From RumpChat (A satellite of Rumpus, the Yale undergraduate humor blog):

Overheard by the hot security guard: “there’s too many f****** liberals at this school”

K.C. Johnson, at Minding the Campus, devastatingly criticized the New York Times story.

When Times readers learned from Richard Perez-Pena that “a fellow student had accused Witt of sexual assault,” how many of them realized that Yale was actually using an “expansive definition” of this otherwise commonly-understood term? How many readers further realized that Yale had designed the procedure about which Perez-Pena wrote so as to give Witt’s accuser “control over the process,” including limited or no investigation? And how many readers could have dreamed that the procedures guiding the allegation against Witt have produced the extraordinary claim that sexual assault is far, far more common on this Ivy League campus than in the fourth most dangerous city in the country? And since the Times went to print without ever speaking to Witt or (it seems) anyone sympathetic to him in the Athletic Department, didn’t the paper at the very least have an obligation to provide the context that would explain the highly unusual procedures and definitions that Yale features?

Patrick Witt’s response to the Times’ story.
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Kathleen Parker, in the Washington Post, put the New York Times’s reporting standards on trial.

A  New York Times story on Friday… essentially indicted and convicted a 22-year-old star football player on an alleged sexual assault charge by an anonymous accuser. ...

[W]ith throat-clearing authority, the story begins with the young man’s name — Patrick J. Witt, Yale University’s former quarterback — and his announcement last fall that he was withdrawing his Rhodes scholarship application so that he could play against Harvard. The game was scheduled the same day as the scholarship interview.

Next we are told that he actually had withdrawn his application for the scholarship after the Rhodes Trust had learned “through unofficial channels that a fellow student had accused Witt of sexual assault.” And there goes the gavel. Case closed.

But in fact, no one seems to know much of anything, and no one in an official capacity is talking. The only people advancing this devastating and sordid tale are “a half-dozen [anonymous] people with knowledge of all or part of the story.” All or part? Which part? As in, “Heard any good gossip lately?”

A statement Friday afternoon on Witt’s behalf denied any connection between his withdrawal from the Rhodes application process and the alleged assault. Moreover, when Witt requested a formal inquiry into the allegations, he says, the university declined. “No formal complaint was filed, no written statement was taken from anyone involved, and his request . . . for a formal inquiry was denied because, he was told, there was nothing to defend against,” according to the statement.

The Times apparently didn’t know these facts, but shouldn’t it have known them before publishing the story? It’s not until the 11th paragraph that readers even learn about the half-dozen anonymous sources. Not until the 14th paragraph does the Times tell us that “many aspects of the situation remain unknown, including some details of the allegation against Witt; how he responded; how it was resolved; and whether Yale officials who handle Rhodes applications — including Richard C. Levin, the university’s president, who signed Witt’s endorsement letter — knew of the complaint.”

Translation: We don’t know anything, but we’re smearing this guy anyway. ...

By anyone’s understanding of fairness, Witt has been unjustly condemned by nameless accusers and a complicit press.

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Reuters pointed out that the Times’ own commenters overwhelmingly condemned the newspaper’s decision to print that story.

The Times has already published a follow-up story that noted “diverging stories,” but only after comments and writers began questioning the Times’ editors and the paper’s editorial process.

The simplest summation of that criticism came from a commenter named ‘mystery shopper’ who posted that running the story was “a horrible editorial decision. Ethics classes in schools of journalism around the country will use this story as an example of an ill-advised story.”

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Instapundit readers also reacted:

Reader John Lucas writes: “A red light violator facing a $50 fine gets more due process than a student at Yale (or most other universities) now.”

Reader Dave Ivers writes: “I’ve wondered what would happen if every male athlete at Yale looked around a classroom and noticed a young woman looking at them and than filed an ‘informal’ complaint. Under the Yale rules that ‘looking’ at well-built athletes could be a sexual crime. Since the athletes don’t know for sure, shouldn’t they file to protect themselves and then get victim status?”

The original story seemed straight out of Owen Johnson or Burt L. Standish’s school stories: Yale’s record-breaking quarterback forced to choose between the interview that could win him a Rhodes Scholarship and playing for Yale against Harvard in The Game, turns his back on dreams of Oxford and dons his uniform to take the field for dear old Yale.

