Recent years have seen a tremendous retreat by Reason from the public dialogue, providing a concomitant opportunity for ideologies embodying the worst of mankind’s vices and follies, socialism and nationalism, to take its place. When foreign governments behave contemptibly, asserting irrational and self-aggrandizing claims of ownership to artistic treasures created by civilizations which existed ages before their own time, the leftwing press typically rushes to add its voice in support for yet another contemporary expression of ressentiment.

Refreshingly, Arthur Lubow, in the Sunday Times Magazine, is less than sympathetic to Peru’s attempts to wrest custodianship of artifacts from Manchu Pichu discovered by Yale’s Hiram Bingham in the early years of the last century from the Peabody Museum.

other countries as well as Peru are demanding the recovery of cultural treasures removed by more powerful nations many years ago. The Greeks want the Parthenon marbles returned to Athens from the British Museum; the Egyptians want the same museum to surrender the Rosetta Stone and, on top of that, seek to spirit away the bust of Nefertiti from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Where might it all end? One clue comes in a sweeping request from China. As a way of combating plunder of the present as well as the past, the Chinese government has asked the United States to ban the import of all Chinese art objects made before 1911. The State Department has been reviewing the Chinese request for more than two years.

The movement for the repatriation of “cultural patrimony” by nations whose ancient past is typically more glorious than their recent history provides the framework for the dispute between Peru and Yale. To the scholars and administrators of Yale, the bones, ceramics and metalwork are best conserved at the university, where ongoing research is gleaning new knowledge of the civilization at Machu Picchu under the Inca. Outside Yale, most everyone I talked to wants the collection to go back to Peru, but many of them are far from disinterested arbiters. In the end, if the case winds up in the United States courts, its disposition may be determined by narrowly legalistic interpretations of specific Peruvian laws and proclamations. Yet the passions that ignite it are part of a broad global phenomenon. “My opinion reflects the opinion of most Peruvians,” Hilda Vidal, a curator at the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Peru in Lima, told me. “In general, anything that is patrimony of the cultures of the world, whether in museums in Asia or Europe or the United States, came to be there during the times when our governments were weak and the laws were weak, or during the Roman conquest or our conquest by the Spanish. Now that the world is more civilized, these countries should reflect on this issue. It saddens us Peruvians to go to museums abroad and see a Paracas textile. I am hopeful that in the future all the cultural patrimony of the world will return to its country of origin.” Behind her words, I could imagine a gigantic sucking whoosh, as the display cases in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Louvre and the other great universal museums of the world were cleansed of their contents, leaving behind the clattering of a few Wedgwood bowls and Sèvres teacups.

Terry D. Garcia, an ally and enthusiast promoter of Peruvian repatriation claims who works at National Geographic and who has made himself into an active participant in the controversy, was dismissive of Yale’s concerns for the preservation of the artifacts as politically incorrect.

It’s so patronizing of them to suggest that you can’t return these objects to Peru because they can’t take care of them — that a country like Peru doesn’t have competent archaeologists or museums,” he says. “Maybe if you were a colonial power in the 19th century you could rationalize that statement. I don’t see how you could make it today.

But Arthur Lubow describes his own experience with Peruvian standards of stewardship.

Fernando Astete, an archaeologist who has worked at the Machu Picchu park since 1978 and been director of it since 2001, wants the Bingham collection to be exhibited at the site’s museum. When I spoke with him in Cuzco, he said: “I am happy with the museum. It has temperature control and humidity control and guards.” But when I visited the site museum, which is located about a mile and a half from the Aguas Calientes train station, I found evidence of none of those amenities. The doors were open to the air, which was moist from the nearby river, and the sole official was a caretaker who sold tickets and then exited the building.

Read the whole thing.

slideshow

An Apache warrior

AP is reporting that an alleged great-grandson of the fierce Chiricahua Apache warrior Geronimo has heard the urban legend that claims that some Yale men belonging to a well known Yale senior society, while stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma during WWI, “crooked” (a traditional society practice meaning “to appropriate for permanent addition to the society’s memorabilia”) Geronimo’s skull, and the alleged great-grandson is writing to the White House and demanding the skull’s return.

Legend has it that Yale University’s ultrasecret Skull and Bones society swiped the remains of American Indian leader Geronimo nearly a century ago from an army outpost in Oklahoma, and now Geronimo’s great-grandson wants the remains returned.

Harlyn Geronimo, of Mescalero, N.M., wants to prove the skull and bones that were purported spirited from the Indian leader’s burial plot in Fort Sill, Okla., to a stone tomb that serves as the club’s headquarters are in fact those of his great-grandfather.

If so, he wants to bury them near Geronimo’s birthplace in southern New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness.

“He died as a prisoner of war, and he is still a prisoner of war because his remains were not returned to his homeland,” said Harlyn Geronimo, 59. “Presently, we are looking for a proper consecrated burial.”

If the bones aren’t those of Geronimo, Harlyn Geronimo is certain they belonged to one of the Apache prisoners who died at Fort Sill. He said they should still be returned.

Harlyn Geronimo sent a letter last year to President Bush, asking for his help in recovering the bones. He figures since the president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was allegedly one of those who helped steal the bones in 1918, the president would want to help return them to their rightful place.

But Harlyn Geronimo said: “I haven’t heard a word.”

The White House did not respond to messages asking for comment.

Their alleged custody of Geronimo’s skull is just one of numerous self-aggrandizing legends artfully disseminated by mischievous members of a certain Yale senior society over the course of its long existence.

But some politically correct and probably deluded younger alumni in a recent article in the alumni mag swallowed the yarn hook, line, and sinker.

Earlier report

A Yale senior society

Yale’s Hewitt Quadrangle has long unfortunately been permitted by the liberal administration to serve as the locus for leftwing protest art. A number of “shanties” erected to protest the policies of the former government of the Republic of South Africa were an eyesore for several years, until Dr. Elwood Bracey ‘58 visiting Yale for a class reunion did us all a favor by setting fire to them.

Local communists had more recently installed the above “sculpture” made from pill bottles to protest pharmaceutical companies’ enjoyment of patent rights. The bottles evidently symbolized all the spongers and looters who allegedly perished because US companies did not simply give away the medicines they spent millions of dollars developing and producing for free.

The Yale Daily News reports that the noisome object

was badly damaged Thursday night, when it was apparently thrown by students involved in secret society Tap Night from Beinecke Plaza into the sunken sculpture garden on the plaza. ...

Although no witnesses to the incident could be reached for comment, Jordan Strom ’07 said he had heard that the individuals responsible were a male wearing a Speedo swimsuit, a male dressed “in a baby costume wearing a diaper,” and a male in a purple dress, indicating that the vandalism was a result of secret society Tap Night* activities.

Jordan Strom said he was told that the three males were confronted by witnesses after they threw the pill bottle over the edge of the pit, but that the perpetrators were “too intoxicated to pay much attention.

All of which shows that good men and true still exist at Yale.

“Elwood Bracey, be like him. Dare to Struggle; dare to win.”
————————————-

• Tap Night is the Spring evening on which new members are “tapped,” i.e. invited to join, Yale’s exclusive senior societies.

AP reports that 23-year-old Said Hyder Akbar received 50 hours of community service and accelerated rehabilitation for setting afire an American flag hanging from a house in New Haven’s Chapel Street.

Akbar apologized to the owner of the house he endangered.

Original story

Follow-up posting

Abashed by nationwide ridicule resulting from Dean Betty Trachtenberg’s ban on stage weapons in university theatrical productions, the Yale administration has announced its cancellation of the ban on free speech grounds. Yale should also reverse its ban on possession of firearms on campus, on second Amendment grounds, but that’s hardly likely, is it?

The Yale Daily News:

Stage weapons will again be allowed in University theatrical productions, in a reversal of last week’s ban, Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Tuesday morning.

Administrators decided Monday afternoon to require that audiences instead be informed of the use of stage weapons before the start of every performance, she said. In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, which left 33 students dead last Monday, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg had told students that they would be required to substitute obviously fake props for realistic stage weapons in theatrical productions.

Klasky said the University reversed the policy because of concerns about free speech.

“As an institution that has always valued free speech, we wanted to uphold the principles that we have always adhered to,” she said.

Klasky said the policy of announcing the use of stage weapons in advance will hold for all future campus productions.

The ban affected at least two shows that went up over the weekend: the play “Red Noses” and the opera “Orpheus in the Underworld,” and attracted national media attention as well as causing a stir among students involved in theater on campus. Several students complained that the requirement infringed on their free speech, while others pointed out that the policy was unlikely to assuage anxiety about Virginia Tech.

But over the weekend, Trachtenberg, who is retiring at the end of the academic year, said student criticism of the stage weapons ban had been exaggerated.

“I think people should start thinking about other people rather than trying to feel sorry for themselves and thinking that the administration is trying to thwart their creativity,” Trachtenberg said. “They’re not using their own intelligence. … We have to think of the people who might be affected by seeing real-life weapons.”

Klasky declined to name the people involved in making Monday’s decision.

Mark Steyn comments pretty acerbically on the academic intelligentsia’s aversion to weapons and self-defense… and to reality.

...at Yale, the dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, reacted to the Virginia Tech murders by taking decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to “permit the use of obviously fake weapons” such as plastic swords. ...

I think we have a problem in our culture not with “realistic weapons” but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already “fear guns,” at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a “gun-free zone,” formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a “gun-free zone” except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.

But you can’t do that at Virginia Tech. Instead, the administration has created a “Gun-Free School Zone.” Or, to be more accurate, they’ve created a sign that says “Gun-Free School Zone.” And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so. The “gun-free zone” turned out to be a fraud—not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.

I live in northern New England, which has a very low crime rate, in part because it has a high rate of gun ownership. We do have the occasional murder, however. A few years back, a couple of alienated loser teens from a small Vermont town decided they were going to kill somebody, steal his ATM cards, and go to Australia. So they went to a remote house in the woods a couple of towns away, knocked on the door, and said their car had broken down. The guy thought their story smelled funny so he picked up his Glock and told ‘em to get lost. So they concocted a better story, and pretended to be students doing an environmental survey. Unfortunately, the next old coot in the woods was sick of environmentalists and chased ‘em away. Eventually they figured they could spend months knocking on doors in rural Vermont and New Hampshire and seeing nothing for their pains but cranky guys in plaid leveling both barrels through the screen door. So even these idiots worked it out: Where’s the nearest place around here where you’re most likely to encounter gullible defenseless types who have foresworn all means of resistance? Answer: Dartmouth College. So they drove over the Connecticut River, rang the doorbell, and brutally murdered a couple of well-meaning liberal professors. Two depraved misfits of crushing stupidity (to judge from their diaries) had nevertheless identified precisely the easiest murder victims in the twin-state area. To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale props department policy, it signals to everyone that you’re not in the real world.

