Yale Herald Plays Early April Fool's Day Prank

As if defeat at the hands of Harvard's Ivy League championship team this fall weren't enough, Yale's football team has suffered another demoralizing blow. In honor of April Fool's Day, the weekly Yale Herald's March 27 issue features a front-page story announcing plans for the demolition of the Yale Bowl.

Yale's historic stadium, built in 1914, is certainly aging, but the school says it has no plans to tear down the Yale Bowl.

Although the Herald story includes comments from Yale's athletic director, Thomas A. Beckett, in an interview with The Crimson, said he had not heard anything about demolition proposals.

"We're going to tear down the what?" Beckett responded when asked for a response to the Herald story.

"I don't know anything about it," he said. "We have absolutely no plans to demolish the Yale Bowl. We had an international soccer game there yesterday."

The Herald story says the Bowl's decaying steel and concrete facade is the reason for its replacement.

But Beckett denied that the structural problems are severe enough to warrant building an entirely new stadium.

"Sure, the Bowl could use a face lift," Beckett said, "but we're not gonna tear it down."

The Herald story is attributed to "Vernon Baislin," who is not listed in the Yale student directory or on the masthead of the newspaper. Andrew Krause, a managing editor of the Herald, explained that the name is an anagram of one of the newspaper's staffers, Brian Levinson.

The story is in keeping with the paper's tradition of running an April Fool's front page, according to Herald staffers.

Last year's April Fool's issue claimed that a Vincent Van Gogh painting housed in the Yale University Art Gallery was a forgery. And the year before, the Herald announced, in the midst of a bitter strike by Yale's dining services employees, that the McDonald's restaurant chain would take over the school's dining halls.

The campus response to the weekly's prank has been fairly muted, according to Michael Bucksein, a Yale junior who writes for the Herald.

"A few football players have been concerned that the stadium is going under," Bucksein said.