The denouement in which Harvard proceeded to crush the Bulldogs 45-7 seemed a sufficiently inglorious return to ordinary reality, but the Kindly Ones were not finished with Patrick Witt and Yale.

The New York Slimes, last week, published a story based on information from anonymous sources (apparently from within the administration of Yale itself), flagrantly violating that institution’s confidentiality policies, alleging that Witt’s Rhodes application had been compromised by an “informal” sexual assault charge made against Witt in September by another student. The article went on to detail a couple of minor brushes with the law on the Yale senior’s record, hinting darkly at a pattern of criminality on the part of the Yale senior.

The New York Times’ decision to destroy a college senior’s personal reputation by elevating an anonymous allegation, unsupported by any evidence and purveyed by a secondary layer of anonymous sources, to national news provoked both astonishment from ESPN and well-deserved indignation from the Wall Street Journal.

What the Times’ smear article really represents is a shocking case of toxic spillover from the radical left-wing head of the Obama Administration’s Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Russlyn Ali’s personal campaign to reinvigorate Title IX Anti-Discrimination enforcement on American campuses.

Her approach amounted to nothing less than arm-twisting university administrations to participate in a federally-required witch hunt against “sexual harassment,” with sexual harassment defined in the broadest possible terms to include “verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct” in any fashion connected with sex which is “unwelcome” to someone or anyone, and asserting that harassing conduct in general may create “a hostile environment” anytime the conduct is deemed “sufficiently serious” as to interfere with some student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s program.

Russlyn Ali’s notorious “Dear Colleague” letter of 4 April 2011 essentially mandates new grievance procedures, processes, and tribunals, specifically reduces standards of proof, and threatens “appropriate remedies” for noncompliance including both withdrawal of all forms of federal funding and assistance and lawsuits by the Justice Department.

The Obama Administration’s Education Department mandates on-campus inquisitions into a supposititious pattern of nation-wide victimization of female students by sexual harassment and assault. Patrick Witt, a white male member of Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, ideally fits the favored profile stereotype of male harassers and assaulters. These days, a politically incorrect smart remark or an unwelcome date request can be construed as a punishable offense. Who knows who accused Witt of exactly what or why? We can, I think, tell that the charge did not rise to what we usually think of as a crime since no police complaint was made. He hasn’t been arrested or charged with any crime. The assault the Times reported was clearly one of the notional assaults prosecutable only in the kind of jurisdictions, like our university campuses, successfully annexed by the radical left, where justice consists of whatever Russlyn Ali says it is.

James Delingpole referred recently to the immense difficulty sane people face in trying to resist an unstoppable bandwagon of do-gooders and reformers, brainwashed kids, powerful NGOs, sanctimonious corporations, and politicians all pushing the party-line of Enviromentalist stupidity. At American Thinker, Peter Wilson admires the colossal scale of resources the other side has at its disposal, and notes just how deeply entrenched the green priesthood is at one of our most prestigious universities.

Australian science writer Jo Nova estimates that since 1989 the U.S. government has spent $79 billion on global warming-friendly climate research. Nova notes that the “figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, [or universities] and is not adjusted for inflation,” and yet even this partial sum is 3,500 times the $23 million spent by Exxon in the same period. Global warming alarmists however continue to accuse skeptics of being duped by disinformation from well-funded carbon polluters, while they seem incapable of recognizing the far greater funding that supports their own efforts.

Case in point: I attended a “Harvard Thinks Green” program last week, which promised “6 all-star environmental faculty, 6 big green ideas.” (According to the flyer, “Green is the new crimson.”) The most polemical of the six speakers was medical doctor Eric Chivian, a founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the nuclear freeze group that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. One of Chivian’s big green ideas: “legal restrictions on oil consumption.” Dr. Chivian lashed out at the evil Koch brothers, enunciating their middle initials as further evidence of their perfidy: “Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch,” who together with “vested interests” like Exxon-Mobil, have spent “tens of millions of dollars” on a “disinformation campaign,” aided by the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

Vested interests? Take a look in the mirror, Dr. Chivian. His speech came from the podium in Saunders Theatre, a sumptuous wood-paneled auditorium in H.H. Richardson’s Memorial Hall, a clubhouse for the 1% at Harvard University. Dr. Chivian earns his generous salary as Founder/Director of the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, which is “designated an official ‘Collaborating Center’ of the United Nations Environment Programme.” The Center’s Corporate Council includes 3M, Baxter (pharmaceuticals & medical devices), Johnson & Johnson, and Siemens. These are some deep pockets and vested interests.

