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.
In October of 1903, a 23-year-old prodigy who had recently finished his first book and who was widely regarded as a genius, Otto Weininger rented a room in the house in Vienna where Ludwig van Beethoven died 76 years earlier, and shot himself in the heart.
Weininger, a prodigy who had received his doctorate at an unusually young age, wrote a book, titled Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) arriving at extremely troubling conclusions. Weininger believed that human beings and human culture and society inevitably contain a mixture of positive, active, productive, moral, and logical (male, Christian) traits and impulses as well as their passive, unproductive, amoral, and sensual (female and Jewish) opposites.
Weininger was of Jewish descent and afflicted with homosexual inclinations and was in despair over the decline of modern Western civilization due to ascendancy of the female/Jewish impulses he deplored, so acting in consistency with his philosophical conclusions, Weininger took his own life.
Last Saturday, Mitchell Heisman, a 35-year-old psychology graduate from the University of Albany, shot himself in the head in front of Memorial Church in the Harvard Yard within the sight of a campus tour. Heisman had been residing nearby in Somerville, Massachusetts, supporting himself on a legacy from his father and by working in some Boston area bookshops, while pursuing his own studies and working on a (so far unpublished) book.
Mitchell Heisman published on the Internet a 1905-page suicide note in which he explains his actions as an experiment in nihilism undertaken in search of objectivity. Heisman, like Weininger of Jewish descent, is critical of liberal democracy, egalitarianism, materialism, modernism, and Jewish ethical opposition to “biological realism and the eugenic evolution of biological life.”
The suicide note pdf is fascinating document displaying considerable learning and evidencing a sharp sense of humor and originality of thought.
The most rigorous objectivity implies indifference to the consequence of objectivity, i.e. whether the consequences of objectivity yield life or death for the observer. In other words, the elimination of subjectivity demands indifference to self-preservation when self-preservation conflicts with objectivity. The attempt at rigorous objectivity could potentially counter the interests of self-preservation or even amount to rational self-destruction. The most total objectivity appears to lead to the most total self-negation. Objectivity towards biological factors is objectivity towards life factors. Indifference to life factors leads to indifference between the choices of life and death. To approach objectivity with respect to self-interest ultimately leads to indifference to whether one is alive or dead.
The dead are most indifferent; the least interested; the least biased; the least prejudiced one way or the other. What is closest to total indifference is to be dead. If an observer hypothesizes death then, from that perspective, the observer has no vested interests in life and thus possible grounds for the most objective view. The more an observer is reduced to nothing, the more the observer is no longer a factor, the more the observer might set the conditions for the most rigorous objectivity.
It is likely that most people will not even consider the veracity of this correlation between death and objectivity even if they understand it intellectually because most will consciously or unconsciously choose to place the interests of self-preservation over the interests of objectivity. In other words, to even consider the validity of this view assumes that one is willing and able to even consider prioritizing objectivity over one’s own self-preservation. Since it not safe to simply assume this on an individual level, let alone a social level, relatively few are willing and able to seriously address this issue (and majority consensus can be expected to dismiss the issue). In short, for most people, including most “scientists”, overcoming self-preservation is not ultimately a subject for rational debate and objective discussion.
Maximizing objectivity can be incompatible with maximizing subjective interests. In some situations, anything less than death is compromise. The choice between objectivity and self-preservation may lead one to a Stoic’s choice between life and death.
Whereas the humanities cannot be what they are without human subjectivities, the inhumanities, or hard sciences, require the subjective element be removed as much as possible as sources of error. Objectivity leads towards the elimination of subjectivity, i.e. the elimination of one’s “humanity”. A value free science has no basis on which to value human things over non-human things and thus no basis to value life over death or vice versa. Social science will become equal to the standards of physical science when social scientists overcome the subjective preference for the life of humanity over the death of humanity.
To attempt to resolve the contradiction of myself as a scientist and a human being on the side of science leads towards viewing myself as a material object. While this contradiction may be impossible to resolve, the closest approximation of reconciliation may consist of the state of death. In death, the teleologically-inclining biases of human subjectivity that hinder one from viewing one’s self as a material object are eliminated.
