Typical Yale secret society initiation (clothed phase) (click on image for larger version.)
This year’s February 19th Pundits’ initiation party apparently featured slightly heavier drinking than usual. A student informant (who knows if he was telling the truth?) told the Yale Daily News that five attendees wound up at Yale-New Haven Hospital and six others at Yale’s Department of University Health.
11 out 50 attendees rendered so hors de combat by drinking that they had to seek medical attention? Not just impressive, Homeric really. Vital positions have been taken in military engagements whose memories echo through history with lower percentage casualties.
The same person (who could possibly be just a little prone to exaggeration) also told the YDN that he saw “a member of the Pundits forcing attendees to kiss each other and that a Pundit forced a male friend’s face onto another’s penis.”
Three Dog Night clearly composed this little number after one of the Pundits’ parties.
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This year’s Pundits initiation party rapidly achieved national news coverage.
A pundit is an expert, a vendor of influential, nay, determinative opinions. According to Wikipedia, it even seems most probable that the common vernacular use of the term pundit has “its origins in a Yale University society known as “The Pundits” which, founded in 1884, developed a reputation for including among its members the school’s most incisive and humorous critics of contemporary society. ... Several members of the society have also gone on to become leading political pundits, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author and energy expert Daniel Yergin. Other notable Yale Pundits include A. Whitney Griswold, Lewis H. Lapham and Joe Lieberman.”
The founder of the Pundits, as an undergraduate at Yale, was the illustrious William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), who went on to become essentially the leading Humanities scholar in the United States in his day, and a long-time, enormously admired professor at Yale. Billy Phelps was, in fact, the original prototype of the star professor, whose lectures were so witty, so brilliant, and entertaining, that attendance at his course became known as a not-to-be-missed feature of the Yale undergraduate experience. Phelps was in the first half of the last century what Vincent Scully was when I was an undergraduate.
The Pundits (founded in 1884) doubtless did not originally hold naked parties, but contented themselves with assembling the wittiest and most brilliant members of the Senior Class for a weekly dinner at Mory’s, and participating in a series of elaborate pranks and lampoons intended to deflate pomposity and pretension.
When I was an undergraduate, late 1960s-early 1970s, the Pundits had become moribund and inactive. They seem to have been revived in the late 1970s, during a period in which a reaction to all the leftwing piety and politically correct cant of the Vietnam era set in and Yale undergraduates began once again reveling in undergraduate life, throwing parties, and reviving fraternities and other social organizations.
My Yale informants tell me that it was Yale’s oldest a capella singing group, the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus, founded in 1938 and usually referred to as “The SOBs,” which began throwing regular naked parties during the late 1980s. The Pundits, known earlier for lobster-and-champagne lunches on the steps of Sterling Memorial Library, had some kind of ties to the SOBs and, from them, acquired the custom of the naked party.
I found, via the Yale Daily News, a Hustler article published in 2007, by a-then-sophomore describing the Pundits taking advantage of Ivy League naked parties hitting the national media to spoof the New York Times.
[W]hen the New York Times called, the Pundits weren’t about to cooperate. One of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers wanted to do a story about them, but the tricksters just did what they do best—they fucked with someone’s mind. Assigned to get a firsthand account of a naked party at Yale, Times reporter Rachel Aviv contacted the Pundits. They would later bring her to a real one, but not before throwing a special shindig on her behalf. Mr. E’s eyes light up recounting the story: “Instead of a lot of people drinking and mingling in a dark, well-decorated room, we brought her to a brightly lit library in which just a couple dozen of us were sitting around and playing board games.
After the Taboo, Uno, Scrabble, etc. were concluded, we did some naked charades and then, to top it off, some naked trust falls off a table.” Likewise, Ms. Aviv’s story on the seedy underbelly of an Ivy League school was collapsing faster than Judy Miller could say, “WMDs.” The Times reporter had to be freaking out, but maybe she was just confounded by the intensity of naked charades. The evening’s coup de grâce came when the revelers gathered into groups of three to eight, distributed condoms and left. The bewildered journalist could do nothing but struggle to jot down a few notes and then slide her pants back on. The Pundits, explains one tall and impeccably dressed member, “make sure there’s never a moment when everything’s okay.”