Looking further: The sponsor of the evening was the Harvard Office for Sustainability, which is staffed by fifteen full-time employees, holding graduate degrees in things like Public Administration and the Sociology of Religion/Gender Studies. They hold titles like: Manager, Sustainability Communications; Manager, Sustainability Engagement; Coordinator, Business and Finance Sustainability Engagement Program; or Coordinator, FAS Green Resource Efficiency Program.

A separate department called Green Building Services employs seven full-time employees and manages student volunteer teams at Harvard College, the Business School and the Law School.

Harvard students can apply for the following 10-hour-a-week internships: Sustainability Innovation Challenge Engagement Assistant, OFS Events and Sustainability Engagement Intern, Housing and Real Estate Design Internship, Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program Research Assistant, Green Skillet Team Leader, Green Skillet Assessor, Green Office Liaison and the Green Ribbon Commission Internship.

Over at the Graduate School of Design there’s the Sustainable Design program G(SD)2. And Harvard Business School has a Green Living Program, “a peer-to-peer education program” that…well, you get the idea.

These various activities are supported by the Harvard University Task Force on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions, commissioned by President Drew Faust, which is committed to reduce the University’s GHGs through 2016. In other words, these people will not be losing their jobs any time soon, no matter what happens at COP-18.

Reading this, I was reflecting that, if Jonathan Edwards and the other “New Light” enthusiasts of the mid-18th century Great Awakening had only taken care to arrange for the construction of exceptionally architecturally distinguished buildings to serve as centers for the study the personal experience of religious revelation and the penning of passionate sermons, and taken care to establish well-paid corps of special managers, communicators, coordinators, deans and interns, all devoted to intensifying man’s consciousness of his sinfulness, unworthiness, and dependence of Divine restraint, why, the emotionalist version of Congregationalism and Sunday hell-fire sermons about sinners in the hands of an angry God might never have gone out of fashion at Harvard and Yale at all.

Karen and I recently had the opportunity to view on Turner Classic Movies a curious, low budget old movie, “Love, Honor and Behave” (1938), lacking entirely a memorable big name cast, but specifically focused on the subject of Yalie-ness, on the distinctive old-fashioned Yale ethos.

The plot.

The marriage of old-time Yale man Dan Painter (Thomas Mitchell) to the stately and quite attractive Sally Painter (Barbara O’Neil, best known for playing the role of Scarlett O’Hara’s mother in “Gone With the Wind”, one year later, at age 28!) breaks up over a brief indiscretion. Sally remarries Doctor MacConaghey, taking away Dan’s son, Ted Painter (Wayne Morris).

Sally insists on raising Ted, contrary to his father’s wishes, as the paradigmatic good loser. Losing gracefully and graciously is her idea of being a gentleman. She refuses to send Ted to Andover (Dan’s old preparatory school), enrolling him in a different (possibly fictional) preparatory school in New Haven which I’d never heard of, because she believes Andover would make him too manly, too ruthlessly aggressive, and competitive. She won’t even allow Ted to play football like his father, bringing him up instead to be a tennis player.

Ted, at least, is permitted by mom to go to Yale. During his son’s senior year, Dan Painter is horrified as he watches Ted, playing for Yale, deliberately throw a tennis match against a Harvard rival because he believes the referee had previously made an erroneous call in his favor. Dan believes you ought to play by the rules, but you have to play to win. Intentionally losing is decidedly not proper manly behavior, not the Yale way.

The unhappy consequences of Ted’s upbringing by his mother continue even after graduation. Ted does rebel against mom, refusing to go to Medical School (in order to follow in his stepfather’s footsteps), but instead getting into the soap business in New Rochelle with a classmate. Ted also marries his childhood sweetheart Barbara Blake (Priscilla Lane) contrary to mom’s intentions and designs. But mother’s character formation lessons in uncompetitive self-effacement and non-aggression take their inevitable toll. The soap business goes under, and Ted cannot make Barbara happy.

When Ted’s business fails, Dan refuses to give Ted a job in his own business on grounds of principle (Dan is not only a Yalie, he talks exactly like an Ayn Rand character), and Ted is reduced to settling for menial work as a construction laborer for $3 a day.

