new center will be operated
by the Peruvian government, with Yale representatives serving on its governing
board.
Levin calls the accord a model for resolving similar disputes over
artifacts that have been taken from their original homes. “The issue is
typically posed as a zero-sum game, a winner and a loser,” says Levin, “but we
were able to share a collection in the interests of preservation and
scholarship on the one hand and national patrimony on the other.”
The agreement seeks to resolve a dispute whose origins lay in whether
Bingham had permission to remove the artifacts. Peru had sought return of all
the Bingham materials in recent years, and negotiations broke down in 2005 when
representatives of former president Alejandro Toledo threatened litigation
against Yale. One of those officials, former National Institute of Culture
director Luis Guillermo Lumbreras, is not happy that Yale is keeping some of
the artifacts. “It’s absurd that this doesn’t cover all of them,” Lumbreras
told the Los Angeles Times. “If
Yale wants to continue studying the pieces, they can come to Peru.”
Military recruiters win Law School battle
by Adrian Brune
Recruiters from the Navy and Air Force were back at Yale with other
recruiters as usual this October. But this fall they participated fully in the
Law School’s job-interview program—for the first time since 2004.
The shift came after an appeals court ruled against a group of Law
School faculty in Burt v. Gates. The decision, handed down on September 17 by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals, rejected the argument of 45 law professors that the so-called Solomon
Amendment—which withholds federal funds to universities that restrict
military recruiting—infringes on their academic freedom. The professors
argued that the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which requires gay
men and women in the military to keep their sexual orientation a secret,
violates Yale’s 27-year-old nondiscrimination policy.
Although the Law School itself receives little federal money, Yale as a
whole takes in $350 million in federal funding for research each year. “The Law
School was placed in an impossible position,” says law professor Robert Burt,
the lead plaintiff in the case. “In effect, the federal government was holding
our colleagues in the medical school and science departments hostage. The
question became whether we would accept harm that would be inflicted on others—who
may or may not agree with us—in order to stand up for our principles.”
Law dean Harold Hongju Koh changed the school’s recruiting policy
immediately after the court decision. The Law School had never barred the
military from recruiting, but it had withheld the use of Law School facilities
and recruiting services.
Some welcomed the court’s decision. Pundit Heather Mac Donald '78 of
the Manhattan Institute says the ruling demonstrates “how far out of the legal
mainstream Yale’s legal professoriate is.” James Kirchick '06 of the New
Republic had a different take on
the magazine’s website: “Filling the military’s ranks with people who oppose
the ban on gays (the sort of people more likely to be found at elite, Ivy
League institutions) is a significant way in which to change the military's
attitude on this policy.”
For its part, central Yale administration had little comment. Asked for
the university’s reaction, public affairs director Helaine Klasky would say
only, with a smile, “It’s over.”
Of interest
On campus, it’s the equivalent of the Super Bowl score or the Best
Actress award. Everybody waits for the result: how did Swensen do this year?
Yale’s celebrated chief investment officer, David Swensen '80PhD, did
not disappoint: Yale’s portfolio earned a 28 percent return this year, growing
in value from $18 billion to $22.5 billion and outperforming every major
university endowment in the country. As the chart at left shows, Yale’s return
since the turn of the century has outpaced both the S&P 500 and the average
of a broad pool of university endowments calculated by Cambridge Associates.
And incidentally, he’s 16–7 against Harvard since coming to Yale in 1985.
Garden honors a peace activist
by Cathy Shufro
In a New Haven cemetery known for the New England luminaries it
harbors, not far up the lane from the resting places of Eli Whitney, Class of
1792, and Noah Webster, Class of 1778, stands a gravestone with a name that
seems out of place: Kanichi Asakawa.
In Japan, Asakawa (1873-1948) is renowned. Schoolchildren from
his hometown of Nihonmatsu compete to join an annual pilgrimage to Grove Street
Cemetery and pay their respects. At Yale, his name is little known—but
that may change.
A few blocks down High Street from the cemetery, a new Japanese garden
in Saybrook College was dedicated on October 12 to mark the centennial of
Asakawa’s appointment as an instructor in history at Yale. Asakawa, who taught
at Yale for 36 years, was the first Japanese scholar to teach at a major
American university and the first curator of Yale’s East Asia Collection. What
made him famous in his home country was his activism.
“In Japan, Asakawa’s fame
rests on his reputation as a tireless advocate for peace,” says Sumitomo
Professor of Japanese Studies Edward Kamens ’74, ’82PhD, the associate master
of Saybrook. For decades, Asakawa spoke out against Japan’s military buildup
and colonialist policies, and in 1941, he used high-level contacts to urge
President Franklin D. Roosevelt to write to Japanese emperor Hirohito asking
him not to enter the war. Roosevelt did send such a letter, but it reached
Tokyo too late.