If the Pundits were fucking with the media’s mind back in 2007 on the naked-parties-at-Ivy-League-schools meme, why, I wonder, do not reporters this year worry that those mischievous Pundits may be playing mind games with them again?
Undergraduate binge-drinking, hazing rituals, and naked parties are all ingredients perfectly calculated to make journalists sit up and beg the same way ham affects my basset hound.
It may very well be that this year’s Pundits’ initiation party scandal is just one more of the nation’s leading prankster organizations elaborate satirical spoofs.
William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), founder of the Pundits.
Sam MacDonald gives a nice compliment to a particular Yale undergraduate organization.
I honestly think that if I ever were to take a sharp right turn, I would very much prefer to send my kids to Brown than to one of the strongly “conservative” colleges. Just to challenge them. I don’t think kids are THAT malleable. For heaven’s sake, half of the conservative movement is run by members of Yale’s Party of the Right. They somehow managed to emerge from the indoctrination unscathed.
Change. When I entered Yale as a freshman, back during the Consulate of Plancus, we thought that we were living in the Age of Marvels, occupying the privileged throne at the very summit and pinnacle of human technological civilization, because we could (nearly) all arrive at college armed with brand, spanking new Royal electric portable typewriters.
The image of Nathan Hale skillfully cutting goose quills to suitable points for penning his Yale examinations in Attic Greek did not fail to cross our minds, as we reveled in possession and use of Coerasable Bond typing paper and found ourselves able to compose our assigned essays with crisp and languidly easy electronic keystrokes, not even needing to pound our way through them on then already-old-fashioned manual typewriters.
The jeunesse dorée in those days actually sometimes possessed IBM Selectric typewriters, featuring easily switchable typeballs offering amazing and astonishing font options. The ultimate luxury was represented by the most recent IBM Selectric models which could backspace and remove one’s typos.
I had one acquaintance from so humble a background that he laboriously hand-wrote his first assigned paper, producing a 150-page dialogue between Socrates and the Nihilist in response to an assigned 5-page paper on the Theaetetus.
I believe Yale issues every entering freshman these days with his own Apple notebook PC. (I was reflecting on this just now, and feeling a bit of pity for the Yalies of today who will discover eventually that the real world typically gets by with cheaper PCs, running Windows.)
I am unusually in touch with modern life for someone of my advanced years. I have loads of Yale undergraduate friends (from Yale conservative organizational circles) on Facebook, so I enjoy a privileged access to life in 2011.
I was highly amused to discover that Yale undergraduates today remain keen optimizers, and express their own perfection of life opportunities these days by compensating for the limited social acquaintance representing the inevitable price of overachieving tooledness by employing an Internet service to supply random luncheon connections with equally lonely strangers.
Miserable, isolated (probably premed), and unhappy (and at Yale)? Try YaleLunch.com (in beta).
And, if it is all too much to bear and you need to vent. Or if, alternatively, things are going perfectly swimmingly and you desire to gloat, drop by YALE FML and share your anonymous one-line descriptions of your personal metaphysical state. Your contemporaries will respond with words of wisdom and expressions of heartfelt sympathy along the lines of this posted response. (which, since the database of that beta seems not to be working, I will explain reads: NO ONE GIVES A F*CK.)
This week, the Yale Glee Club is having its own reunion timed to coincide with the anniversary of the organization’s founding in February of 1861. The Midnight at Yale feature tries to put the Glee Club’s longevity into proper perspective.
If your only exposure to choral music has been listening to Carmina Burana in Super Bowl commercials, please allow us to point out that we existed 106 years prior to the first Super Bowl and 74 years before Carmina Burana was composed.
That got us thinking.
1861 was, of course, the beginning of the American Civil War.
Theodore Roosevelt turned three in 1861, and Sigmund Freud turned six.
The Pony Express was in full swing.
The flush toilet was patented.
Russian Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom.
Italy was unified.
