Yale Relents, Won't Expel Thin Student

Yale student Frances Chan is naturally thin at 5-foot-2 and 95 pounds, just like her parents and grandparents before her. But when she visited the school's health center on an unrelated matter, officials there deemed her too thin and demanded that she gain weight or face expulsion, reports the New Haven Register. Chan did her best for weeks, scarfing down junk food and forgoing stairs, but it was no use. When a nurse told her that the 2 pounds she gained wasn't good enough, Chan vented publicly in an essay at the Huffington Post. It worked.

While the school won't comment publicly on the matter, Chan says she switched to a new Yale doctor who "trusts that I do not have an eating disorder and admitted that ‘we made a mistake,’" the 20-year-old history major tells the Register. The problem, Chan maintains, is that Yale put too much of an emphasis on body mass index as a measure of health, reports Fox News. She no longer has to return to the health center for weekly weigh-ins. (Click to read about another case in which an intervention by strangers at the gym turned out to be exactly the right response.)