The “gun-free zone” fraud isn’t just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia’s distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with “the erosion of intellectual self-defense,” and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and “safe spaces” that’s the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we “fear guns,” and “verbal violence,” and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ‘’The Three Musketeers.’’ What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?

Whole thing.

We’ve known that since early in our own Freshman year, of course. But Dean of Undergraduate Affairs Betty Trachtenburg (PC-enforcer for the University) really outdid herself in the liberal stupidity department with this response to the Virginia Tech Shootings.

Oldest College Daily:

In the wake of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech in which a student killed 32 people, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg has limited the use of stage weapons in theatrical productions.

Students involved in this weekend’s production of “Red Noses” said they first learned of the new rules on Thursday morning, the same day the show was slated to open. They were subsequently forced to alter many of the scenes by swapping more realistic-looking stage swords for wooden ones, a change that many students said was neither a necessary nor a useful response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

According to students involved in the production, Trachtenberg has banned the use of some stage weapons in all of the University’s theatrical productions. While shows will be permitted to use obviously fake plastic weapons, students said, those that hoped to stage more realistic scenes of stage violence have had to make changes to their props.

Trachtenberg could not be reached for comment Thursday night.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

To celebrate Gay Pride Week at Yale (which for some unaccountable reason is apparently scheduled to last for 16 days: April 7-22), a group calling itself the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Cooperative desecrated the gate to Yale’s Cross Campus, between Berkeley and Calhoun Colleges,) by suspending from it a rainbow-colored Homosexual Political Movement flag, labeled in duct-tape “Yale Pride.”

That gate was erected many years ago in honor of the memory of Noah Porter (1811-1892), Professor of Moral Philosophy and 7th President of Yale College (1871-1886), a learned and distinguished man of high character, who is unlikely personally to have entertained a very positive opinion of sexual inversion and sodomy.

In the fashion of college life, some wag came along on Saturday night, and modified the offending flag’s lettering, causing it to make reference to a different member of the Seven Deadly Sins.

The Yale Daily News today is reporting indignantly about the “desecration” of that rubbishy flag, when it ought to be condemning the actual desecration of President Porter’s gate by its impertinent appropriation for use in the glorification of so unworthy and incongruous a cause.

Left-thinking reporter Cullen Macbeth is quick to condemn the untoward application of humor to any of the forces of political correctness’ sacred cows.

Other recent incidents include jokes published in a few campus periodicals that made fun of various minority groups, including Asian-Americans. Although such actions have been intended as humorous, they are still hurtful to many members of those groups.

And in a further note of inadvertent humor, the Yale Administation’s enforcer-in-chief of PC clocks in:

Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg said she has not seen the defaced flag but is open to working with LGBT Co-op members if they approach her to talk about the issue. Taking down another group’s sign and altering it without informing anyone is a “cowardly” thing to do, she said.

“If somebody has some problem with what the gay pride people are doing, they have to come forward and talk about it openly and above-board,” Trachtenberg said. “Why they don’t want to identify themselves is beyond me.

Oh, come on, Betty, you’d rusticate or expel any undergraduate you caught making a gesture of dissent to one of your left-wing causes in a New York minute. And defying you, since you have the power and are by no means reluctant to use it, makes even so small a gesture as this a courageous thing to do.

The British Telegraph reports that 23 year-old, Afghan-born Hyder Akbar, one of the three Yale students recently arrested for setting on fire an American flag hanging from the porch of a private home in New Haven, was a friend of Sayed Ramahtullah Hashemi, the former Taliban foreign ministry spokesman whose attendance at Yale as a special student led to considerable controversy in the aftermath of an admiring New York Times’ profile.

The Telegraph also quotes the offended home owner.

Marc Suraci, the owner of the house, said: “I’ve heard people say it was just an innocent prank but people who go to Yale are smart. I’d imagine there’s an agenda behind it.” ...

“My great-grandfather fought in World War One, my grandfather fought in World War Two and my uncle served in Vietnam. I’m patriotic. My family has shed blood for our country.

“I like to show solidarity with the men and women who are fighting for our freedom. If I was in Afghanistan or Pakistan and I burned one of their flags, I wonder what would happen to me?”

Read the whole thing.

AP:

Three Yale University students have been arrested on charges of setting fire to an American flag hanging from the porch of a private home.

The three were arrested early yesterday after police on patrol spotted the burning flag and tore it from pole where it was mounted to the house on Chapel Street, police said.

Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, also 19, were arrested on charges ranging from reckless endangerment to arson.

“Though the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated flag-desecration statutes in 1989 and 1990 on First Amendment grounds, that does not mean that individuals can burn flags and face no criminal charges,” said First Amendment scholar David Hudson of the First Amendment Center.

“There are generally applicable criminal laws, such as laws against vandalism, for which there is no free-speech defense,” Hudson said. “Justice Scalia alluded to this fact in his opinion in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) — a case involving a juvenile who burned a cross in a neighbor’s yard — when he said the city of St. Paul had ‘sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.’ Presumably, the authorities in this (New Haven) case have ‘sufficient means’ to prohibit such threatening conduct.”

Angelopoulos and Anklesaria, who are freshmen, are both foreign citizens. Anklesaria is British and Angelopoulos is Greek.

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan, according to police, but is a U.S. citizen. Both Anklesaria and Angelopoulos had to hand over their passports

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan but is a U.S. citizen, police said. He worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, ‘’Come Back to Afghanistan,’’ based on his experiences, the Yale Daily News reported Wednesday.

At the arraignment in Superior Court a few hours after the arrests, bond was kept at $25,000 for Angelopoulos and Akbar, but was reduced to $15,000 for Anklesaria. They remained jailed last night.

Police said the students had two encounters with officers. Officers Stephanija Van Wilgen and Diane Gonzalez were responding to an unrelated call Haven at about 3 a.m. and were flagged down by the students who asked for directions. A short time later, the two officers returned to Chapel Street to see if the students had found their way home and spotted the burning flag.

“There was a glow in front of the house which they identified as a flag mounted on a pole to the house and it was engulfed in flames,” police spokeswoman Bonnie Posick said.

Van Wilgen pulled down the burning flag to prevent the fire from spreading to the house and Gonzalez tracked down the three men.

A century ago, people, like both my grandfathers, came to this country from Europe to take humble jobs performing hard labor in the coal mines where fatal accidents were common and where the occupational disease of anthrasilicosis shortened every miner’s life, and they were still grateful all their lives that America had taken them in and provided as much opportunity as that.

Today, Ivy League Universities give scholarships to hairy primitives from exotic strongholds of barbarism hostile to our country and our civilization, who are so grateful for being here that they set American flags on fire.

They should revoke that one ungrateful wretch’s citizenship, and deport all three of them so fast their heads spin.
——————-
On second thought:

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that they are all very young, after all. And there is the significant difference that my Lithuanian grandfathers settled in America in respectable communities possessed of decent values, where patriotism, gratitude, courtesy, and common sense were valued and part of expected conduct.

These little wetback arsonists get their values and attitudes from centers of contemporary anti-American elitism, like California’s East Bay and Yale University. Is it any wonder they have no sense of gratitude or appreciation toward the United States? They are obviously loyal enough to the treasonous community of fashion they currently inhabit.

Rather than deport the kids, we should probably be deporting the President of Yale and its administration and faculty.
——————-
More details

Oldest College Daily:

Three Yale students, including the son of a former governor of an Afghan province, were arrested early Tuesday morning after burning an American flag attached to a home on Chapel Street.

Hyder Akbar ’07, Nikolaos Angelopoulos ’10 and Farhad Anklesaria ’10 were arrested for charges including first-degree reckless endangerment, third-degree criminal mischief, second-degree arson, breach of peace and conspiracy to commit second-degree arson, the New Haven Register reports today. The two freshmen are both foreign citizens, and Akbar is a United States citizen, though he was born in Pakistan. Akbar worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, “Come Back to Afghanistan,” based on his experiences there.

According to the police report, as reported in the Register, the students were arrested after police found the burning flag, which had hung off 512 Chapel St. The arresting officers had previously assisted the students by giving them directions back to campus from Chapel Street in Fair Haven and later found the students a few blocks away from the burning flag. The three students admitted to police that they lit the fire, according to the report. The New Haven Police Department was not available for comment Tuesday evening.

The students were set to spend Tuesday night in jail after a Superior Court judge refused to release the men without bail, the Register reports. The bail for Akbar and Angelopoulos was set at $25,000 and was $15,000 for Anklesaria.

Yale University may join the Louvre and the Guggenheim by opening an Arts Institute in Abu Dhabi.

The Oldest College Daily reports that

The University aims to make a final decision by June, Yale President Richard Levin said.

Over at National Review, Michael Rubin is trying to mau mau Yale over all this. Apparently the University of Connecticut canceled some sort of plans for a satellite campus in Dubai, so Yale should fall into line with the Israeli lobby, too, Rubin hints darkly.

Glenn Reynolds unfortunately seems to have swallowed his nonsense.

Let’s see now, we can’t discriminate against Muslims on our airlines, but we cannot allow companies from friendly Islamic countries to purchase port facilities in the United States, and we also should not be exporting fine arts education to them, either. Ridiculous.

Abstinence should be no problem for all those nerdy types at Harvard. They won’t be running into a lot of opportunities to sin anyway.

CNN story.

Meanwhile, at Yale....

La plus ça change, la plus c’est la même chose.

Elihu Yale with servant

Oh, Yale was begun back in Seventeen One
With a gift of books weighing nigh a ton.”

the old song inaccurately states.

In reality, it was in 1718 that the Welsh nabob Elihu Yale (1649-1721) responded affirmatively to a request from Cotton Mather, and bestowed 417 books, along with “nine bales of goods” worth over £560, and a portrait of King George I upon the then struggling Collegiate School of Connecticut. This bequest permitted the erection of a new building to house the college in New Haven, which was duly named for its benefactor.

The March/April issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine contains an article (not yet on-line) informing us that last month the University agreed to remove a portrait of Elihu Yale from the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall, in response to complaints.

The dark and antique portrait shows Yale sitting beside a window displaying his trading ships, attended by a dusky servant wearing a metal collar.

The forces of Political Correctness are long on outrage, and short on acumen, and have unhappily mistaken the dark-skinned Indian servant for an American Negro slave, and the servant’s ornamental silver collar as a yoke of bondage.

Yale may be an educational institution, but University Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer JD’77 has announced that the task of educating the offended is beyond Yale’s abilities. “Since the portrait is confusing without the explanation [that Elihu Yale did not own slaves], I have decided it would be prudent to exchange that portrait of Elihu to another one in the University’s collection,” Lorimer said.

Ah, the courage of our University officials!

Yale Daily News, February 7

Hartford Courant, February 8

David Starkey, a specialist in Tudor history, believes that he has identified a miniature in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art as the only known contemporary portrait of Lady Jane Grey (1537-1554), queen regnant for nine days (10 July – 19 July 1553).