Kansas was admitted as the 34th state in the Union
In 1862, the Internal Revenue Service was founded and Claude Debussy was born.
The Brahms Requiem is eight years younger than the Yale Glee Club.
Wagner’s Tristan is three years younger.
The entire planethood of Pluto, from discovery to dismissal, is a subset of the Glee Club’s existence.
Walter Kirn, in his autobiographical Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever, describes the post-modern English major experience and explains the nature of the conversion process to full membership in the contemporary elite educated community of fashion.
[A] suffocating sensation often came over me whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a collection of essays by leading theory people that I spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force Herę is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name: “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered the windpipe-blocking “heteronomous” and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across— stuck in a footnote—”unreadability.”
That word I understood, of course.
But real understanding was rare with theory. It couldn’t be depended on at all. Boldness of execution was what scored points. With one of my professors, a snappy “heuristic” usually did the trick. With another, the charm was a casual “praxis.” Even when a poem or story fundamentally escaped me, I found that I could save face with terminology, as when I referred to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as “semiotically unstable.” By this I meant “hard.” All the theory words meant “hard” to me, from “hermeneutical” to “gestural.” Once in a while I’d look one up and see that it had a more specific meaning, but later—some-times only minutes later—the definition would catch a sort of breeze, float away like a dandelion seed, and the word would go back to meaning “hard.”
The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery-” honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps—left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted. Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds. We recognized one another instantly. We toted around books by Roland Barthes, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Walter Benjamin. We spoke of “playfulness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that the Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert. In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors—the ones who drank with us at the Nassau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up our pants and skirts—we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.
For true believers, the goal of theory seemed to be the lifting of a great weight from the shoulders of civilization. This weight was the illusion that it was civilized. The weight had been set there by a rangę of perpetrators—members of certain favored races, males, property owners, the church, the literate, natives of the northern hemisphere—who, when taken together, it seemed to me, represented a considerable portion of everyone who had ever lived. Then again, of course I’d think that way. Of course I’d be cynical. I was one of them.
So why didn’t I feel like one of them, particularly just then? why did I, a member of the classes that had supposedly placed e weight on others and was now attempting to redress this crime, feel so crushingly weighed down myself?
I wasn’t one of theory’s true believers. I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion. The literary works they prized —the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion—were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example. My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then. We could say “incommensurable.” Both words meant “hard.”
I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were fakes. In classroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I—a born con man who knew little about great literature—had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability, the nonreader was king, it seemed. Long live the king.
This lucky convergence of academic fashion and my illiteracy emboldened me socially. It convinced me I had a place at Princeton after all. I hadn’t chosen it, exactly, but I’d be foolish not to occupy it. Otherwise I’d be alone.
Finally, without reservations or regrets, I settled into the ranks of Princeton’s Joy Division—my name for the crowd of moody avant-gardists who hung around the smaller campus theaters discussing, enjoying, and dramatizing confusion. One of their productions, which I assisted with, required the audience to contemplate a stage decorated with nothing but potted plants. Plants and Waiters, it was called. My friends and I stood snickering in the wings making bets on how long it would take people to leave. They, the “waiters,” proved true to form. They fidgeted but they didn’t flee. Hilarious.
And, for me, profoundly enlightening. Who knew that serious art could be like this? Who would have guessed that the essence of high culture would turn out to be teasing the poor saps that still believed in it? Certainly no one back in Minnesota. Well, the joke was on them, and I was in on it. I could never go back there now. It bothered me that I’d ever even lived there, knowing that people here on the great coast (people like me— the new, emerging me) had been laughing at us all along. But what troubled me more was the dawning realization that had I not reached Princeton, I might never have discovered this; I might have stayed a rube forever. This idea transformed my basic loyalties. I decided that it was time to leave behind the sort of folks whom I’d been raised around and stand—for better or for worse—with the characters who’d clued me in.
I had a few drinks last night, so I don’t actually remember how it was that I stumbled upon this amusing 2005 article in the New Journal by Adriane Quinlan providing a tour d’horizon of the best t shirt slogan expressions of the traditional Yale-Harvard football rivalry.
Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s pledges sell shirts “to raise money for their pledge project—usually an improvement to the infrastructure of the house. “For example,” said Fraternity president Billy Deitch, “rebuilding the basement bar.” Two years ago the frat put out one of the most successful shirts in recent memory, the front of which argued, “You’d have to be crazy to go to Harvard…” and the back of which provided evidence: a picture of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Harvard Class of 1962. A later shirt was more minimal in design, “VE-RI-DUM,” which Branford Senior Jonathan Breit claimed as his favorite game shirt: “Everything is perfect: the number of syllables, the latin-esque ending of ‘dum,’ the fact that ‘dumb’ is misspelled. It just works.”
How do Ivy League universities make sure that they are only admitting reliable conformist tools these days? By incorporating loyalty oaths to liberal group think and political correctness in the application process.
Glen Ricketts and Peter Wood describe the college applications diversity essay in the latest National Association of Scholars newsletter.
The CAO [Common Application Online] at Yale, for example, asks prospective students:
A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
That’s virtually identical with what you can expect to find at dozens of other institutions, where “diversity” is cultivated with tedious uniformity.
Let’s weigh this question. The first sentence simply asserts that the “range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences” adds to the “educational mix.” Few people would doubt that, and the sentence is no doubt written to command bland assent. But if we force it to stand up for inspection, it displays a remarkable intellectual slovenliness. When we go to college, we do indeed benefit from encountering people with views and experiences other than our own. But that encounter depends on something else: a shared commitment to the broader purposes of education. The enlivening “mix” that Yale would like to foster requires students, at some level, to put aside differences at least long enough to consider one another’s views.
The “diversity” doctrine doesn’t necessarily prevent that deeper sharing from taking place, but it does cut against it and urges students instead to huddle inside their pre-chosen identities. The Yale CAO question is the first of a long series of subtle steps that teach students to lead with their particularities and to cultivate a kind of group vanity.
The second sentence in the assignment (“Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.”) is a masterpiece of question-begging. What of the student who has slowly and painfully worked his way out of psychological isolation or social alienation to achieve a sense of identification with the larger community? Such a person would seem to have no acceptable answer to the task of explaining “the importance of diversity” to his own life. Would the Yale admissions office look favorably on the student who answered, “I have found ‘diversity’ to be a cudgel by which self-appointed elites attempt to enforce their preferences over others. Diversity to me has been the experience of having my individuality denied, suppressed, and demeaned. It is a word that summarizes a smarmy form of oppression that congratulates itself on its high-mindedness even as it enforces narrow-minded conformity.”
No, any student really seeking admission to Yale wouldn’t say such a thing. But chances are very good that a great many students harbor insights very much like that. They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are.
These “diversity” essay questions are never innocent. They are a tool to keep college applicants aligned with the dominant ideology on campus, which continues to favor group categorizations over both individuality and the broader claims of shared community.
I would not have gotten in in the current era. No doubt about it.
I would have written a belligerent and full-throated denunciation of group identity and privileges, ruthlessly pointing out its inconsistencies, contradictions, and hypocrisies, making the argument for intellectual diversity, and I suppose I would have attended some very different college from Yale.
Newly appointed Yale deans this fall: W. Marichal Gentry, dean of student affairs and associate dean of Yale College, and Shelly C. Lowe, the University’s first assistant dean for Native American affairs and director of the Native American Cultural Center.
In an email to the entire Yale student body, Dean of Student Marichal Gentry reminded students that “consensual sex can be glorious”. We’re used to getting emails about staying safe, saving the Yale Police phone number in our phones, and to always call for help, especially around the biggest drinking weekends of the year. The past two years we have received very standard emails about Spring Fling, Harvard-Yale, and Halloween, but this one definitely caught the eye. With unusually eloquent prose for Dean Gentry he reminded us,
A few years ago when we introduced the idea that consensual sex could be glorious, it seems that was a surprise to many. Consensual sex is having the sex you want, something you can say “yes” to, not something you’re afraid to say “no” to. Glorious consensual sex is something given, not taken, something shared not endured: something that makes you smile the next day, not something that hurts psychologically, emotionally or physically.