Having had his problems trying to make a living during the Depression, Ted has been too busy working to entertain Barbara satisfactorily. Since he’s not available to take her out, and too passive to lay down the law, Barbara begins stepping out on Ted with a former rival. Finally, the worm turns, the deep-blue hereditary Yale blood (even without Andover’s influence) boils over, and Ted initiates a knock-down, drag-out fight with Barbara, ending in his giving her a good spanking. He also rises to the occasion and knocks down his rival with a good punch in the nose, and then throws him physically out of the house.

Dan Painter (conveniently on-hand to see the whole thing) is absolutely delighted. He now knows that his son has learned his lesson: that a man has to fight for things in this world, for success in business, even for his woman, just as he needs to be determined to achieve victory in athletic contests. Ted is now a properly competitive Yale man, just like his father.

LHB is certainly not a great film, not even a good film, but it is extremely interesting as a period piece and a case of watermark evidence of national-level recognition of a specific culture and personality associated with Yale way back then.

I was at Yale 30 years later, much had changed in America and at Yale, but I would say that even 30 years later, the “no excuses, just succeed” ethos had definitely survived in a number of undergraduate organizations right up into my day.

By now, Dan Painter’s hearty and unabashed, manly competitiveness must be thickly encrusted with layers of political correctness grown all over it like barnacles but I wonder if the same thing in essence, today unglorified, unacknowledged and unavowed, does not yet still survive at dear old Yale.

This is where I used to eat lunch.

Michael Rubin (Davenport ‘94) warns us that Yale is going to hell in a handbasket, the colleges are losing their distinctive individual identities, the left is running the place into the ground, and la patrie est en danger!

For decades, residential colleges have both been Yale University’s chief selling point and the feature by which the university differentiates itself from its Ivy League companions and other top tier universities. All freshmen are subdivided randomly into one of 12 colleges, remaining affiliated with it for four years and living there for three or four years. The net effect is that the colleges provide a sense of community—the chief benefit of a small college experience—with the classroom and campus resources of a much larger university. In a society in which identity groups often self-segregate themselves, the residential colleges also enable Yalies to meet a diverse array of people.

While in theory each residential college is equal, over time, they develop different characteristics. Each college is led by a master. Some masters are disinterested: When I was an undergraduate, I was in Davenport College. In my freshman year, the master was a professor of 19th-century Germany and ran the college like a Prussian general. In my subsequent three years, the master was a retired admiral, who, it turned out, was retired not only from the Navy but also from anything which required effort. In contrast, when I was a graduate student, I was for a year a resident graduate affiliate in Pierson College. Harvey Goldblatt, a professor of medieval Slavic literature, was master and quickly catapulted Pierson into the envy of all other colleges: He knew each student not only by name, but also made an effort to interact with everyone. He cheered on the residential college’s intramural sports teams, and even undertook his own alumni endowment to allow, for example, a spring break trip to Italy for most seniors. Behind the scenes, he was involved in administrative issues and stayed on top of everything from employee morale in the dining hall to the length of time scaffolding remained up after work was completed.

Alas, Yale has changed. In the twelve years since I have left New Haven, faculty members tell me that the number of administrators has almost doubled. While Yale University once encouraged autonomy among students to set up organizations, fix problems, and take responsibility for their own decisions, today, an ever-increasing number of deans get involved to regulate all aspects of life and administration. Whereas Yale students could once choose to excel in extracurricular activities or academics, today there is little differentiation: grade inflation and administration intervention has evened the playing field so that a lazy and irresponsible student will, from his or her record, appear equal to one who in the past might have been able to differentiate themselves academically.

The quest for equality and the bolstering of safety nets has not only blurred distinctions amongst students, but also faculty. At some point, administrators—for whom bureaucracy rather than education is a career—decided that it was unfair to have inequality among colleges. After all, if a college master managed to energize both students and alumni, students in other colleges might resent that another master was not up to the job.

Enter President Richard Levin: Replicating what too often happens in liberal society, rather than celebrating success or encouraging competition to keep up, Levin instead sought to encourage mediocrity by “equalizing” the college experience.

Read the whole thing.

He’s basically not wrong, of course. But the rot set in long, long ago. Kingman Brewster, brilliant, talented, and impeccably bred from the bluest blood of Plymouth Colony descent, personified Yale’s style, ethos, and tradition perfectly, better, one thought inevitably, than any other living, breathing person could, but the King was already leading Yale full tilt down the primrose path of fashion, Modernism, and leftism.