Telegraph

His detective work began when he saw a photograph of the miniature, painted on vellum, in a book. He said: “Almost all the early miniatures such as this were of royal subjects. This one struck me instantly and I thought it had to be of Lady Jane.

“What I noticed was the evident youth of the sitter. It would be unusual for someone to sit for a miniature unless they had very high status.”

But it was the jewellery that eventually gave the evidence. He found that the brooch in the portrait matched one in an inventory of Jane Grey’s possessions at the British Library. It is described as being made of gold with an agate centre and bearing the profile of a classical face.

He also worked out that the “foliage” behind the brooch was the badge of the Dudley family. John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, effectively ruled England in the last days of Edward VI, the sickly boy king whose death propelled Jane to the throne. The duke married one of his four sons, Guildford Dudley, to Jane Grey, to assert his control of the throne.

The foliage includes the four-petalled gillyflower, a relative of the cabbage.

“Gilly” was the nickname or rebus of Guildford Dudley. A 16th-century stone carving of the gillyflower* survives in a wall of the Beauchamp Tower at the Tower of London where Guildford, his father, and his three brothers were incarcerated with Lady Jane before their executions.

Dr Starkey believes the portrait was made by Lavinia Teerlinc, the Belgian miniaturist who succeeded Hans Holbein as Henry VIII’s court painter. It may have been painted to record Jane and Guildford’s wedding or while Jane was at the Tower awaiting her death.

*Apparently, the wallflower (a number of members of the Genus Erysimum), which has four petals, but which is not—as the Telegraph says—a relative of the cabbage.

The Master of Calhoun was filled with indignation when a showering couple’s private activities flooded one of the college bathrooms, and is demanding that undergraduate aqueous trysts cease in Calhoun forthwith. Fiercely fueled with righteous wrath, he proceeded to bombard the residential college’s entire undergraduate population with an angry email, which was promptly leaked to the AP:

A randy couple’s frolic in a shower at one of Yale’s undergraduate residential colleges prompted a professor to issue an e-mail of protest, which in turn has sparked debate on the Internet.

Yale officials told The Associated Press on Friday that the e-mail was sent Jan. 30 by Professor Jonathan Holloway, master of Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges at the Ivy League university.

About 330 students received the e-mail from Holloway, who runs Calhoun as master. He referred comment to Yale’s public affairs department.

His e-mail warns against “intimate activity” in the showers, “especially that kind of activity that leaves the showers in a decidedly less hygienic state.

“Several times since the start of the spring term some Hounies have come across a couple having the time of their lives in a shower stall,” the e-mail stated, referring to the nickname for college residents. “Last night, the shower flooded and the bathroom could not be used for over 90 minutes. To the as yet unidentified couple, this may be pleasurable and exciting for you, but it is a violation of community standards. Please stop.”

The note, first reported Friday by the New Haven Register, ended with a warning to the frolicking couple: “I really don’t want to explore this matter any further, as I respect your individual privacy. But such continued brazen public displays of affection will only invite public embarrassment. I beg of you, let’s not go there.”

What does he mean by threatening public embarassment, do you suppose? Email number 2 names names? Email number 3 includes .jpg’s?

Dan Gelertner ‘09 thinks there’s trouble right here in Elm City. His fellow Calhoun undergraduates are sinking into the depths of degradation.

Maybe he could start a boys’ band.

I can remember some sophomores from Calhoun (I think it was) being expelled back in the 1960s as the result of being caught showering with a date. But in the early 1970s, Yale bathroom doors often featured interchangeable signs, reading “Male Inside,” “Female Inside,” or “Couple Inside.” I don’t remember any couples causing a flood, however. What could they possibly have been doing?

The 2007 Calhoun Shower Scandal is pretty tame stuff, I can tell you, compared to great Yale sex scandals of days gone by. Older Yalemen will remember the “Calhoun Suzy” affair of the late 1950s? early 1960s? in which a very naughty, and decidedly underage, townie took up residence in the then-uncoeducated residential college, providing horizontal refreshment to large numbers of undergraduates. The Suzy story ended unhappily with the arrival of the New Haven police, and the premature termination of some promising Yale careers.

Wick Sloane SOM ‘80 reading through his monthly issues of the Yale Alumni Magazine observed a conspicuous absence of attention to war-time service on the part of the University.

What is Yale doing to recognize those from Yale — graduates, staff, faculty — who have served in combat in the Persian Gulf or in Afghanistan or the other troubled areas of the world, either for the United States or for their own country? What about any working in humanitarian jobs in these places? More than once I’ve asked this of Joel Podolny, dean of the School of Management. I’ve asked University President Richard Levin and the Association of Yale Alumni. No replies.

U.S. Army Col. Rich Morales SOM ’99 is back just now from at least his third tour in the Gulf in combat, including the first Gulf War. His e-mails to friends are inspiring in their courage and dedication to his troops. Not a syllable of politics or criticism. Most humbling is that he wrote to us that he understood that the debate at home over the war is what he and his troops are fighting for. I’ve asked the School of Management who else is serving, military or otherwise. Has anyone died? Any Yale staff called up in the reserves? Why not an edition of the Alumni Magazine on these people? The SOM Alumni Leaders’ Web pages have color photos and write-ups for the captains of industry and many fine people. Rich is there in name only. No photo or write-up. I am embarrassed for Yale here.

The University could make a powerful gesture of support to her alumni serving overseas by ending Yale’s Vietnam era posture of hostility to the US military and permitting ROTC programs to return to the Yale campus, but it won’t. As in the case of Vietnam, Yale will eventually inscribe the names of those who died on a slab of marble in Woolsey Hall, and that will be that.

Hat tip to Memeorandom.

AP:

Members of an all-male singing group from Yale University say they were taunted with anti-gay slurs, attacked and beaten after singing “The Star Stangled Banner” at a New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco.

At least three members of the Baker’s Dozen a cappella group were hurt. One suffered a broken jaw.

No arrests have been made. Police said they are investigating.

The trouble started when a couple of partygoers began mocking the 16 student singers who wore sports jackets and ties as preppies, witnesses said.

“You’re not welcome here,” Sharyar Aziz Jr., an 18-year-old Baker’s Dozen member whose jaw was broken, quoted one partygoer as saying. “He called a few members of the group, whether it was fag or homo, very, I would say, juvenile taunting.”

Reno Rapagnani, a retired San Francisco police officer whose daughter hosted the event, shut down the party. As the singers headed back to a nearby home where they were staying, another group of young men got out of a van and jumped them, according to Rapagnani.

“They were surrounded, then tripped _ and when they were on the ground, they were kicked,” Rapagnani said.

Two other Yale students needed medical treatment following the fight, one for a concussion and the other for cuts and a swollen ankle.

Police said they arrived and found about 20 people fighting in the street. They interviewed some of the participants but let them go after taking their names.

KESQ:

There’s a growing sense of outrage among some in San Francisco over a New Year’s Eve fight in which members of a Yale University singing group was beaten and some ended up in the hospital.

As first reported by Dan Noyes of A-B-C affiliate K-G-O T-V, members of Yale’s all-male a capella group—The Baker’s Dozen—were reportedly jumped by a vehicle full of young men after they left a New Year’s Eve house party in San Francisco.

One Yale student—Sharyar Aziz—had his jaw broken in two places during the fracas. Others in the group were bloodied and bruised as well.

The party was being held at the home of Reno Rapagnani, a retired San Francisco Police Department lawyer. The trouble started at midnight after The Baker’s Dozen sang “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Witnesses say some of the local men didn’t appreciate the attention the Yale students were getting, called them derogatory names and made threats that they apparently followed up on.

The Yale Daily News has more details.

A bit over a year ago (22 Nov 2005), the New York Sun was reporting on the spread of Naked Parties from Yale (and possibly Brown) to Columbia.

But the earliest public report probably appeared in the novel Chloe Does Yale published in March of 2004 by then Yale Senior (Timothy Dwight) Natalie Krinsky.

Today’s Times reports that the fad for naked parties was created in 1995 by the Yale Pundits, an undergraduate society which in earlier days contented itself with jokes and champagne-and-lobster lunches on the library steps.

The Pundits, founded in 1884 as a society of “campus wits,” have a history of rebelling against Yale tradition, often through elaborate pranks. They organize six to eight covert naked parties a year, which attract anywhere from 30 to 300 people to off-campus houses, neglected rooms in classroom buildings and even small libraries on campus.

“It’s one of those things people feel they need to do before they graduate,” says Megan Crandell, a senior who estimates that she has been to a half-dozen naked parties during her time at Yale. “The dynamic is completely different from a clothed party. People are so conscious of how they’re coming across that conversations end up being more sophisticated. You can’t talk about how hot that chick was the other night.”

News of Yale’s contribution to modern undergraduate social life has spread all the way to Scotland. The Scotsman.

While one campus source at Yale… says naked parties are “the No1” thing to do before graduation, students who attend the six to eight parties held each year say it can be a life-changing experience, far from the “frat-house” bawdiness portrayed in films such as Animal House…

Another Yale student, who did not want his name to become known by campus authorities – which do not try to stop the parties but do not encourage them – said: “Part of it is just the mystique of not knowing where you’re going. It’s become a hip thing to do.”

The events are magnets for social-climbers at other top academic institutions, including Columbia, MIT and Brown.

A better history, and a first person account from a Yale coed, appeared in the Yale Herald back in March of last year.

La plus ça change, la plus c’est la même chose.

James Kirchik Y ‘06, at the America’s Future Foundation blog, serves up an account of the recent Conservative political scene at Yale, describing the current character and ethos of the various political parties of the Yale Political Union.

Meanwhile the right-wing subculture at Yale has become the bastion of intellectual life on campus. At the PU, I always knew that getting into a debate with a Tory, Con, or a member of the POR would be more challenging than any classroom discussion. Yale students suspect that this is more or less the truth of the matter. They just wish it weren’t so.

As the POR chairman said in a recent YPU organizational meeting speech, “Getting drunk and hungover at every opportunity may be intense, but without something more, you’ll wake up one day and find yourself as empty as the keg by your head. You may find something intense in varsity sports, musical organizations, secret societies, and debating clubs, but make sure that your college experience informs your life. You need authenticity.”

I will forever remember my days in the Yale Political Union with great fondness. There really is no body like it in the world. I know that new characters will replace the old ones, but the PU will remain its lively, irascible old self. And while I will not soon be joining any secretive conservative organizations, I will, at the very least, have a greater appreciation for Charles the Martyr.

This blog’s author is, for the record, a member of the Party of the Right.

Hat tip to SC Maggie Gallagher Y’82.

Sam Heller is only a junior at Yale, but he wrote this colorful, but politically non-commital column, which was actually posted on Free Republic.