The philosopher can hardly avoid laughing at the 180 degree reversal of the Puritan establishment’s position on carnal activity on the part of the persons it supervises in loco parentis.
Yet, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, the annoying tone and conscribed perspective of the cant of indulgence differs only in puerility from the earlier cant of continence.
Yale has acquired a treasure in Dean Gentry. To mark the inauguration of one’s term in office by delivering via email a sermon to the water advising it to run downhill represents a gift for inadvertent comedy amounting to genius.
And I’m doubly grateful to Mr. Gentry for bringing it to my information, via his university appointment press release, that Yale now boasts a dean in charge of Native American Affairs. Who would have imagined that Yale actually had Native American Affairs? We are not Dartmouth, after all.
Sing, Eris, Goddess of Discord, the joys of Diversity!
Glenn Reynolds observes that the pseudo-intellectual community of fashion is not really worthy of being described as an elite.
Forget cultural insularity or smugness. The main problem with the “new elite” is that they’re not an elite at all. That is, they aren’t particularly smart, or competent. They are credentialed, but those credentials aren’t so much markers for smartness or competence, or even basic education, as they are admission tickets to the Gentry Class, based on good standardized test scores. That’s fine — ETS was berry, berry good to me — but it doesn’t have much to do with ability to succeed, or lead, in the real world. Worse yet, it seems to have fostered a sense of entitlement.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
Very long-time reader and first time emailer. Just my two cents on the elitists.
I am an elite anti-elitist Tea Partier and I made my first protest signs way back in March 2009. I’m a Yale [BA, Philosophy], Columbia [MA, International Affairs] former Wall Street trader and risk manager who is just about done getting another masters [in Library and Information Science] during a two-year “John Galt” sabbatical from work. I’ve met many, many Tea Partiers at this point and they are not anti-elitist in a general, superficial sense. Indeed, they most often admire those who have succeeded by dint of a good education or hard work or taking advantage of a bit of good luck. The subset of elitists that we are fed up with are the ones in the government, the media, and academia who think (erroneously) that they know better what we should be doing with our time every day and have the right to pick our pockets to fund it. Not only are we tired of being condescended to (and take my word for it, I could wipe the floor with most of them intellectually) but they’re obviously screwing everything up. So, to borrow Lee Harris’ word from his new book, we’re the “ornery” bastards who, from time to time, rise up to put the elite (and effete) corps of impudent snobs back in their place.
Places like Yale and Columbia (both of which I attended myself) are actually full of people with less than all that exciting SAT scores, who were really simply adequately professional performers of routine academic tasks. The lumpen Ivy League graduate tends to be sufficiently skilled in the rapid assimilation of cultural trivia and the manipulation of symbols and ideas to earn a comfortable place in the establishment community. But people of this sort are typically not genuinely intellectual, not well educated, and utterly and completely incapable of independent critical thought.
Members in good standing of the liberal community of fashion obtain all their ideas and opinions off the rack from the establishment media. They care deeply about politics because a strong commitment to fashionably leftwing politics is just like the right address, clothing, personal accessories, and automobile, a key class identifier.
Bad, stupid, and unfashionable people vote Republican, own guns, and remain committed to old-fashioned forms of conventional religion, just as Barack Obama observed aloud during the 2008 campaign. There is obviously something fundamentally defective about them. People who are chic, intelligent, and sophisticated, or at least who think they are, vote faithfully for liberal democrats and subscribe to a body of opinion simultaneously embracing Pacifism, Puritanism much modified by Epicureanism, and secularist Socialism.
The conservative critique of liberal political theory, liberal foreign policy, liberal economics, and liberal notions of environmental catastrophism is actually infinitely more substantive and serious, but conservatives are always being dismissed as stupid for failing to recognize that the smart people are the ones clever enough to identify the correct opinions and alert enough to the advantages of being aligned with the establishment.