One’s other quibble is that no one really goes to Yale for the residential colleges.

Most people admitted don’t even know about the residential college system, a New World, early 20th century attempt to emulate the British Oxbridge style of elite education, until they have read thoroughly their admissions material.

I think it isn’t really possible for Yale colleges to feature the colorful individuality and eclat, which in earlier days reflected the personalities of great men like Basil Duke Henning (a direct descendant of a famous Confederate Kentucky cavalry officer) or Beekman Cannon (whose marriage and private life inspired Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). America just does not supply a suitable contigent of illustrious, flamboyant, and idiosyncratic WASP gentlemen scholars anymore. Besides, today’s Yale values “diversity” over cultural continuity and arete.

We still refer to “white shoe law firms” today, but young people at Yale today, alas! no longer remember the adjective which, back in my day, used to represent the supreme compliment at Yale.

Saying that someone was “shoe” described him as approximating the ideal of Yalieness itself. Being shoe meant that one possessed sophistication, the capacity for effortless achievement, and the specifically Prep School elite version of cool in its highest expression and form. The concept of shoe was essentially the same quality that Castiglione referred to in his treatise on The Courtier as sprezzatura.

The wearing of beat-up, ill-maintained (formerly white) bucks during school year, outside the proper Memorial-to-Labor-Day season, represented the perfect badge of membership in the elite because while mere ownership of white bucks in itself would serve as evidence of affluence and access to the sunlit fields of Gatsby-ish country club life, the ability to treat white bucks as fungible, the ownership of an older pair which could be demoted and conscripted into routine knock-around daily use demonstrated long-term upper caste membership, enough to wear out one’s white bucks.

Ivy Style has resurrected from the crypt of American culture a must-read 1953 Esquire magazine article discussing shoe in the concept’s heyday.

At Yale there is a system for pigeonholing the members of the college community which is based on the word “shoe.” Shoe bears some relation to the word chic, and when you say that a fellow is “terribly shoe” you mean that he is a crumb in the upper social crust of the college, though a more kindly metaphor might occur to you. You talk of a “shoe” fraternity or a “shoe” crowd, for example, but you can also describe a man’s manner of dress as “shoe.” The term derives, as you probably know, from the dirty white bucks which are the standard collegiate footwear (you can buy new ones already dirty in downtown New York to save you the embarrassment of looking as though you hadn’t had them all your life), but the system of pigeonholing by footwear does not stop there. It encompasses the entire community under the terms White Shoe, Brown Shoe, and Black Shoe.

The era of gracious living at Yale began to perish, before my time, sometime I believe late in the 1950s or early in the 1960s, when Yale’s residential colleges removed the white linen tablecloths and ceased using waitresses in the dining halls, and switched over to cafeteria style dining.

The late 1960s delivered another blow, when the silver sugar bowls and water pitchers disappeared. Too many were being appropriated as souvenirs by representatives of the new, more democratic Yale admitted by Dean of Admissions R. Inslee Clark.

In 2009, even the humble modern style of Yale dining experienced a seismic shock, when the Yale administration, responding with Pavlovian obedience to the preposterous demands of environmentally-minded whackjobs, suddenly removed all the plastic trays used for conveying your food and drinks from the cafeteria serving line to your table in the University Commons dining hall, used by Yale’s freshman class. No trays to run through Yale’s dishwasher would save some infinitesimal percentage of the water making up more than 70% of the planet’s surface from temporary contact with detergent.

Gaia would have been so pleased, but those inconsiderate freshmen rebelled at being asked to juggle plates, glass, and silverware, and demanded that the offending trays be brought back into service.

Director of Dining Rafi Taherian announced, after only a week of dissension, that it did not make sense to continue an initiative that seemed contrary to the wishes of the Yale community.

“Yale Dining listens,” Teherian said. “We don’t have ego. We’re responsive.”

But the Student Taskforce for Environmental Partnership (STEP) remained determined. Trayless dining might no longer be obligatory, but it could still be encouraged. STEP nagged students to try trayless dining.

Food waste measurements performed by STEP determined that people who dine trayless waste half as much food as tray users. That adds up pretty quickly. Trayless dining also looks classier. And the dining halls save a lot of water when they don’t need to wash as many trays. These are all awesome thing.