Goodbye, boys, I die a true American.” So went the apocryphal last words of Bill “The Butcher” Poole as he died on March 8, 1855. He’d been fatally shot in the heart, but he’d hung on for another 11 days, presumably to think of something totally metal to say…

Thing is, though, here at Yale, we have a political climate maybe an inch or two to the left of center – not sure if you’ve heard… My political views hover on the right-most end of Yale’s political discourse, and I’m not even that conservative.

Worth a read. You’ll be seeing this kid in the future. Who knows? Maybe he’ll become conservative after all.

Ballroom dancing

Four days ago, IvyGate (an Ivy League miscellaneous news and humor blog) linked a 6:46 minute YouTube video produced by Yale senior Aleksey Vayner to accompany the cover letter, resume, and research paper he was using to apply for investment banking jobs.

Mr. Vayner’s video (which showed the youthful job applicant lifting astoundingly large weights, skiing, playing tennis, ballroom dancing, and karate-chopping a tall stack of bricks) produced very much the opposite of what he had intended. No one called him for an interview, but amused NY bankers quickly began sharing his credentializing video’s link by email as the humor item of the week. That video soon went viral. Aleksey did not become any company’s newest AVP, but he did become the next Star Wars kid.

Dow Jones/AP:

Vayner, a self-described ``CEO and professional athlete,’’ submitted a cover letter and resume to UBS AG, describing his ``insatiable appetite for peak performance.’’ By Friday afternoon, both the cover letter and resume—which includes a link to the video, titled ``Impossible is Nothing’’—had circulated among employees at Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group and Wachovia Corp., to name a few.

UBS spokesman Kris Kagel said the firm is looking into the forwarding of the e-mail. ``We’re looking at whether it did come from UBS and if so, we’ll take action,’’ he said. ``As a firm we obviously don’t circulate (job applications) to the public.’‘

And it gets worse and worse.

One thing led to another. Curious viewers looked closely at Aleksey’s investment firm, charity, and book listed on his resume, finding major problems (like non-existence, misrepresentation, and plagiarism) with each.

The Yale Daily News joined the pack now barking at Aleksey’s heels, with other students supplying more stories.

Daniella Berman ‘07, who knows Vayner through the Yale Ballroom Dance Team, said she has heard “outlandish” stories about Vayner both from him and from other students. Among the claims she said she has heard is one that Vayner is one of four people in the state of Connecticut qualified to handle nuclear waste.

Berman said that while she thinks that kind of claim is fairly harmless, she thinks Vayner crossed a line by misrepresenting himself to a potential employer…

Vayner was profiled (as Aleksey Garber) in the Yale Rumpus in May of 2002 after visiting Yale as a prefrosh. The profile outlined Vayner’s many fabrications, including his claims that he was employed by both the Mafia and the CIA during his childhood and that he gave tennis lessons to Harrison Ford and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Today, IvyGate returned for a final coup de grace.

A member of the Yale tennis team wrote in to dispute Aleksey’s claim that he competed on the Satellite tour: “I played for Yale tennis, and he tried to walk on the team. He got cut the second day. I had one conversation with him, and he claimed to have KILLED 24 people in the caves of Tibet.”

(Other great comments: “I too played for Yale tennis, and Vayner/Garber claimed that he has trouble flying on planes because he has to register his hands as lethal weapons each time he goes to an airport.” And: “The giveaway on the investment firm was that he said his firm specialized in “risk-aDverse” strategies. The other giveaway was that he’s fucking crazy.”)

We decided to not be too scared of the cease and desist letter Aleksey emailed us, given that he copied and pasted it from the first Google hit for “cease and desist letter,” right down to the “very truly yours” signoff. Attorney Ron706@aol.com, Esq., really earned his fee there.

At Yale, Aleksey has offered to treat sports injuries using various “Eastern” therapy methods, including massage and acupuncture. Before “treating” a “patient,” he sent them this letter. You simply have to read it in full. Somewhere in there he claims that his brother is “head of pediatrics at Columbian Presbyterian hospital in NYC.” A search on the Columbia Presbyterian Physician Network turns up no one with the last name “Garber” or “Vayner.” But our favorite part is this line: “I am not certified in any Western sense of the word, neither in Chinese medicine, Tui-Na, Shaolin trauma medicine, nor in acupuncture, all of which I practice extensively never-the-less.”

And, um, not quite so humorously, the SEC and dean of Yale College have been notified of Aleksey’s transgressions.

God, what theater. You cannot make this shit up. Unless, y’know, you’re Aleksey.

You can bet that Yale will now review this lad’s admission application materials, looking for discrepancies. Ouch!

Hat tip to Andrew Olson.

———————————UPDATE

Mr. Vayner has (not unwisely) gotten YouTube to pull the video, by claiming copyright infringement.

The vindictive IvyGate is defying him, and has placed the video in a new posting.
———————————-
UPDATE 10/16

He now has a Wikipedia entry.

Aleksey is being ridiculed by Gawker.

And poor Aleksey’s story, and some comments on this posting by classmates on my Yale College Class email list made the New Yorker.———————————-
UPDATE 10/18

There is now an Aleksey Vayner Repository web-site, where readers post suggested new claims and accomplishments for Aleksey. The order of precedence of new alleged Aleksey accomplishments is determined by reader votes.

And, we missed this earlier posting in which Bess Levin communes with Aleksey’s brain.

Dear old Yale is going to provide some of her courses to the whole world via the Internet… for free!

Reuters:

Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible…

The 18-month pilot project will provide videos, syllabi and transcripts for seven courses beginning in the 2007 academic year. They include “Introduction to the Old Testament,” “Fundamentals of Physics” and “Introduction to Political Philosophy.”

No, they won’t give you a degree, if you watch them all. But, hey! they won’t charge you $46,000 a year either. I wonder if they’re going to offer Vince Scully’s History of Architecture.
—————————
Hat tip to Ratty.

How Neal Katyal expresses his gratitude to the US:
Defending Osama bin Ladin’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan

This month’s Yale Alumni Magazine interviews celebrity alumnus Georgetown Law Professor Neal K. Katyal, ‘95JD Yale Law, preening over his victory in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which challenged the authority of the President to consign illegal combatants to trial by military courts, and which elicited the absurd majority opinion, written by Justice Stevens, which erroneously applies the language of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, viz.,

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions (to):

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause…

to illegal combatants and terrorists captured outside the territory of the United States.

Katyal shares with the Yale Alumni Magazine the heart-warming story of his moving reply to Hamdan, when the imprisoned jihadi asked: “Why do you want to help me?”

So I paused for a long time, and then I said that I was doing this because my parents came to America to give their children better opportunities, and I couldn’t imagine another country on earth in which I would be able to do what I have been able to do. My parents came here from India, literally with eight dollars in their pockets, each of them. And what bothered me the most about the president’s order is that it said only foreigners would get this military justice system. If you were an American citizen, then you got a civilian trial. But if you were a green-card holder or a foreigner, then you got something really inferior. That was the first time that I felt our country was so fundamentally on the wrong path—and I had to do something.

I can relate to Mr. Katyal’s strong feelings of gratitude and appreciation toward the United States, as I come from immigrant background myself. My grandparents arrived here from Lithuania in the 1890s.

Professor Katyal and my father have a lot in common. Both were of the first generation brought up and educated in the United States. Both were grateful for the opportunities offered by the United States, though my father was not so quite so fortunate as Professor Katyal, who attended Dartmouth and Yale Law School.

Because his own father was dying of miner’s asthma, my father had to quit school after 8th grade and go to work in the coal mines to help support the family. But he was still grateful to grow up in the United States, rather than in Russian-occupied Lithuania, grateful for both America’s political freedom and for her economic opportunities, even though he had much less access to the latter than some others.

Despite the things they have in common, still, I cannot help reflecting that my father’s gratitude toward this country expressed itself in forms distinctly different than Professor Katyal’s, forms more recognizable as gratitude. I feel sure that my father left America better off by his relatively obscure contributions, a lifetime of hard labor and wartime military service, when he died in 1997. If Professor Katyal passed away tomorrow, I’m afraid I would find it very difficult to say the same of his more celebrated ones.

I do agree with Professor Katyal on one thing, though. I too cannot “imagine another country on earth in which (he) would be able to do what (he) ha(s) been able to do.”

How my father expressed his gratitude to the US:
Serving in the Marine Corps in the South Pacific

Yesterday evening, I caught a film, running on IFC, written and directed, by a more recent Yale graduate than most I know personally, Derek Simonds ‘94, titled Seven and a Match.

It was a rather depressing Gen X-ers’ version of Big Chill, in which late 20’s friends from Yale re-unite at one of their group’s family home in Maine.

The hostess Ellie (Tina Holmes) is in bad shape. Her parents were killed in a car crash, leaving Ellie nothing but the house, whose taxes alone she cannot cover from her own income. Ellie used to work at a camp for disabled children. Driven to desperation, Ellie has gone into a tail-spin, losing her job, selling her house’s furniture to get by, and scheming to burn it down for the insurance. Her college friends have been invited to supply cover for the intended arson.

It’s one of those weekends: renewing old friendships and animosities, status insecurities, fear of commitment, drinking, infidelities abound. Two girls cheat on their down-market boyfriends, but decide they want them after all, when the boyfriends start to walk out.

I was finding the film depressing, until there came a great moment.

After dinner, the gang retires to the living room to chat. Ellie reveals her problems and her plan, and the friends are not eager to participate, so Ellie sulks off to bed. Before long, struggling actor Sid (Eion Bailey) and bad blonde Whit (Heather Donahue, best known for the Blair Witch Project) are left alone, pouring down shots, and reminiscing about old times. “I had sex with Blair in that very chair,” boasts Sid, adding details about glassware broken during moments of passion. Whit rises, dims the lights, and pats the chair by way of invitation.

When he sits down, she climbs into his lap, then pauses, and observes: “There is something I like to say on occasions like this.” ...pause.. “It has become something of a tradition.” ....longer pause… and throwing back her head… “I’m really drunk!”

A line like that will make you forgive a lot in a movie.

I knew he was a commie, of course. But not until I read Martin Peretz, in the Wall Street Journal, did I realise that he is an hereditary commie of impeccable red-diaper origins: old money, with Exeter, Harvard, and Stalin as family traditions.

Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue “peace candidates,” and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It’s really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of “having arrived” up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him.

Diana Peterfreund’s Secret Society Girl is an agreeable example of High School/Adult Chick lit, with benefits.

(In a modest effort at discretion, names have all been changed.)

Smart and spirited Amy Haskell is a junior at “Eli University” (Yale), where she edits the “Lit Mag” (Yale Literary Magazine), and resides at “Prescott College” (Davenport or Pierson), and so on.