I cannot fully reconcile my understanding of the world with my existence in it. There is a conflict between the value of objectivity and the facts of my life. This experiment is designed to demonstrate a point of incompatibility between “truth” and “life”. In this experiment I hypothesize that the private separation of facts and values, when disclosed to the wider social world, creates a conflict of interest between the value of sociobiological objectivity and the “facts” of my sociobiological existence such that it leads to a voluntary and rational completion of this work in an act of self-destruction. ...
How far would one be willing to go in pursuit of scientific objectivity? Objectivity and survival are least compatible when objectivity becomes a means of life, subordinate to life as opposed to life subordinated to objectivity. If the greatest objectivity implicates confronting the most subjective biases, this implicates confronting those truths that most conflict with the subjective will to live. By simply changing my values from life values to death values, and setting my trajectory for rational biological self-destruction, I am able to liberate myself from many of the biases that dominate the horizons of most people’s lives. By valuing certain scientific observations because they are destructive to my life, I am removing self-preservation factors that hinder objectivity. This is how I am in a position to hypothesize my own death.
So if objectivity is not justified as end, then objectivity can be a means of rational self-destruction through the overcoming of the bias towards life. Rational self-destruction through the overcoming of the bias towards life, in turn, can be a means of achieving objectivity. And this means: To will death as a means of willing truth and to will truth as a means of willing death. ...
Why am I doing this? Ah, yes, now I remember the punchline: I’ll try anything once!
There is nothing to take seriously!
I have not had time yet to read the whole thing, so I’m not completely sure just what I think of all of the late Mr. Heisman’s opinions, but I am intrigued enough to have resolved to read all of it. I’ve even downloaded and saved a copy.
My guess, at this point, is that his book is probably well worth publishing.
Salon reports with a major effort at snark on a prospect which obviously alarms them.
John Bolton was a classmate of mine at Yale. We were both active in the Yale Political Union, but John joined the moderate Conservative Party, of which he became Chairman, and I joined the wholly immoderate Party of the Right.
Some Conservative Party members, like John Bolton, actually were pretty conservative nonetheless. The CP, as a whole, unfortunately tended to take anti-Conservative Movement, Rockefeller Republican kind of positions, being dominated in those days by the influence of Yale Law student and freshman counselor Charlie Whitebread.
I didn’t know John Bolton particularly well at Yale, but he was generally recognized as a competent guy and a vigorous competitor in the Union. I have over the years come to appreciate more and more Bolton’s performance in significant roles in Republican Administrations, especially as US Ambassador to the United Nations, and to admire in particular his commendable ability to infuriate liberal democrats.
John Bolton would be an articulate candidate, one well able to debate on even ground with the silver-tongued Barack Obama. I expect he would fill his administration with well-qualified representatives of the Republican Right, would govern with fiscal conservatism domestically, and with firmness and resolution abroad. The GOP could do a lot worse.
On Friday, Harvard University reported in an SEC filing that it has sold all of the shares it owned in Israeli companies. The total wasn’t large, by Harvard’s standards, around $39 million, and the university didn’t offer an explanation. But it seems unlikely that Harvard’s portfolio managers would simultaneously decide that it was time to sell all shares in five different companies, with nothing in common other than the fact that they are located in Israel. So, unless some other explanation is forthcoming, it seems that Harvard may quietly have divested its Israeli holdings on political grounds.
If this is right, it assorts oddly with Harvard’s acceptance of large amounts of money from Saudi Arabian sources. Also, what are Harvard’s largest securities holdings? Two ETFs, each worth $295 million, one in Chinese equities and the other in emerging markets. So Israel doesn’t meet Harvard’s moral test, but China does; and it would be interesting to see what countries are included among those emerging markets.
There is a pretty clear pattern here—again, assuming that the five nearly-simultaneous sales of shares in Israeli companies were not coincidental. Harvard is happy to do business with oppressors—real oppressors, that is—as long as there is enough money in it. China and Saudi Arabia have, in sheer monetary terms, a lot to offer. But taking a “principled” stand against Israel, still the Middle East’s only democracy (unless you count Iraq, on which the jury is still out) and the only country in the region with a Western human rights sensibility, is cost-free. Sort of like banning military recruiters.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson points out that the past explains how America got where it is today.