And as this new academic year opens, Yale students found that one more traditional distinctive feature of life in Yale’s residential colleges was gone. The twelve Yale residential colleges’ individual dining services had been removed, replaced by a new, generic service, specifically designed to promote the “voluntary” trayless dining movement.

Oldest College Daily:

Yale Dining has replaced the custom china sets in the residential colleges with a uniform set that will be used all across campus. The new china set features white plates with an outline and a “Y” on the bottom.

The new set also has considerably fewer pieces than the old set – it includes only a big plate, a saucer, a mug and a bowl.

The new plates are bigger, and allow students to take more food without having to take a tray.

Isn’t it typical of the left? If open coercion is ever effectively resisted and fails, you then get constant nagging, nibbling away and step-by-step subversion until choice is finally eliminated and the petty dictators get their way.

The old Yale plates were smaller than conventional dinner plates, being designed for ease of handling in cafeteria style dining. They were made by Syracuse China. Though they weren’t luxurious fine china, the old services were sturdy and durable, visually gratifying, and individual to each residential college.
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I found the photograph of the plate from my own residential college here. The last six pictures feature the outside and the interior of the Berkeley Dining Hall.

Liberals, as we all know, basically believe we ought to abolish democracy immediately, and just turn running the entire world over to the kind of morally superior, highly educated, and totally enlightened beings who run Ivy League universities.

IvyGate, however, finds that the omniscient wisdom of Yale, for instance, is not all that it might be, even in the fairly obvious matter of routine identity theft prevention.

Remember that time when you first matriculated? And Yale was all like, “Hey guys, no big deal, but we’re going to need all of your personal information. Yeah, that Social Security number? Fork it over. Don’t worry, though. We’re world-class academics. We know not to do anything stupid with it, like make it available on Google, or whatever.”

Yeah, well, turns out Yale was wrong.

The university announced on Friday that around 43,000 Social Security numbers — belonging to current and former students, faculty, staff and alumni – were released into the Google ether at some juncture in the past, apparently by force of sheer incompetence innocent mistake.

Via IvyGate.

Out-of-date “Heather Has Two Mommies” controversy to be superseded by the hip new “Kate Has Three Mommies” model?

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On a leafy drive in west Los Angeles, at a newly renovated home with cathedral ceilings and a backyard pool, 4-year-old Kate Eisenpresser-Davis’ friends have been known to pose an intriguing question: “Why does Kate have three mommies?”

Lisa Eisenpresser, 44, and her partner, Angela Courtin, 38, share custody of Kate with Eisenpresser’s ex-partner.

When asked to describe their life, Eisenpresser and Courtin respond with the same word: “Normal.” Days are spent searching for the right balance between work and home, and zigzagging through Mar Vista to meetings, school and gymnastics.

Courtin is pregnant. Kate will soon have a sister, Phoebe, conceived from Eisenpresser’s egg and sperm from a donor — the same 6-foot-1 Harvard grad, who scored a 1580 on the SAT, who served as Kate’s donor.

“It’s almost like I’m too busy to be thinking too deeply about being gay and different,” Eisenpresser said.

Maybe she shouldn’t bother. According to a Times analysis of new U.S. Census figures, the Eisenpresser-Courtin-Davises are on the leading edge of change — of a steady evolution in the meaning of “family” and “home” in California.

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J continues:

But what the heck kind of woman not only tells the media that the sperm donor that facilitated her childbearing is a Harvard grad but tells the media his frickin’ SAT scores? (Unfortunately, I can’t evaluate how awestruck I ought to be without more information on whether the reported score was generated before or after the various dumbing-down “renormings” of the scoring system.)
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T responds:

Presumably the singing groups will soon need to update their repertoires to include “Your Daddy Was a Yale Sperm….”*.

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• A reference to the old-time Yale a capella singing group song “Your Daddy is a Yale Man,” which not every reader may be familiar with, so here are the 2009 Whiffenpoofs performing same:

NPR rejoices in the occupancy of the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights by Russlynn Haneefa Ali, a first generation American, raised by a single mother from Trinidad, who is thoroughly committed to a philosophy that holds that inequality of results is immoral and intolerable and requires vigorous correction through an aggressive agenda of coercive federal social engineering.