Amy had been expecting to be tapped for the humble literary Senior Society “Quill & Ink” (Manuscript), but instead receives an unexpected (and irresistible) invitation from the dreaded and all-powerful “Rose & Grave,” described as follows:

You’ve heard the legends, I’m sure. We’re the Ivy League’s dirty little secret. We run the country, even the states you wouldn’t think we’d care about, like Nebraska. We start wars, we coordinate coups, and we have a hand in writing the constitution of every new nation. Every presidential candidate is a member—that way, whoever wins, they’ll always be under our thumb.

The media fears us, which is silly, since the CEO of every newspaper and television network in the country is already a member of our brotherhood. We’ve been controlling every aspect of the media for more than a century, from deciding which movies get greenlighted to choosing the next American Idol. (Do you actually think your text-message votes count?)

We own most of the buildings of the university, as well as most of the land in the city, and we’ve got a good proportion of it bugged. The local police work for us. The mayor lives in our pocket. There’s not a student on campus who isn’t afraid to walk past our imposing stone tomb.

Election to our society is a ticket into a wildest dreams. Success is our birthright from the moment we emerge from our initiation coffins into our new lives as members of the society. Any job we want is within our reach, and any job we don’t want our enemies to have is out of theirs. We are given enormous monetary gifts upon graduation, as well as sports cars, valuable antiques, and a mansion on a private luxury island. We will never be arrested. We will never be impoverished. The society will see to that.

Our loyalty to the society supercedes everything else in our life—our families, our friendships, even our love lives. If anyone, even someone we care about with all our heart, mentions the name of our society in our presence, we must leave the room immediately and never speak to them again.

We can never tell anyone that we are members. We can never let anyone who is not a member into our tomb, or they’ll be killed.

We can never quit the society or reveal any of its secrets, or we’ll be killed.

Which of these rumors are true and which are overblown conspiracy theories?

I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

The author, Y ‘01, serves up a thinly veiled, but still quite informative picture, of the customs and ceremonies of a certain nameless Yale organization (whose membership includes both candidates in the 2004 Presidential election), along with what seems to be a pretty accurate description of the interior of a certain well-known building on High Street.

She plays with history just a bit for purposes of her plot, moving the confrontation within a certain society which occurred in 1991 over the selection of female intitiates between that year’s graduating class and the society’s alumni forward to the present day.

Like many school story protagonists of earlier day, Amy Haskell experiences serious doubts about her own commitment to ancient and arcane school traditions, as her new association with these quickly produces ugly conflict and personal cost. At first, she tries to free herself by rejecting those traditions, but she soon comes to understand that they have already become part of herself, and she must defend her own right to be part of them.

Book web-page.

William N. Wallace, along with another 53,000 Americans, as a ten year old boy, attended an epic battle between Yale and Princeton on November 17, 1934, in which the Yale eleven, playing both offense and defense for all 60 minutes, rose up from a previously mediocre record to best an undefeated Princeton team, favored by three touchdowns, and widely believed to be headed for the Rose Bowl.

Playing both ways without substitutions won this Yale team, five seniors, three juniors, and three sophomores, the title of Ironmen. Only three other teams, post-WWI had ever played 60 minutes without substitutions (Michigan and Illinois in 1925, and Brown in 1926). Yale’s 1934 team at Princeton played the last Ironman game of college football ever played.

Stanley Woodward of The Herald Tribune declared of the upset:

Eleven Yale football players with constitutions of iron and dispositions of wild cats perpetrated the signal outrage of modern athletics in Princeton’s Palmer Stadium today.

Robert Kelley of the Times:

Yale defeated Princeton today by a score of 7-0. In that sentence is packed all the deep excitement of the most popular drama that football or any other sport knows, the rise of the man without a chance, the refusal of the underdog to play the role that has been assigned to him.

This Yale-Princeton game set the ten year old boy on his path in life. He grew up to become a professional sportswriter, and at the close of a fifty year career (including 35 years with the New York Times), has produced a book on the unforgettable 1934 game. His profiles of the members of that illustrious Yale team (and several of their Princeton rivals), offer fascinating snapshot portraits of American life in last century via his investigation of the players’ origins, and his account of Ivy League life during the Depression, the impact of WWII, and their varying ultimate fates.

Two old Yale Political Union debaters clashed at Senate hearings on John Bolton’s confirmation as UN Ambassador.

And John Bolton. former Conservative Party Chairman, Yale Class of 1970, got the better of John Kerry, former Liberal Party Chairman, Yale Class of 1966.

video

Yale University received subpoenas from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation requesting 10 years of the university’s financial records connected with some 47 Federal research grants amounting to approximately $45 million dollars.
WebCPA:

A February report by the Department of Health and Human Services that referred to a gene research program found that more than a third of the university’s more than $500,000 in invoices did not comply with federal standards, and costs were improperly transferred across budget cycles to make up for shortfalls.

“Regardless of the outcome of the current investigation, we must get all our processes right and make sure that we are good stewards of the funds entrusted to us by the federal government,” Yale president Richard Levin said in a statement.

The most detailed press reports seem to indicate that the discrepancies are associated with stem cell research.

LifeNews.com

Dear old Yale was goofy enough to cooperate with a New York Times’ Sunday Mag feature all about how former Taliban roving ambassador Sayed Ramahtullah Hashemi was now studying at Yale, and wasn’t that so cool?

What with world events, the Taliban’s generally negative reputation, and the ready availability of some rather colorful interviews gven just a few years ago by Ramahtullah himself, poor Yale really got clobbered with the proverbial million dollars worth of bad publicity over all this. And it seems that those stout-hearted Yale administrators are getting tired of replying “No comment” to sarcastic questions from the Press.

The Yale Administration reflected long and hard, and came to the inevitable conclusion that fewer and better Ramahtullahs at Yale amounted to less grief for themselves, so (with the characteristic courage of their breed) they denied Ramahtullah’s application for admission as a degree candidate.

H/T to Michelle Malkin.

Those faculty no-confidence votes intended to punish Harvard President Larry Summers for failure to tow the political correctness party-line did result in Summers’ resignation, but all the Harvard faculty’s PC fun is going to have a cost: $100,000,000 dollars.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison had been plannng a very large donation, but he had signed no papers; and, absent Summers, Ellison is striking Harvard off his Xmas list.

Following the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers, Oracle boss Larry Ellison has decided not to donate over $100m to the university after all.

Ellison’s cash was to fund research into the quality of worldwide government healthcare problems, and according to Oracle’s spokespeople, Ellison viewed Summers’ participation as critical to the study.

“In light of Summers’ resignation, Larry Ellison has decided to reconsider his decision,” a spokesman told Reuters. “There was never a formal agreement but it had been talked about.”

The indiscreet New York Times Magazine feature last February rejoicing in the presence at Yale (in the capacity of a special student) of former Taliban roving ambassador and international spokesman Sayed Ramahtullah Hashemi led to a heap of controversy and proved a major embarassment to the university administration. But it’s an ill wind, and all that.

All the flak brought down upon liberal heads at Yale during the brouhaha over poor little Ramahtullah’s presence on campus intimidated the rascals. It was the million dollars worth of Ramahtullah-associated bad publicity that persuaded the powers that be at Yale to refrain from a far worse decision: the appointment of an egegrious apologist for Midde Eastern terrorism, the infamous Juan Cole, to a senior position on the faculty at Yale.

The decision is in. Cole is out.

And Juan Cole is now posting on his blog all about just how sour grow the grapes in old New Haven:

I am very happy at the University of Michigan, which has among the largest and oldest Middle East Studies programs in the United States. It is like Disney World for a Middle East specialist. To its credit, the University invested tens of millions of dollars in creating positions and building library and other resources in this field at at time when it was considered marginal by many other universities. Michigan also has a History Department that is among the very best and largest in the country, characterized by diversity of area specialization and innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship. It is a nurturing and congenial intellectual environment. Many fine departments in the US have a North Atlantic focus or bias, but Michigan for decades has had a global emphasis.

The press has some out of date impressions about our major research universities, imagining that the old hierarchy of Ivy League versus the rest is still meaningful. It is not. Research universities, whether state (Berkeley, the University of Michigan) or private, are much more similar than they are different. Were I ever to go to another place, it would likely be as a pioneer in a less well-developed Middle East Studies program, for the purpose of building up something that we already have at Michigan. That is, it would be a personal sacrifice for some purpose, and not a decision easily made.

Ah, yes! Michigan is just as good. We’re all sure you’ll be very happy staying there, Juan, old boy. And a good many Yale men are even happier than you are that you’re staying there.
—————————————-

Just how disgraceful a faculty appointment Juan Cole’s would have been may be discerned from a perusal of this Front Page article.

Harvard Economics professor Greg Mankiw reports that, at a recent faculty meeting, President Larry Summers confessed:

I have been troubled, and I believe you should be troubled, by survey data suggesting that student satisfaction at Harvard is much closer to the bottom than to the top of any list of leading American colleges, and that the relative satisfaction of our students declines with each year that they are here.

Noting that the Harvard Crimson had reported only days earlier Harvard’s unequalled admissions yield percentage, Mankiw reflects:

It is an odd business that has customers who are simultaneously unhappy about the product and eager to buy it.

Hat tip to PJM.

The Millionaires’ Unit makes for ironic reading in an era when elite universities like Yale won’t even allow ROTC units on campus, dining hall offerings include vegan, and pampered students are tutored by a corps of bolshie profs in fashionable poses of anti-American sophistication and smug Pacifist moral superiority.

Publisher’s Weekly describes Marc Wortman’s new book on the history of the Yale Flying Club, an aviation unit formed by Yale undergraduates even before America’s entry into into WWI to train to fight, as harkening

back to a bygone era when campus regattas were the place to be seen, Harvard-Yale football games drew crowds 80,000 strong and, perhaps most jarringly, American isolationism placed the country’s air command not just behind Germany’s fearsome air service, but behind British and French forces as well. Preparing themselves for fire fights and bombing missions that generated harrowing casualty figures, these wealthy, elite Yale students saw it as their responsibility to fight on the front lines, and in the first wave. In a brief but important epilogue, Wortman spells out just how profoundly the times, and in particular the Yale campus, has changed in the past 90 years.

Poor Louis Auchincloss Y ‘39, in the Wall Street Journal, makes a gallant attempt to stand up for his own class:

I seemed to sense at the end of Mr. Wortman’s narrative—I may have been wrong—an implication that the heroic spirit of the Millionaires’ Unit has somewhat departed from our land. But that spirit, which existed in World War II as well, was inspired in both conflicts by the barbarous attacks on our nation by dangerous and mighty foes. The sons of the rich have not seemed tempted to leave Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley to enlist in wars in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq, where a good half of our youth, if not more, saw no real threat to the country. But if attacked, I believe, we would find the same spirit that the old unit so splendidly showed. I know some of the descendants of those men, and I am sure we could count on them.