If one were to survey the elite campuses around 1975 and talk to those in law school, poly sci, or the humanities, then imagine them 35 years later as our elite leaders in government, the media, the universities, the foundations, and the arts, one could pretty much expect what we now have.
The present symptoms that characterize both our popular culture and current governance — shrill self-righteousness; abstract communalism juxtaposed with concrete pursuit of the aristocratic good life; race/class/gender cosmic sermonizing with private school and Ivy league for the kids; crass and tasteless public expression; a serial inability to take responsibility for one’s actions; the bipartisan mega-deficits; the inability to cut pensions and social security for the baby boomers — from the trivial to the fundamental, all derive from a bankrupt cohort that came of age in the sixties and seventies.
We see the arrested adolescence and hypocrisy that come from that sermonizing generation, whether in Al Franken’s puerile face-making, the ideologically driven suicide at Newsweek, the steady destruction of the New York Times, John Kerry’s tax-avoiding yacht, the Great Gatsby Clinton wedding, Michelle on the Costa del Sol, Nancy Pelosi’s jet, Tim Geithner’s tax skipping, or the constant race-card playing of a Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters. Yes, one walk across the Yale or Stanford campus circa 1975, and one could see pretty clearly what sort of culture that bunch would create when it came of age and was handed power.
As Dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan not only moved Harvard away from teaching the case method (invented at Harvard circa 1870), she eliminated Constitutional Law from the list of required courses.
As CNS reports, American Constitutional Law was demoted in favor of more international perspectives.
[I]n a 2006 Harvard news release explaining the changes, Kagan explained the move away from constitutional law was deliberate: “From the beginning of law school, students should learn to locate what they are learning about public and private law in the United States within the context of a larger universe—global networks of economic regulation and private ordering, public systems created through multilateral relations among states, and different and widely varying legal cultures and systems.
“Accordingly, the Law School will develop three foundation courses, each of which represents a door into the global sphere that students will use as context for U.S. law,” the guide said.
Among the three new required courses Kagan introduced, one focuses on public international law, involving treaties and international agreements, and the second is on international economic law and complex multinational financial transactions, according to a Harvard news release.
But the third course, on comparative law, “will introduce students to one or more legal systems outside our own, to the borrowing and transmission of legal ideas across borders and to a variety of approaches to substantive and procedural law that are rooted in distinct cultures and traditions,” the release said.
What could be a more eloquent demonstration of the precise level of deference to the US Constitution Ms. Kagan would bring to the Supreme Court?
Michael Filozof (recently an adjunct instructor at Niagra County Community College), at American Thinker, denounces the elite conspiracy that rules America.
If it sometimes seems that the nation is governed by an elite liberal clique of college fraternity and sorority pals who are out of touch with average Americans, that’s because it’s largely true. Every president, and almost every presidential candidate for the last two decades has been a graduate of Harvard or Yale, and if Kagan gets confirmed by the Senate every member of the Supreme Court will have been a Yale or Harvard attendee, too.
The 1988 presidential election was a contest between Harvard law grad Michael Dukakis and Yalie George H.W. Bush. Yale Law grads Bill and Hillary Clinton came to power in 1992, beating Washburn alum Bob Dole in 1996.
The election of 2000 produced an interesting result: George W. Bush, a graduate of both Yale and Harvard (but according to his leftist critics the dumbest president ever) beat another Harvard grad, Al Gore, who is supposedly so brilliant he won a Nobel Prize. And in 2004 Bush beat fellow Yale grad John Kerry, whose grades at Yale were worse than Bush’s grades.
The election of 2008 saw the ascension to the presidency of Harvard graduate Barack Obama, who beat Navy grad John McCain. According to his supporters like Michael Beschloss, David Brooks, and Colin Powell, Obama is “brilliant” and “transformational” – yet oddly, he never published anything as first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and unlike Bush, Kerry and McCain, his grades have never been released.