Helen Rittlemeyer, evidently the Dorothy Parker of the ultramontane Catholic Right
Not long ago, I came upon an excerpt from Jonah Goldberg’s new anthology Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation and quoted and linked the criticisms of the young men of today leveled by a female conservative from Vanderbilt, along with the alternative viewpoint of the Former Chairman of the Party of the Right at Yale.
Just yesterday, another essay from the same collection turned up online.
This defence of smoking from a religious ultra-traditionalist perspective is by Helen Rittlemeyer, another female Sometime Chairman of the Party of the Right, and also requires attention.
[N]othing breeds mutual affection like huddling under a shop overhang in a New Haven sleet storm because Anna Liffey’s won’t let you smoke inside anymore. We smoked on principle. It was reactionary, libertarian, spiritual, and aesthetic all at the same time. Cigarettes Are Sublime, Richard Klein’s tribute to nicotine, was our Bible, because it had sentences like this: “When the religious dignity of smoking is completely obscured, we have lost a right to pray in public.”
That our tobacco habit had something to do with freedom should be obvious. ...
Smoking bans bothered us because they gave the modern cult of health the force of law, which was more than we thought it deserved. The little joys of cigarette smoking—a moment of late-night camaraderie, an excuse to talk to an attractive stranger, just the right prop for an emphatic gesture, or simply a moment of relaxation at the end of a long day—these were all more important to us than health. There was something unappealingly technocratic about the state’s attempt to boil the argument down to heart-disease rates. Unlike the libertarians, we thought smokers should have to make a convincing case that the benefits of smoking in bars outweigh the costs. Unlike the Left, we thought unquantifiables like the way good bourbon mixes with a Marlboro should count.
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Ms. Rittlemeyer is becoming famous.
She also made the Daily Caller yesterday when an ex-boy friend delivered an extemporaneous critique of the impact on her social life of her extremist positions on CSPAN.
Last Wednesday, the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity annual pledge hazing ritual took the form of open defiance of political correctness. Pledges were required to march across the Old Campus, blindfolded, hands on each other’s shoulders in a human chain, chanting deliberately outrageous expressions of anti-feminist machismo.
Some of the slogans used included: “No means yes, yes means anal” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f—- dead women.”
Persons of normal intelligence would realize, of course, that the purpose of such an activity would be to test the courage and commitment of those aspiring to join the fraternity by subjecting them to an ordeal exposing them to personal humiliation and to a certain amount of genuine risk.
Since America and Yale are both presided over today by prigs and nincompoops with less than normal intelligence and overdeveloped faculties of indignation, the risk was clearly a bit greater than the officers of Yale’s DKE chapter had expected.
Deep thinkers in the national media and the Academe, people like Tracy Clark-Flury at Salon, the management of Yale’s Women’s Center, Yale College Dean Mary Miller , and Feminist and Queer Studies Prof Melanie Boyd who doubles as Special Advisor to the Dean of Yale College on Gender Issues, all got their knickers in a twist and began blathering about “hate speech,” “sexism,” and “verbal assault.”
Inevitably, a forum on “Yale’s Sexual Climate” (which I would have guessed would be intensely favorable) was held, allegedly representing “the first step in a long process of dialogue and systemic change.”
An apology was extorted from the fraternity’s president, the international DKE organization suspended the Yale chapter’s pledge activities, and the virago enforcer of political correctness indulged in a few threats.
I wouldn’t say the question of disciplinary action has disappeared from the conversation,” [Melanie] Boyd said.
One Yale Daily News commenter found it ironic that DKE was being so thoroughly pilloried for tongue-in-cheek outrageous expressions, while the Yale Women’s Center in complete earnestness has taken the following positions:
Women who choose to act as stay-at-home moms are traitors to their gender
Capitalism is anti-feminist
The United States is the most anti-woman nation in the world
All hierarchies are by definition patriarchal since hierarchy and structure are masculine constructs
Post-birth abortion should be legalized (see: Peter Singer)
There is no biological difference between men and women – it is entirely a social construct
The overwhelming majority of men at Yale actively and knowingly attempt to oppress women in their everyday lives
Gendered pronouns (ie: he or she) are relics of a bigoted society.