But, unless you count the British-flagged Lusitania, whose sinking cost the lives of 128 Americans, Germany did not, in fact, attack the US prior to US entry into WWI. And if we substituted today’s American elites for the WWI-era’s, Ivy League undergraduates would have obviously been found demonstrating against the Wilson Administration and the War, not training to fly combat missions. Pace Mr. Auchincloss and his WSJ editor, some of us do actually think America was attacked this time.

A Yale Senior Society Building

The Wall Street Journal today published a story (based on an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine) featuring just the kinds of themes illustrative of the arrogance and oppression of the ancien regime beloved by the hearts of liberal journalists.

Skull and Bones, the most prestigious of Yale’s senior societies, derives its public name from its use of that emblem, typical of the Freemasonry-inspired imagery adopted unversally by student fraternities founded in the 19th century Romantic era. Memento mori were characteristically exhibited to remind fraternity members that life is fleeting.

Skull and Bones, from the time of its foundation in 1832, has had a policy of deliberately encouraging wild rumors of its own dark secrets, influence, and power in order to enhance its prestige. One of the most popular legends, right up there with tales of guaranteed lifetime incomes, and Skull and Bones’ alleged control of governments and national economies, is the legend of the Bones collection of the skulls of famous individuals, including that of the famous Apache warrior, Geronimo.

The association of skulls with the society’s emblem supposedly makes their aquisition highly desirable to the society, so generations of enterprising and influential Yale men have spent their spare time bribing officials and excavating graveyards by moonlight in order to carry back prizes to be housed in the recesses of its High Street headquarters. The reality seems to be that the senior society does possess a human skull and pair of femurs, purchased as anatomical specimens back in the 19th century, which have been used emblematically since in annual photographs of class delegations.

A skull is a skull is a skull, and nothing has ever prevented dark hints that this particular skull is Geronimo’s, or Pancho Villa’s, or President van Buren’s. And like the legends of subsidized incomes, or the immense swimming pool supposedly in the club’s basement, the wilder the story, the more eagerly it was taken up and repeated as gossip in the college community. Bonesmen smiled behind the closed doors of their impressive clubhouse, as the hints they dropped, and the rumors they spread themselves, blossomed into wide acceptance, inspiring outsiders with awe.

The Geronimo skull legend made the news wires back about a generation ago, and in 1986 the Yale Society offered to return the supposed Geronimo relic to Indian possession, but Indian representatives were not satisfied with the skull they were offered and were unwilling to sign a receipt for its delivery.

Another account.

William Sloane Coffin Jr. was born in 1924 in New York City to a wealthy and prominent family. His great grandfather founded the prestigious W.& J. Sloane and Company department store in 1843. His father and grandfather attended Yale, where both were members of the illustrious Skull and Bones senior society.

Coffin attended the Buckley School in New York, Deerfield Academy and Andover, and Yale. His undergraduate education was interrupted by the draft in 1943. In the Army, he did not seek out combat assignments, but instead won admission to OCS, and trained as an interpreter. His most notable contribution to the war effort consisted of successfully sending some 1500 Russian prisoners of war back to death or prison in the Soviet Union. For which feat, he received the Army Commendation medal and a promotion.

He returned to Yale as a member of the graduating class of 1949. In accordance with family tradition, he was tapped for Bones. He wrote a senior paper revealingly titled: Notes Towards a History of Bolshevik Trade Unionism. In 1949, he entered Union Theological Seminary, then headed by his uncle, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, also a Yale graduate and Bonesman.

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 prompted Coffin to leave the seminary to serve as an Operations Officer with the CIA. Coffin was assigned to recruiting agents from refugee camps for covert entry into the Soviet Union. His first two groups of agents simply disappeared. Pravda ran a front page cover story detailing the capture of Coffin’s third and largest group of agents.

In 1953, Coffin left the CIA and returned to the seminary, this time, however, attending Yale Divinity School. He became famous as a Divinity Student for dashingly riding a BMW motorcycle, and for regaling fellow students with tales of war-time derring-do (stories of parachute drops behind enemy lines and secret missions), and for singing Russian songs.

In 1956, he married Eva Rubinstein, daughter of the famous Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein. They separated in 1968, and he married again later twice.

In 1956, he also accepted the position of chaplain at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He moved on to Williams College after one year, where he made a reputation as a radical by attacking fraternities for a dearth of minority admissions. In February 1958, he was finally offered “the only job (he) really wanted:” the chaplaincy at Yale.

Coffin brought the ideal combination of personal assets to the Yale Chaplain’s position: an impeccable blue-blood background (featuring deep Yale roots), and superior intelligence, combined with energy, charisma and dramatic flair. William Sloane Coffin could actually attract an audience to college chapel for the pleasure of watching him perform. A Coffin sermon would reliably be original, timely, and delivered with both humor and emotional depth.

Coffin’s career as chaplain coincided with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, and he quickly found that Civil Rights presented the perfect opportunity to utilize the message of Christianity to attack the existing order of Society from an unanswerable moral high ground. Predictably, elderly and sclerotic alumni demanded his dismissal, and equally predictably the Yale Establishment chose to view him as an invaluable asset: a brave, eloquent, and original in-house conscience.

The US War in Vietnam emerged in the mid-1960s as the pre-eminent leftist cause, and Coffin was among the earliest of Establishment luminaries to oppose the war. He joined the opposition’s ranks in the Summer of 1965. In addition to organizing protests, signing petitions, and servng on committees of opposition, Coffin employed his position as Chaplain of Yale University with tremendous skill in service to the cause.

Yale undergraduates inevitably experienced a certain moral discomfort, protected by student deferments and able to enjoy the all-too numerous pleasures of Ivy League Unversity life, with the knowledge that others of their own generation were being drafted to fight, and sometimes die, in their stead. It was naturally, therefore, highly agreeable to Yale undergraduates of those 1960s to be assured in the stentorian baritone voice of authority of their admired chaplain that the war was wrong, they were not only justified in avoiding serving, they were far, far morally superior to those who did!

Coffin used every means to indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates, starting (even prior to the beginning of Freshman year) at a Summer Retreat held for the benefit of religiously conscientous Protestant students, which he turned into an indoctrination seminar through which the youthful admirer of Reinhold Nieburh from the hinterlands was commonly transformed into Lenin’s useful idiot.

Doonesbury ©1972 G.B. Trudeau

The Anti-War Protest Movement made William Sloane Coffin a national figure. In 1968, along with Benjamin Spock, he was one of the “Boston Five,” indicted for conspiracy to violate the Selective Service laws (by public advocacy of resistance and evasion). The government ultimately dropped the case.

He was prominent in the 1970 protests opposing the trial in New Haven of several members of the Black Panthers for the torture-murder of Alex Rackeley, erroneously believed by his tormentors to have been a police informer. Coffin proclaimed in a sermon: “I am prepared as an anguished citizen to to confess my conviction that it might be legally right but morally wrong for this trial to go forward.”

In 1972, Coffin went to Hanoi to “accept” the release of three America POWs as part of a major North Vietnamese propaganda operation. He repeated the same kind of stunt in 1979 by accepting the invitation of the Iranian government to celebrate Christmas with the American hostages in Teheran.

But as the 1970s advanced, with the Vietnam War and the Protest Movement winding down, Nixon in the White House, and the old Yale passing away as the result of the impact of coeducation, Coffin experienced increasing problems in his personal life. He took a year’s sabbatical from Yale in 1973, hoping to write his memoirs and save his second marriage. The effort failed. In November 1974, he inflicted a hairline skull fracture on his second wife. He had begun to beat her when they quarreled.

In January, he informed President Brewster that he would not be seeking another five year extension of his contract as Yale’s chaplain.

His career seemed at an end. He moved in with Arthur Miller for six months, and finally took refuge in a barn at his brother’s house in Vermont. He began keeping company with the female manager of the local general store, whom he eventually married seven years later. In 1977, however, he was called to the pulpit of Riverside Church on Manhattan’s liberal Upper West Side.

The Riverside appointment allowed Coffin to enjoy again a comfortable position of suitable social importance which he could also use as a base for political activism. He stepped down in 1987 (after a confrontation with a prominent Black minister over the church’s position on homosexuality) to accept the presidency of SANE/Freeze, the well-known Soviet front organization. He retired circa 1990.

He died yesterday at his home in Stratford, Vermont, at the age of 81, of congestive heart failure.

His talents were as great as his views were unsound. William Sloane Coffin undoubtedly contributed as much as any other single individual to the conversion of the American community of fashion to political Radicalism. I strongly suspect that he was a knowing and conscious Soviet Agent of Influence.

Nearly a hundred million people in Southeast Asia today live under despotism and in poverty, and 58 thousand Americans died in vain, because William Sloane Coffin (and a small group of allies) succeeded in changing the opinions of the majority of Yalemen, and the majority of Americans, in a few short years in the late 1960s.

Associated Press

Flagg Youngblood Y’97, and non-Yalies Jason Mattera and Jedediah Jones, have cooked up a satirical Application for Admission to Yale for the likes of Rahmatullah Hashemi.
—————————————————-
Hat tip to Scott Drum Y’70.

John Fund doesn’t get the Yale Alumni Magazine, which seems a pity. If John had looked into the latest issue today, he would have discovered that admitting young Rahmatullah as a special student is just the tip of the iceberg (excuse me! sand dune) in Yale’s latter day pilgrimage in the direction of Mecca.

The Alumni Mag reports that Yale these days has a student belly dancing society (founded 2003) with 30 members. O tempora, o mores!

(I was hoping the web-site offered a DVD, but no such luck.)

John Fund was eager to take his journalistic Jihad against former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, now attending Yale as a special student, to young Rahmatullah’s current home ground in a Yale Political Union debate (to be held March 29th), featuring the indignant Mr. Fund and his presumptive ally, former Army Captain Flagg Youngblood, Y’97.

The members of the YPU’s Executive Board had the good taste, however, to decline to hold a debate on the question of whether another student at Yale ought to have been admitted in the first place. Debating such a question would be ungentlemanly, to say the least. And, frankly, if one started debating who really should have been admitted to Yale, and who should not have been, considering some of Yale’s graduates, it would only be too easy to debate nothing else. Good for the Union E-Board. They did the right thing.

Yale and special student Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former Taliban ambassador, have doubtless been hoping the controversy created by that February 26th New York Times Magazine feature article would finally subside, but John Fund of the Wall Street Journal today is continuing his personal jihad, moving on to playing gotcha! with the Yale administration over a heated email.

Beyond a single vague 144-word statement (later expanded to 281 words, including a defense of Yale’s not hosting a ROTC program), Yale won’t let anyone comment officially, citing student privacy issues and hoping they can keep silent and last out the storm. But unofficially, some Yale administrators are privately trashing critics. One even anonymously sent scathing emails to two critics calling them “retarded” and “disgusting.”

