Public Safety is tracking a significant snowfall that will be arriving in our area late Sunday morning (Jan. 25). It will snow heavily throughout the day and evening eventually tapering off Monday (Jan. 26) with 10-14 inches expected statewide. A sleet and freezing rain mix is also possible along the shore. Temperatures will be in the teens and twenties.
Due to this significant winter storm and the extensive campus clean-up operations that will need to take place, all in-person day and evening classes scheduled for Monday, January 26, 2026 have been cancelled. All scheduled in-person classes will transition to being held online or remotely. Additional information on the virtual format for each class will be provided by your instructor.
Faculty have been asked to prepare for Online or Remote sessions in the event of in-person meeting cancellations. These options will be determined by the Faculty member and all questions should be directed to the Faculty teaching each course section. Faculty also have been asked to be very understanding and accommodating of the individual situations of their students who may have difficulty managing these alternative online or remote class meetings on short notice.
Please note that only essential employees, as previously determined by their respective department leaders, should report to campus. All other employees should fulfill the requirements of their role remotely.
Campus operations for residential students, unless otherwise noted, will operate as scheduled, though hours may be modified or changed based on the conditions. Separate messages will be sent from the Peterson Library, the Beckerman Recreation Center, and Dining Services regarding any changes to their normal hours of operation. The Bergami Center for Science, Technology, and Innovation will remain open for residential students to use for study space and to participate in online classes.
Off-campus students that live in the City of West Haven should abide by the city’s parking ban during inclement weather to avoid having their vehicle tagged and towed. Please check the City of West Haven’s website for further information on their snow parking ban.
The Charger Blog
As a student and journalist in the Baltic region of the USSR in the early 1990s, I witnessed firsthand the fear and turmoil that overtook the area. I recently reflected on that time during a special event in Connecticut that brought together locals with ties to the Baltics to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the restoration of independence in that region.
Aug 31, 2021
Thirty years ago this August I was in the Baltic region of the USSR, where I had been studying and working as a journalist for the previous year and a half. I recalled my experiences from August 1991 as the invited speaker at the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the re-establishment of independence for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian Societies of Connecticut held the event on August 21 in Andover, Conn.
Early in the morning of August 19, 1991, hardliners in the Kremlin seized power in Moscow, sidelining Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was vacationing with his family on the Crimean Peninsula. In the evening of the next day, the Estonian Supreme Council (formerly, Supreme Soviet) declared de facto independence for the country, and the Latvian Supreme Council declared independence the day after that – August 21. In Lithuania, independence had already been declared a year and a half earlier, on March 11, 1990, but real independence for all three of these small countries on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea was made possible only with the subsequent unraveling of the coup in Moscow against Gorbachev.
On the first day of the coup, I was in Daugavpils, a town in southeastern Latvia near the border with Lithuania, waiting for a train to the Latvian capital of Riga, from where I would continue on to Tallinn, capital of the Estonian Soviet Republic, my home for the time I was in the Soviet Baltic. I heard a helicopter fly over the Daugavpils station, and I ran out to see leaflets descending. It was a text by the Communist Party in the Latvian Soviet Republic. One side was printed in Latvian and the other in Russian, directing people to support the “law on the state of emergency” – the coup against Soviet President Gorbachev.
As I returned to Tallinn that evening, no one knew the coup would fail and that Soviet troops and tanks would not be unleashed, putting an end to the Baltic independence movements and continuing the violence by Soviet forces that had resulted in deaths in Vilnius and Riga earlier in the year.
Since the fall of 1990, I had been reporting for an English-language newspaper published in Tallinn, The Estonian Independent, which later in 1991 became The Baltic Independent. The week after the coup plotters were arrested, and as Western states one after another recognized Baltic independence (the United States did so on September 2), I interviewed people on the town’s central square about their impressions.
The interviews, published in the August 30-September 5, 1991 issue of The Baltic Independent, included these thoughts from Estonian Kalev Kaarus: “Everything has happened so fast. The events in Moscow have helped us so that we can now get our independence back. Totalitarianism will now be defeated.”
At the recent event in Andover, I recalled these experiences of 30 years ago with Americans of Baltic extraction and descent, many of whom remembered the fear and the excitement of 1991, while many did not, knowing their ancestral homelands only as the free, open, and democratic countries that they are today.
My experiences in the Baltic Region in the early 1990s were the most powerful of my entire life. I saw at firsthand the joint, collective action by people motivated not by exclusionist nationalism but, rather simply, by the belief in and ardent desire for more authentic, truthful, free lives.
I concluded by saying I knew how much the peoples of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had gone through in the 20th century. The past 30 years have, overall, brought prosperity and security. Work remains to be done, though, to ensure the multiethnic societies in the Baltic are well integrated and that these multicultural and multilingual societies are not divided by their diversity.
I shared with the Baltic communities in Andover my confidence in the continuing success of the peoples of the Baltic, and on that day, the 30th anniversary of the restoration of their independence, I celebrated with them.
Bradley Woodworth, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history in the University’s Department of Human Sciences.
University News
New University-wide council will advance strategic partnerships, immersive student opportunities, and innovative research, supporting the University’s strategic plan the development of its pioneering Center for Innovation and Applied Technology.
The Charger Blog
Entrepreneur David Sussman, Pompea College of Business Advisory Board Member and chief visionary officer of The Family Security Plan®, is collaborating with University of New Haven students, faculty, and staff to create a program and app that helps Chargers support each other to achieve academic, personal, and professional goals. It’s called Uccountability.
University News
Vice President for Innovation and Applied Technology Paul Lavoie will serve on the Board of Directors and as America’s Chief Manufacturing Officer for the newly launched American Manufacturing Futures Institute.