On the Supreme Court, Justices Alito, Sotomayor, and Thomas are Yale Law grads, while Scalia, Roberts, Breyer and Kennedy all went to Harvard Law. Justice Ginsberg graduated from Columbia Law, but she attended Harvard before transferring there. The odd man out is the retiring Justice Stevens, who got his law degree from Northwestern, soon to be replaced by Harvard’s Kagan.
What shall we make of this preponderance of Yale-Harvard grads in elite positions of our society?
It’s much more complicated that that, I’m afraid. Mr. Filozof is not wrong, of course, about liberal culture dominating at Harvard and Yale, as at all elite institutions of higher education, but both Yale and Harvard do produce some prominent conservatives. Clarence Thomas is the soundest member of the Supreme Court, and he went to Yale Law. George W. Bush was, after all, if not entirely conservative, at least decidedly anti-liberal establishment which hated him like poison.
There is a strong conservative presence at Yale. There is even some conservative presence in Cambridge. It’s just the case that conservatives are less welcome in the establishment in many areas, and successful careerists (like Elena Kagan, read David Brooks on Kagan and conformity) are much more commonly conventionally liberal.
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At Volokh, David Bernstein, Yale Law ‘91, graciously stands up for other schools:
The president went to Harvard, and barely defeated a primary opponent who went to Yale. His predecessor went to Yale and Harvard, and defeated opponents who went to Yale and Harvard, and Harvard, respectively. The previous two presidents also went to Yale, with Bush I defeating another Harvard grad for the presidency. And once Elena Kagan gets confirmed, every Supreme Court Justice will have attended Harvard or Yale law schools.
I know that Harvard and Yale attract a disproportionate percentage of America’s talented youth, but still, isn’t this a bit much?
I think the current Harvard-Yale monopoly is really just happenstance and coincidence. I feel sure that, if we live long enough, we’ll see people from UVA, Chicago, and even Stanford, and Columbia on the Court again.
Last year, a third-year Harvard Law Student sent a private email to two friends, continuing a dinner-table conversation about the genetic basis of (and possible racial differences in) intelligence.
She said:
I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.
I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects.
This young woman ought to have gotten away scot-free with saying the unsayable and thinking the unthinkable in private, but more recently she reproached one of those two friends about sleeping with another person’s boyfriend. Her interlocutor promised “to ruin her life,” and proceeded on a program of revenge worthy of the Jacobean Theater.
The vengeful strumpet forwarded the six-month-old email to members of the Harvard Black Law Student Association, who were definitely not amused.
Someone then passed it along to the legal blog Above the Law. Gawker and HuffPo picked up the story, and soon it was everywhere.
Before very long, the Dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow was issuing official statements assuring Black law students that “Here at Harvard Law School, we are committed to preventing degradation of any individual or group, including race-based insensitivity or hostility.”
The PC-criminal, an editor at the Harvard Law Review, had already received a clerkship with colorful Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski. Indignant demands that her clerkship should be rescinded followed.
But they teach young people well at today’s elite schools. When you blot your copybook, it is still possible to save yourself by performing the appropriate prostrations and affirming loudly that the sun does move around the earth. Look at Bill Clinton.
Our guilty student did the necessary thing, she wrote a thoroughly PC letter of apology, and took complete responsibility. (laugh)
“I am deeply sorry for the pain caused by my e-mail. I never intended to cause any harm, and I am heartbroken and devastated by the harm that has ensued. I would give anything to take it back,’’ [Name withheld by me] said in the apology, obtained by the Globe.
“I emphatically do not believe that African-Americans are genetically inferior in any way. I understand why my words expressing even a doubt in that regard were and are offensive.’’ ...
In her statement yesterday, Minow called the incident “sad and unfortunate’’ but said she was heartened by the student’s apology. She added: “We seek to encourage freedom of expression, but freedom of speech should be accompanied by responsibility.’’
I couldn’t find a decent photo of the interior courtyard of Morse, featuring the Morse Tower. They’ve planted some little trees, which get in the way now.