That official—Alexis Surovov, assistant director of giving at Yale Law School—did talk to me. Last Wednesday, Mr. Surovov sent an angry email from a Columbia University account to Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, two young Yale grads who are so frustrated at their alma mater’s refusal to answer questions about Mr. Rahmatullah that they’ve launched a protest. Called NailYale, it focuses on the Taliban’s barbaric treatment of women, which extended to yanking out the fingernails of those who wore nail polish. In a column on TownHall.com, they urged alumni “not give one red cent this year, but instead send Yale a red press-on fingernail.”

Mr. Surovov, a Yale alumnus who has worked in its development office for three years and is on the board of the Yale Club of New Haven, wrote Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber at their private email addresses with the subject heading: “Y [sic] do you hate Yale.” Here is his email in its entirety: “What is wrong with you? Are you retarded? This is the most disgraceful alumni article that I have ever read in my life. You failed to mention that you’ve never contributed to the Yale Alumni Fund in your life. But to suggest that others follow your negative example is disgusting.”

Intrigued that someone had looked up his wife’s giving record, David Bookstaber, a Yale computer science graduate, used Columbia’s publicly accessible IT account database to trace the anonymous email. The trail led straight to Mr. Surovov’s Yale office. On Thursday Mr. Taylor phoned Mr. Suvarov, who told him he was angry because the furor over the Taliban official was hurting fund raising and could lower Yale’s rankings in the next U.S. News & World Report college survey. He also accused Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber of “terrorist tactics,” which when challenged he amended to “terror tactics.”

John mentions, in conclusion, that he also spoke to someone sensible:

A former Yale admissions official told me Mr. Rahmatullah’s acceptance into the special student program normally would give him a clear advantage when he applies for the full-degree program next month. “Now that their stealth admission of a Taliban official is public after eight months, the best thing Yale can do now is suggest he ‘study abroad’ next year,” he told me. “Otherwise, they risk losing all credibility if they keep letting him study there while flatly refusing to explain their decision to anyone.”

Earlier posts.
——————————-

Mr. Justin Cox, one of the contributors to Opinion Work Product, which seems to be a two man blog originating at Yale Law School, posted a comment to a recent Rahmatullah posting here in which he rebuked me, saying that “the debate regarding Hashemi is far more nuanced and complex than you are letting on.” And advising me that, for a fairer treatment of the issue, I should run, not walk, over to Opinion Work Product to get the straight dope.

I looked at them, and thought their contents were less witty, and no more balanced, than my own postings, but I do thank Mr. Cox for bringing them, and his blog, to my attention. Mr. Cox supplied five links, which may very well be of interest to all true Rahmatullah controversy devotees.

Some right-wing angry alumni (who can’t be all that conservative, since I don’t know them), are proposing a new form of protest over the presence at Yale of special student Sayed Rahmatulah Hashemi, former spokesman for the Taliban.

Clint Taylor ‘96 and Debbie Bookstabber ‘00 report receiving the idea by email:

One email stood out from the rest — “I won’t give Yale one red cent this year, but maybe I will give them a red fingernail instead!”

She was referring to the Taliban’s policy of pulling the fingernails off of Afghani women who dared to wear fingernail polish. Some of these women even had their thumbs sliced off as punishment. To date, Mr. Rahmatullah has not apologized or taken responsibility for his support of this brutal regime, though he told the Times he wished he’d been “a little bit softer” in his advocacy.

If you’d like to show your outrage at Yale’s decision to admit the Taliban’s spokeman, join us in “giving Yale the finger.” It would be disgusting— not to mention really painful — to mail your own fingernails, but you can buy glamorous, decadent, shameless-hussy-scarlet press-on nails (ask for “nail tips”) from any drug store or beauty shop. They’re cheap; a box costs about $5.00. (Caution to Harvard-educated readers: do not eat the press-on nails. Sure, they look tasty, but they will make you sick.)

Send them to Yale’s Office of Development, along with a polite (or not-so-polite) letter explaining what you think of their decision to admit Rahmatullah:

Yale University
Office of Development
P.O. Box 2038
New Haven, CT 06521-2038

President Richard C. Levin
Woodbridge Hall
Yale University
New Haven Connecticut 06520

Poor little Rahmatullah was mercilessly pursued around the Yale campus by Sean Hannity playing paparazzi last week. And John Fund, in the Journal, also still refuses to bury the Khyber knife, dredging up hostile memories and furnishing them up with all the trimmings:

Last week I described Mr. Rahmatullah’s remarkable visit to The Wall Street Journal’s offices in the spring of 2001. After a meeting in which he defended the Taliban’s treatment of women and said he hadn’t seen any evidence that their “guest” Osama bin Laden was a terrorist, I felt I had looked into the face of evil.

I walked Mr. Rahmatullah out. I will never forget how he stopped at a picture window and stared up at the World Trade Center, which terrorists had failed to destroy in 1993. When I finally pried him away, I couldn’t help but think, He must have been thinking about the one that got away.

We do need to look at the facts. The Taliban regime, though ultimately proving highly objectionable and decidedly ungrateful, did emerge originally from the ranks of allies of the United States against the Soviet Occupation. So Taliban ties were not (originally, at least) ipso facto anti-American. Ramahtullah was kind of an ersatz diplomat, really, not a meaningful official of the noxious government. He was a junior Afghan State Department officer, who was essentially allowed to assume the title of ambassador-at-large, and go abroad on a trip paid for by overseas sponsors (like that nice Mr. Hoover) to act as a spokesman for the regime, which undoubtedly had a serious shortage of English-speaking personnel or PR resources.

Rahmatullah took some barbarous positions during his 2001 visit, but he was (a) young, and (b) a barbarian, after all. I agree with Mr. Fund that Rahmatullah’s views were deplorable, but if Mr. Fund were as well acquainted as I am with the kinds of views which used to be popular among my contemporaries at Yale during our own domestic Taliban’s period of ascendancy during the War in Vietnam era, he wouldn’t think Rahmatullah as bad as he does. Who knows? Perhaps, like so many fiery revolutionaries I used to know, Rahmatullah will, in the end, wind up a dentist in Cleveland, or a stock broker in Houston, and a Republican.

It is, of course, untrue, that Rahmatullah is usurping a seat at some Yale dining hall table, which ought to have gone to a highly qualified American, who was turned down by Yale, and who therefore had to settle for Harvard. Rahmatullah was admitted as a supernumerary special student, and will have to perform academically before Yale will graciously consider allowing him to become a candidate for a degree. They won’t consequently admit one fewer person next year. Nor are they giving him a scholarship. His tuition is being paid by a foundation, so Rahmatullah is really currently a minor profit center for the university.
———————————————————-

Clinton W. Taylor, Y’96, mocks the administration’s gesture at ecumenicism, in the American Spectator, with gusto:

Yale’s then-Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Richard Shaw (for whom I worked as an undergraduate, and who at that time seemed like a nice man with no indications of incipient lunacy) told the New York Times Magazine that “another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber” applied to Yale the year before, but “we lost him to Harvard,” and “I didn’t want that to happen again.” So that’s what happened to Baghdad Bob!

RAHMATULLAH
(Formerly “Boola, Boola!”)

Rahmatullah, Rahmatullah,
Mullah Omar’s speaking through ya,
When they blew up
The Bamyan Buddhas
Did you holler Boola Boola?

DHIMMI YALE
(Formerly “Bulldog! Bulldog! Eli Yale!”)

Burqa! Burqa! Get your gals
Behind the veil…
Burqa! Burqa! In-fi-dels
Are going to burn in hell…
Oh, when Jews and Christians step o’er the line
We’ll behead those we don’t impale
Burqa! Burqa! Enslave each frau…
Dhimmi Yale!

BRIGHT SCIMITARS
(Formerly “Bright College Years”)

(Talib)
Bright sci-mi-tars, both swift and sharp
Keep women cow’ring ‘neath a tarp
We’ll stone the sluts in Woolsey Hall,
Then crush the gays beneath a wall…
(Student Chorus)
The Taliban is here, you see
And primitive barbarity
Is peachy kee-e-een at Yale today
Jihad’s apologists are here to stay.
(Talib)
The skulls and bones of those we’ve killed,
The seas of guiltless blood we’ve spilled,
Those Buddhas that we bombed to scrap,
Are excused by multicultural crap…
(Student Chorus)
So let us strive that ever we
More tolerant of Jihad be
For, just like all of us, the Taliban
Has suffered uh-uh-under Dubya’s hand!

The Sunday Times Magazine did a feature yesterday on Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, now attending Yale. “I’m the luckiest person in the world.” Rahmatullah told the Times, “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale,” where (not surprisingly) one of his recent courses was:”Terrorism-Past, Present and Future.”

Yale was equally delighted. Yale’s admissions office had once had another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber apply for special-student status, Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Times. “We lost him to Harvard. I didn’t want that to happen again.” The allegedly 27 year-old (who has a history of changing his reported age) former Taliban had visited Yale once before, speaking in March of 2001 as diplomatic representative of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. His diplomatic assignment came about as the idea of Mike Hoover, American adventurer, mountain-climber, and film-maker. In 1998, Rahmatullah was assigned by the Taliban government to guide Hoover and serve as his translator. Hoover became the young Afghan’s friend and benefactor, first suggesting the role of representing the Islamic regime abroad, then personally funding travel expenses and arranging speaking appearances and interviews.

The Rahmatullah of 2001 was turbaned, more hirsute, and a lot more combative than today’s Yale student. He vigorously criticized UN sanctions on the Afghan regime, and casuistically defended the dynamiting of the ancient buddhas and the segregated place of women in Taliban-ruled Afghan society.Rahmatullah was married and living in exile in Pakistan, after the fall of the Taliban regime, when in 2004 Hoover, his perennial benefactor, proposed sending him to college in the United States. Hoover consulted with an attorney friend from Jackson Hole, Bob Schuster Y’67, who helped him arrange for Rahmatullah to be interviewed for admission as a special student, a temporary status, reflecting his 4th grade education and high school equivalency diploma, convertable after a year of satisfactory academic performance to regular baccalaureate study.

Waiting to hear from Yale, Rahmatullah spent the holidays in Jackson Hole with Hoover. He met Bob Schuster and spoke to students at several local schools. The talks reprised the form if not the content of his lectures in America in 2001. After a talk to the young teenagers at the Jackson Hole Middle School, two boys approached Rahmatullah.

“Can we ask you a question? Have you ever been in a war?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us about it? We want to be Army Rangers.”

He thought for a second. “Do you guys play video games?”

“Yeah,” they said, looking at him as if he had rocks for brains.

“I thought so,” he said. “Let me ask you, have either of you ever killed a chicken?”

They shook their heads. They didn’t know anyone who even had chickens.

“When was the last time you had to kill anything to eat?”

They were confused.

“I killed a goat before I came here,” Rahmatullah said. “I hated doing it. Go kill a chicken, and pluck it, and eat it,” he said softly. “And then maybe you will know a little bit about war.”