Marriage is sexual slavery
Letting the man pay on a date is tantamount to prostitution
Directed Studies is an attempt to defend the patriarchy
Women who vote Republican are brainwashed
Religion was designed to oppress women
Condoms are patriarchal since they put men in control of safe sex
Condoms are feminist since they let women avoid pregnancy
Men should be required to submit their DNA to a database upon entering college, since 1 in 4 women is raped in college.
The Hon. Mark Dwyer, Judge of the Court of Claims (Supreme Court of the State of New York, Yale Law 1975) clearly still collects and reads comic books, since he discovered and informed the Yale Law Library that on page 16 of Detective Comics No. 439 (March 1974), there is a framed “Diploma of Law” from Yale University in Gotham City on the wall of Bruce Wayne’s study.
Judge Dwyer’s discovery was featured recently in an exhibition in the Yale Law Library’s Rare Book Gallery.
How long has it been since there was anyone not an establishment liberal or a radical on the Yale Corporation board? I expect someone along the lines of John Chafee or John Lindsay must have been the last board member to be registered as a Republican.
A group of Yale alumni, including some friends of mine, have organised an insurgent candidacy for a board seat on the Yale Corporation, an effort resembling a number of candidacies for Dartmouth’s board.
Mr. Horowitz’s supporters published the following letter to Yale alumni able to sign a candidacy petition.
Dear Fellow Yale Alumna/Alumnus:
We seek your support for the petition nomination of Michael J. Horowitz ‘64L as an Alumni Fellow candidate of the Yale Corporation. We do so because of our conviction that Horowitz’ election and service will enhance Yale’s financial viability and intellectual and political diversity.
Horowitz’ record of accomplishments is as impressive as it is diverse. He has formed and led broad-based, bipartisan coalitions that have passed such major human rights legislation as the International Religious Freedom Act, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, the Sudan Peace Act, the Democracy Promotion Act, the North Korea Human Rights Act, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and reforms that overrode the Bush administration’s harsh construction of the Real I.D. and Patriot Acts. Horowitz has led a successful effort to reduce the epidemic scourge of sexual assault in America’s prisons, and has played a critical role in permitting victims of terrorist coercion to be eligible for consideration as U.S. refugees. He has been a central figure in the historic effort to eliminate the sex trafficking of women in both the United States and abroad–and to define it as the slavery issue of our time. In the case of North Korea, Horowitz is a key advisor to an underground railroad movement that rescues North Korean refugees, and he is engaged in enlisting the Korean-American community to press for the peaceful implosion of the Pyongyang regime through strategies modeled on the Campaign for Soviet Jewry and the anti-apartheid campaign. He is also now mobilizing left-right coalitions in three new, major initiatives:
Linking US foreign aid to the satisfaction of baseline humanitarian prison conditions–an effort likely to save tens of thousands of lives per year at nominal cost while strengthening rule of law governance in the developing world; Establishing a cost-effective “medical diplomacy” effort to eliminate forced child marriages and one its most horrific effects: the devastating condition of obstetric fistula suffered by millions of incontinent and pariah-treated African girls and women; Shattering the Internet firewalls by which regimes like those in China, Iran, Burma, Tibet and Cuba isolate and control their people–an effort premised on the view that the Internet firewalls of today are as fragile as was the Berlin Wall, an object of Horowitz’ concern during his service in the Reagan administration.
Horowitz taught the first integrated classes at the University of Mississippi Law School, where he is a still-honored figure for his efforts to bring civil rights reform to life, and for his efforts to recruit African-American students while insisting on the maintenance of rigorous and color-blind academic standards. He was an equally distinguished General Counsel of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during the Reagan administration.
In seeking your support, we call your attention to two issues that cause us grave concern, which we believe Horowitz is strongly qualified to address.