Designed and built by Boston landscape architect Shinichiro Abe, the
space contains three elements of the traditional Japanese garden: living
plants, stone, and water. “The designer specifically selected rocks with flat
surfaces to invite visitors to sit and enjoy the garden quietly,” says Kamens,
who has seen students lingering there.
A high-tech architect for SOM’s new home
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Since its founding in 1976, the School of Management has been housed in
a dispersed and disparate group of nineteenth-century mansions on Hillhouse
Avenue. By 2011, it will have a brand new, decidedly twenty-first-century
campus. The university announced in September that the British architecture
firm Foster + Partners will design a new campus for the school, on Whitney
Avenue across from the Peabody Museum.
The new campus will be built at 155/175 Whitney, where a Yale
administrative building now stands. It will provide 230,000 square feet of
space—more than doubling the 110,000 square feet the school’s eight
buildings currently afford. The new facilities will house classrooms, community
spaces, and faculty and administrative offices, arranged around a courtyard in
the Yale tradition.
That may be all that is traditional about the building, though.
Architect Norman Foster '62MArch is known for elegant modern buildings that
exploit and celebrate technology. A past winner of architecture’s highest
honor, the Pritzker Architectural Prize, Foster has designed such high-profile
projects as the Hearst Tower in New York, the renovation of the German
Reichstag, and an office tower in London nicknamed “the gherkin” for its
(arguably) pickle-like form. “It is not going to look like a traditional
business school,” says SOM dean Joel Podolny, “and that’s appropriate, because
we are not a traditional business school.”
Although the four-acre site has been Yale property for more than 40
years, the SOM campus will be a significant new Yale presence on the town side
of Whitney, a time-honored town-gown border. A row of expensive homes borders
the site to the east, and the exclusive New Haven Lawn Club to the north. Will
SOM’s new neighbors object? Douglas Rae, a member of the influential local
homeowners' group, says proudly, if jokingly, that the group “opposes progress
on all fronts.” But Rae is in an unusual position: not only does he have the
new SOM site virtually in his backyard, but he is also the Lawn Club president—and
a professor at SOM. Rae says he is confident that the final design will satisfy
him and his neighbors.
The new campus will be designed to accommodate 50 percent more students
than SOM now admits. Podolny says the student body will likely expand, but over
a longer timeline than the construction of the building. Foster’s design is
also expected to serve and reflect SOM’s new interdisciplinary curriculum, a
departure from conventional business education that the school launched last
fall (see “Revamping the MBA,” May/June). Podolny sees the new curriculum as a
way to better differentiate SOM from its peers in the competitive world of
business schools, and he wants the new campus to do the same. “Because we are
so physically decentralized, I think people don’t really know fully where the
school is,” he says. “It is a wonderful convergence that, at the time that the
school is clarifying its identity, we actually have the opportunity to think
about a space that can be a very tangible reflection of that.”
Students cancel cross-country bike trip
by Jessica Marsden '08
For 13 summers, Yale students have headed westward on bikes to raise
money for Habitat for Humanity. But this year’s cross-country ride may have
been the last. Citing safety concerns, the board of directors of the Habitat
Bicycle Challenge (HBC) announced in September that the trips would not
continue in 2008.
There have been three serious accidents and two fatalities associated
with the trip over the past three years. In June, Dan Lewis '09 was struck by a
car while riding through Kansas. He remains unconscious in a Denver hospital.
Alexander Capelluto '08 was killed in May 2006 when he was hit by a truck while
training for the trip in West Haven. And Rachel Speight '06 died in 2005 after
being hit by a car in Kentucky on an HBC trip.
The “cumulative effect” of the three incidents prompted the student-led
board to call off the trip, says board member Jessica Bialecki '08. In response
to the first two accidents, the group had overhauled the three cross-country
routes and added pre-departure training programs for riders in 2006. But even
with those added precautions, Bialecki says, “putting 90 young people on
American roads on bicycles is a very, very risky thing to do.”
The trip was a major fund-raiser for the Greater New Haven chapter of
Habitat for Humanity, raising more than $400,000 during this year’s challenge
and a total of $2.4 million over HBC’s lifetime. To help compensate for the
loss of HBC, former riders have organized a new fundraising challenge for next
summer. Over nine weeks, participants will travel the country and work on
Habitat building projects in four or five different areas. In between projects,
they will enjoy hiking and kayaking trips to “America’s natural gems,” Bialecki
says, and with bicycles ruled out, they will travel from place to place by bus
or train.  |