Morse College (along with Ezra Stiles) is one of two new residential colleges at Yale built circa 1961 featuring back-then very fashionable designs by Eero Saarinen, who whipped up a curious melange, alluding to medieval hill towns in Tuscany via a late 1950s marriage of George Nakashima to a comfy Disneyesque-version of Brutalist modern concrete architecture.
Students wound up receiving a basically ugly, somewhat industrial-looking modernist college with the sort of interior that might have been designed by communist hobbits… if communist hobbits had a lot of money. Their consolations were single rooms, and lots of expensive built in wood. The grain of the corridor doors in Morse was very striking, and I can tell you that back in the early 1970s at least half of the hirsute crowd of stoners in the Morse TV room could normally be found sitting facing away from the set engrossed in the grain patterns of the door. You could get wrecked just walking through that TV room.
One drawback of life in Morse was the fact that Saarinen had an aversion to right angles (too uncreative, I suppose), which produced peculiar room shapes. Two rooms in Morse College were notorious for having eleven walls, none of which was long enough to put the standard issue Yale bed against, while still allowing the resident to open the door.
Over the last decade, Yale has been “remodeling” (read: gutting and completely rebuilding) its residential colleges, completely revising floor plans and installing new PC green mechanicals, doubtless with an eye to packing in more students into less generous spaces.
At the present time, Morse is receiving its remodeling, which the Yale Daily News reports, once again, demonstrates just how feckless and irresponsible architects and the institutional administrators in the prosperous and happy 1960 era of Brutalism really were.
Though the college is built in the Modernist style, its aged facilities were anything but modern, [Evan] Yassky [of the Philadelphia-based architecture firm KieranTimberlake] said. Many of Morse’s internal systems, from electrical to fire safety, needed to be upgraded or replaced. An unexpected challenge was the difficulty of upgrading heating mechanisms inside the college because of the irregular angles of the buildings, Yassky said.
When the college was completed nearly 50 years ago, it was heated by means of hot water pipes cast into the concrete of the college’s floors. But some time in the 1980s, the pipes failed, and because they could not be pried out of the concrete, the University put together a slapdash set of above-ground heaters throughout Morse, said Chris Meyer of Turner Construction Company, the general superintendent of the current renovation. These were neither dependable nor particularly effective, he added.
Determined to get it right this time around, the University asked the architects at KieranTimberlake for a thorough overhaul of the heaters. But Morse’s irregular interior corners have turned the otherwise simple task of installing radiators around the rooms’ perimeters into a costly puzzle.
“It’s a challenge that I didn’t quite appreciate when we first started the project,” Yassky said. “It’s not like, instead of 90 degree angles, Saarinen used 70 or 80 degree angles. Every angle was different.”
Fitting each crooked corner with custom pipes would cost millions, Yassky said, so the firm modified the majority of the rooms to include more square corners for the heating. These new perpendicular walls are particularly noticeable inside the college’s new common rooms, where some walls have been opened or removed to create the suite-style residential spaces typical of Yale’s other colleges.
“It’s been a fascinating experience and intellectually stimulating to engage with Saarinen’s design,” Yassky said.
The most prestigious architects of that era could not be bothered to care about how someone a few decades down the road would have to effectuate a repair. Budgets were extravagant, the sky was the limit for materials and designs costs. “Let them tear it down and rebuild, when they need to fix a leaky pipe!” thought the great architect. The administrators never deigned to critique the genius’s design with an eye to how exactly someone was going to change the light bulb placed 50’ in the air or how anyone could repair heating pipes buried in concrete.
Modernist architecture was to buildings a lot like what liberal policy was to society: grandiose, gestural, dismissive of the past, narcissistically self-promotional, staggeringly costly, and totally impractical.
That Skull and Bones balloting box was not actually sold. Apparently, Christie’s withdrew it from the sale late last month, IvyGate reports, after receiving a mysterious “title claim.” The Russell Trust has plenty of lawyers.
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Hot Air (one of the most important conservative blogs) has been sold to Salem Communications. Congratulations and good luck.