First, we believe that the University’s finances are unduly premised on three false assumptions: that current levels of federal subsidies for students and private universities will continue; that today’s financial unrest is a temporary blip in a long-term trend of rapid endowment appreciation; and that Yale can continue to raise tuition each year without fundamentally changing the composition of its student body or compromising the nature and quality of the academic experience it offers. Horowitz’ work at OMB has given him a keen understanding of the strategies and pitfalls involved in managing large and complex budgets, and his past service on the board of his children’s school has given him critical experience with the tradeoffs between high operating expenses and high tuitions. Horowitz will serve as a much needed voice of restraint and responsibility dedicated to putting Yale’s finances on a more sustainable course.
Next, we are deeply disappointed by the growing lack of intellectual diversity on campus. Yale’s political correctness was highlighted when the Yale Press compelled the redaction of a Danish cartoon portraying the prophet Mohammad–an incident we believe to be sadly representative of current University policies and practices. Through Horowitz’ election, we seek to elevate the priority at Yale of a robust and diverse exchange of ideas, an openness to modes of thinking that have been too easily discounted as politically incorrect, and a measure of courage in standing up for the enduring values that will always define great universities.
Horowitz believes that greater respect for traditional culture is in order at Yale, and in the national discourse. As the only Jew to receive the prestigious Wilberforce Award for his work in combating the worldwide persecution of Christians, Horowitz values the contribution of religious groups to the moral progress of our society. Likewise, he believes that conventional ideas about sexuality have often been dismissed without regard to their particular value to young women, and he believes that such campus “traditions” as Yale Sex Week, where sadists, pornographers and enslaving sex traffickers are routinely celebrated, should be subjected to more vigorous debate about their auspices and effects. He believes that a lack of political and intellectual diversity in some parts of Yale’s faculty is an issue in need of sensitive but focused attention.
The above said, it must be immediately noted that neither Horowitz, nor we, seek censorship or traditional values hegemony at Yale; to the contrary, the critical hallmark of Horowitz’ candidacy is its call for greater openness, debate and diversity than the University has fostered–or at times even permitted–in challenges to its prevailing orthodoxies.
A political conservative, Horowitz served in the Reagan administration for the same reason he taught the first integrated classes of law students at the University of Mississippi – an ability to think straight about American values, decency and history. He has been persuaded to run for the Corporation as a means of honoring the immigrant grandparents who inculcated his deep belief that America is a blessed land; his election will help restore the intellectual balance and common sense prudence now so badly in need of reinvigoration at Yale.
We urge your support for the Horowitz candidacy.
Richard Brookhiser – Yale College 1977
William W. Chip – Yale College 1971
Andrew P. Clark – GSAS 2009
Seth J. Corey – Yale College 1978
Eleanor Gaetan – Yale College 1982
Todd Hartch – Yale College 1989, Ph.D 2000
John Miller – Yale Law & GSE, 1963
Grover J. Rees – Yale College 1972
Michael Rubin – Yale College 1994, Ph.D 1999
Michael W. Steinberg – Yale College 1974
Diana West – Yale College 1983
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Michael J. Horowitz is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, and its website features biographaphical highlights.
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The Horowitz candidacy has been promoted in postings by such eminent conservative bloggers as Powerline’s Scott Johnson and Maggie’s Farm’s Bird Dog, Glenn Reynolds.
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In order for Mr. Horowitz’s name to appear on the ballot as a write-in candidate for the 2011 election, he needs to receive 3,808 signatures by October 1.
If you are a Yale alumnus/a, send the following email with your name, school, and year to Yalepetitioncandidate@electionservicescorp.com to nominate Mike to be on the 2011 Alumni Fellow ballot.
I am writing to support the Alumni Fellow petition candidacy of Michael Horowitz.
, describes the post-modern English major experience and explains the nature of the conversion process to full membership in the contemporary elite educated community of fashion.
, a collection of essays by leading theory people that I spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force Herę is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name: “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered the windpipe-blocking “heteronomous” and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across— stuck in a footnote—”unreadability.”
and quoted and linked the criticisms of the young men of today leveled by a female conservative from Vanderbilt, along with the alternative viewpoint of the Former Chairman of the Party of the Right at Yale.