John Fund waxes pretty sarcastic about all this in the Wall Street Journal.  But it is true that there is a long-standing tradition of Ivy League schools reaching out to provide educational opportunities to promising representatives of non-traditional constituencies, and the appetite of such schools for candidates with good stories or colorful backgrounds could be predicted to assure a warm welcome for any plausible Pashtun.

2001 Interview

Boston Magazine attributes Summers’ demise to bad manners.

When visitors came to his office, Summers propped his feet up on a table, sometimes with his shoes off. He often appeared in public with a toothpick dangling from his mouth. He repeatedly mangled the names of people he was greeting or introducing. If someone said something he deemed uninteresting or foolish, he would conspicuously roll his eyes. Other times Summers would stare into space when being spoken to, as if no one else were in the room. “Larry’s always looking away,” says one junior professor. “At first you think he’s scanning the room for someone more important, but no, he’s just looking away.” And then there was the recurring problem of his eating and talking at the same time, during which Summers sometimes sprayed saliva on his audience….

The Harvard Crimson… repeatedly noted how Summers’s lack of social graces impeded his interaction with students and faculty. The new president’s manners, or lack thereof, were so widely discussed that student reporters were really just transcribing an omnipresent campus conversation.

Summers also had a bizarre habit of falling asleep in public. Eyewitnesses caught him dozing at a talk by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a lecture by United Nations head Kofi Annan, a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev in Sanders Theatre, a service at Harvard Hillel, and a festival celebrating cultural diversity.

When he was more engaged by speakers, Summers often acted derisively toward them. At one fall 2001 meeting with the law-school faculty, a female professor asked a question that Summers didn’t think much of. “That’s a stupid question,” he responded. Later that autumn, he brusquely terminated an interview with a female journalist from the Financial Times after a disagreement over whether his remarks were on or off the record. Just as they had at Treasury, his aides insisted that Summers’s style was typical of the intellectual free-for-all that characterized economics seminars and that people shouldn’t take it personally. Inevitably, they did.

So great was the bewilderment over Summers’s lack of social skills that some in the Harvard community wondered if there might be a clinical reason for his behavior: a neurobiological disorder called Asperger’s syndrome.

According to people familiar with the situation, Mr. Summers also alienated Jack R. Meyer, who until last year was chief executive of Harvard Management Corp. The group oversees Harvard’s endowment and posted strong gains under Mr. Meyer’s tenure. He and about 29 others in the fixed-income group left the affiliate last year. Although it wasn’t the catalyst for his departure, Mr. Meyer was disappointed Mr. Summers didn’t stand up to alumni who criticized some employees’ pay, these people say. The controversy reached a head in 2003, when the top two HMC investment managers earned $35.1 million and $34.1 million, respectively.

Meyer’s mananagement team increased the portion of Harvard’s endowment they administered by an average of 16.1% per year over a decade, growing it by billions (from $4.8 to $22.6 billion over the period from 1990 to 2004), so Summers’ failure in this department was no simple symbolic culture wars’ defeat. Harvard stands to lose an incalculable amount of asset growth as the result of Summers’ cowed posture in response to personal damage sustained in previous quarrels with the left.

Larry Summers is resigning (under faculty fire) as president of Harvard. He had been brought in by the Corporation, in the Spring of 2001, as a representative of Clintonian Democratic Party centrism, with the goal of wresting that university’s management and destiny out of the hands of representatives of the aberrant culture of leftwing radicalism which has flourished in post-1960s academic institutions the way kudzu flourishes beside Southern highways. Summers was given a vote of no confidence by the faculty of Arts and Sciences last March as punishment for a mild remark speculating on the possibility of intrinsic gender differences playing some partial role in the smaller numbers of females working as professionally as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.

In the 18th century, tyrannical presidents of the great American colleges first ruthlessly purged faculties and student bodies of New Light deviationists from Congregationalist Orthodoxy, then later when the Great Awakening prospered, also purged the Old Light survivors of earlier efforts at uniformity.

Summers’ defeat deserves to be viewed as a modern repetition of the ancient struggles at Harvard and Yale over the fine points of theology. Summers represented the worldly and optimistic party of affirmative Democratic governance, adaptable to post-Reagan changes in the national agenda, reconciled to the necessities of the free market, and committed to technocratic pragmatism. He is being driven out by a consensus loyal to a culture of conformity in thrall to leftist extremism, committed to the politics of ressentiment, the apocalyptic condemnation of Euro-American history, and to the rejection of market capitalism.

When Summers dared to criticize Afro-American studies professor Cornell West and suggested that popular notions of feminine victimhood might possibly be exaggerated, the result was much as if one of his 17th century predecessors had ventured upon criticism of Predestination, and expressed doubts concerning some of the articles of the Augsburg Confession. Summers’ defeat represents indubitably the triumph of a reactionary orthodoxy at Harvard, and an explicit rejection of the idea of a reconciliation between the academic community and the diurnal political reality of America in the 21st Century.

UN Ambassador John Bolton (a college classmate of mine) is one of two Americans nominated by Sweden’s former deputy prime minister Per Ahlmark, for playing a major role in exposing Iran’s secret plans to develop nuclear weapons. The American left must be, as they say, having a cow.

Radio Blogger reveals that Joe Biden is more than a little conflicted about Princeton.

The pro-Princeton statements: It’s an honor to be here. It would have even been a greater honor to have gone here. &c. were from February 23, 2004.

The anti-Princeton statements: I didn’t even like Princeton…No, I mean I really didn’t like Princeton. &c. are from yesterday’s Alito hearing.
——————————————————Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Scott Johnson of Power Line links an Investors Business Daily editorial which notes:

Representatives of autocratic theocracies that finance terror, oppress women and consider homosexuality a capital crime are welcomed at Harvard and other campuses. But not the U.S. Marines.

Harvard red crimson in tooth and claw department:

Does Harvard need its own glossy life-style magazine for the sophisticated coed? Two Harvard sophomores thought so, and each produced her own.

Scene—a would-be Vanity Fair for 02138 Ivies, founded by a no-nonsense art history major who interned at YM in ninth grade—hit the Harvard campus Thursday morning [12/1]. Freeze—a CosmoGIRL! for the Crimson coed, founded by a fast-talking government major who’s into romance novels and Audrey Hepburn—launches Dec. 9. Both mags are written, edited, photographed, and designed by Harvard undergraduates. Both are light reads, downtime diversions with columns on sex and clothes modeled by students.

Comparison:

WHY?

To readers from Scene co-editors Emily Washkowitz and Rebecca Kaden:
‘’We think of Scene as what is missing from the standard Harvard tour. It is not Harvard as reputation holds, but the Harvard as we, the students who make it, know it. It is an attempt to capture the detail—to portray the events, the people, the passions and the talents that make up the experience that we are all a part of.”

To readers from Freeze editor Thea Sebastian:
‘’I believe in escapism. I believe that world politics and micro-finance are important, sure. But sometimes, we all need to relax. . . . Fundamentally college kids need something their OWN. They need a periodical that specifically targets THEM —and bridges that crucial gap between Friday night football and 9-5 America.”

WHERE?

Scene’s New York chic: from ‘’Wearing Deco”

‘’The Chrysler Building is an icon of the Manhattan skyline. But for Lewis A. Remele ‘06, an Art History concentrator, it’s an inspiration for a cocktail dress.”

Freeze’s Boston schtick: from ‘’10 Perfect Dates in Boston”

‘’The Mapparium: One of Boston’s most awe-inspiring sights, this is an absolute must for any winter date.”

WHO?

From Scene’s ‘’The 10 People on the Scene You Ought to Know”

‘’Jack McCambridge is probably the most widely known name on the Harvard campus. He seems to do everything—a leader on the Harvard Concert Commission, involved in the UC and the Harvard AIDS Coalition, President of the Fox, the list goes on.”

From Freeze’s ‘’10 Hot Harvard Men”

Peter Wood on his first kiss: ‘’I was in eighth grade at the time. I vividly recall spending about an hour the night before making out with my hand to practice.”

WHAT?

From Scene’s ‘’Ready for Takeoff”

‘’Where is a hipster to turn for some cerebral pop music? Chances are Sufjan Stevens didn’t come to mind for most people, but it’s about time that you make that adjustment.”

From Freeze’s ‘’Embarrassing Moments”

‘’One day, in the middle of the summer, my friend dared me to take off my entire bathing suit, while swimming at a horribly crowded public beach. . . . Well, to make a long story short, we searched for my bikini pants for about an hour.”

The third-year students at Yale Law find the dominium of orthodoxy at their elite school troubling.

Yale Law School’s almost universal disapproval of the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear, yet again, the stark lack of ideological diversity here in New Haven… Notably lacking among Yale’s professors has been any vigorous defense of Judge Alito or of the conservative judicial philosophy he’s believed to hold. No one has stepped forward to defend or even suggest that the country would be better off with another Roe vs. Wade skeptic on the court who is also an “originalist” (believes the Constitution should be interpreted as it was originally written) and a federalist (believing in strict separation of federal and state powers). Such ideas supposedly belong to conservative extremists, who are considered beyond the pale at Yale Law School… We don’t say this to whine about being underrepresented as conservatives at Yale Law School. But the school’s lack of diversity increasingly represents a scholarly and pedagogical problem for Yale. For example, the Rehnquist court was a revolution in the country’s jurisprudence. Except as fuel for denunciations of the court’s conservative majority, these developments have gone largely unnoticed in the scholarship of Yale Law’s professors…. There is something odd when a major strain of American jurisprudence can’t find a single defender at the country’s top law school.

The Yale branch of the Federalist Society constitutes the solitary voice of heresy able to be heard within the Gothic corridors of the nation’s highest rated institution of legal education.
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Juan Non-Volokh links an article by Yale Law Professor Peter Schuck in the American Lawyer on the lack of viewpoint diversity at elite law schools. Professor Schuck observes:

... a teaching institution that constructs an ideologically one-sided faculty, whether liberal or conservative, seriously abdicates its pedagogical responsibilities. Professors have a sacred duty to their students and to each other to affirm-and also to exemplify-core academic and intellectual values. We should convey to our students an abiding respect, even awe, for the complexity of law in society, and we should exhibit the ideological humility that this complexity implies. Any professors worthy of the title have strong views, of course, but they should also have a keen sense that those views may be wrong, or based on incomplete evidence, or highly reductive. Even if we are utterly convinced of the correctness of our positions, we should teach as if we aren’t-as if there are serious counterpositions to be entertained and explored, as if even the truth cannot be fully apprehended until it is challenged by the best arguments that can be marshaled against it. And although scrupulous teachers can sometimes challenge their own deepest convictions in class, most of us need competing points of view-on our own faculties, debated before our own students-to keep us intellectually honest and to enrich learning.