————————————————————— As part of the Carnival celebration, preceding the beginning of Lent, in the Spanish village of Laza, “Peliqueiros” or ancient tax collectors, are portrayed wearing warning cowbells and prepared to beat the villagers with sticks.39 Carnival photos.
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Stratfor: Tradecraft in Dubai Assassination
3:14 video
Yale Baseball Team, c. 1890. They would not approve.
The New Yorker reports on negative reactions from a variety of Old Blues to that noxious and appalling “That’s Why I Chose Yale” recruiting video.
Some samples:
Christopher Buckley, Class of ’75, son of the late William F., Class of ’50, paused to pour himself a “stiff one” and dashed off an e-mail to another alumnus: “OMFG!” ...
James Goodale, Class of ’55, and a former general counsel for the Times, made it through all seventeen minutes—more collegians bursting into song, accompanied by “Up with People”-style dance numbers, and even some electric-guitar shredding in the art gallery—before reporting that the production seemed “intended for an audience that I couldn’t divine.” He added, “My God, if you’re a hockey player, you think, I’ll go to Princeton.” ...
“Halfway in, I said, ‘These people are kidding,’ ” the former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, Class of ’56, recalled the other day. “Then I realized, ‘No, they’re not.’ And I was depressed.”...
“It’s a variation on Marie Antoinette in the garden of Versailles. I’m surprised they didn’t dress the girls as shepherdesses. In the ancien régime, this is the kind of thing that would have prompted the French Revolution. Are we supposed to send this to struggling youths in Asia and Africa?”
John Rogers, Class of ’84, and the English department’s resident Milton scholar [reacts:]
It’s the God-damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. ...
Milton would be absolutely and perfectly appalled by this. ...
Yale is saturated in an ironic mode that your parents can’t understand. ... This is aristocratic and privileged irony—an aristocracy not of moneyed fathers but of generational ironic sensibility: ‘I can speak with more quotation marks around my nouns and verbs than you.’
Information Technology Services administrators plan to join with Google Apps for Education to bring students, faculty and employees the Gmail e-mail service by the end of this month, said an undergraduate member of the Student Technology Collaborative who asked to remain anonymous because of ITS policy. The service, tentatively called “Bulldogs,” will also offer users a suite of tools for communication and collaboration — including Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs. The new interface will look like the standard Gmail layout, but without advertisements, the student said.
The Gmail-based service will gradually replace the University’s current e-mail client, Horde, the student said. The incoming class of 2014 will be the first to go directly to the new Google system, and current freshmen and sophomores will have to make the switch. Upperclassmen will have the option of keeping Horde, but the University plans to phase out Horde by spring of next year, the student said.
Planning for “Bulldogs” did not include computer science faculty, computer science professor Michael Fischer said, adding that he and his colleagues have not yet discussed the transition with ITS administrators.
“It’s a complicated issue, and I’ve just learned about the plans for the switch myself,” Fischer said. “They’re certainly not finalized yet, and we’re going to be holding discussions over the next few days to work things out.”
The transition to Google Apps will also give users more storage capacity — 7.4 gigabytes — than the two gigabytes that the University’s Pantheon data storage system currently offers, the student said. Students and faculty will be able to upload any file smaller than one gigabyte to the Gmail server and share it with other users. With Pantheon, students can upload files of no more than 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte.
Another student tech, who also asked to remain anonymous, said switching data to Google Apps would save Yale 12 gigabytes of on-site storage per student, totalling tens of thousands of gigabytes’ worth of data.
“Now [Yale] can host it all off-site and allow Google to maintain it for them,” the second student said in an e-mail. “The extra space can be reallocated or shut down to save money.”
Yale’s in-house disc space will then be given to only faculty or graduate students who need large amounts of data storage for academic purposes, the first student said.
Another factor in the decision to make the switch, the student said, was Gmail’s user-friendly interface.
“Since settings for ‘Bulldogs’ will be identical to Gmail settings, e-mail forwarding and the use of e-mail clients (such as Thunderbird or Outlook) will be easy,” the second student said in an e-mail.
I’m so old that I can remember the days when IT at Yale consisted of playing Star Trek and Adventure on a PDP-10.