Russlynn Ali, the youthful, curly-haired assistant secretary of the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, oversees the enforcement of all anti-discrimination laws related to education. With broad jurisdiction that includes admissions and recruitment, student discipline, as well as classroom assignment and grading, she investigates schools and districts nationwide to ensure equitable conduct across race, gender, national origin and disability.

It’s the same perch once occupied in 1982 by conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But over the past two years Ali, 40, has elevated the office’s work to new heights.

While previous OCR leaders have relied on filed complaints to launch probes, Ali has proactively opened 60 investigations based on the agency’s own research. That’s in addition to nearly 7,000 complaints recorded last year, the most in Education Department history. Of the thousands of cases handled in the first year under the Obama administration, resolution agreements increased by 11 percent. Voluntary resolutions, in which schools made sufficient changes without additional prodding, jumped 32 percent.

“My sense of urgency could not be greater,” Ali says in her raspy voice, punctuating each word with insistent hand motions over her office’s mahogany conference table. “We’re talking about questions of fundamental fairness.”

Ms. Ali describes the 1972 passage the 36-word Title IX amendment as “one of the most effective and profound Civil Rights laws in American History… One of the greatest Civil Rights accomplishments of the last 30 years. ”

“There’s been a great slippage in Title IX… We came so far from 1972 to 1980, then we started slipping. Then we picked back up in the early ‘90s, but then by 2000 we started slipping badly… And I made a commitment… I promise you no more slippage. Not while Barack Obama is President of the United States, and not while Arne Duncan is Secretary of Education, and not while Russlynn Ali is the Assistant Secretary of Education.”

The Yale DKE business represents Russlynn Ali’s attempt to revive Title IX aggression on the liberties of Americans and the autonomy of American colleges and universities in the name of radical egalitarianism.

Caroline May, at the Daily Caller, quoted several opinions: those of Doug Lanpher, the executive director of the national DKE organization; Amy Siskind, president and co-founder of the feminist New Agenda; Robert Shipley, senior vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE); and Hans Bader, Counsel for Special Projects at the Competitive Enterprise Institute on the peculiar action of the Yale University Administration in awarding new sanctions (banning the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon from the Yale campus for five years) in May in connection with a controversial initiation ritual last October. Despite denials by an obviously mendacious university spokesman, all agreed that Yale was acting in specific response to federal pressure.

So, why is the Federal government’s Department of Education twisting the arm of Mother Yale to beat up on DKE for a frankly sophomoric minor incident?

It seems that DKE was deliberately selected to serve as an example to demonstrate the renewed advance of Title IX federal enforcement, a key element of coercive social engineering fundamental to the strategic agenda of the democrat party’s radical leftwing base.

The complaint about an atmosphere at Yale allegedly hostile to ladies conveniently materialized early last month, from a small group representing in a Yale context the same strategic agenda at precisely the same time when the Obama Administration’s Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights, Russlynn Haneefa Ali, issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to essentially every college and university in the land, declaring a federal witch hunt against “sexual harassment” to be underway, defining sexual harassment in the broadest possible terms to include “verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct” in any fashion connected with sex which is “unwelcome” to someone or anyone, and asserting that harassing conduct in general may create “a hostile environment” anytime the conduct is deemed “sufficiently serious” as to interfere with some student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s program.

Instances of witchcraft presumably would be similarly worthy of federal intervention if someone engaged in verbal, nonverbal, or physical magic unwelcome to the alleged victim which created a hostile environment or interfered with a student’s studies.

Universities are not currently obligated to abjure witchcraft, to hire a particular person to receive complaints from persons claiming to have been hexed, and they are not federally required to conduct judicial inquiries into witchcraft complaints or to entertain spectral evidence, but Russlynn Ali’s Dear Colleague letter did decree that, in cases of sexual harassment, the federal government intends to require an official witch-hunter and an entire set of judicial apparatus and procedures be created, complete with victim counseling and support services. Additionally, universities are going to have to keep elaborate sets of records and keep Big Sister intimately informed about how many witches (Excuse me! sexual harassers) they have caught and punished and all the things they are doing to suppress heresy (Excuse me! sexual harassment).

The DKE fraternity chant affair has concluded with utterly contemptible behavior by the university, embodying cowardice and extraordinary and astonishingly unbecoming stupidity and violating the university’s own official commitment to freedom of expression.

Quote:

Yale’s commitment to freedom of expression means that when you agree to matriculate, you join a community where “the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox” must be tolerated. When you encounter people who think differently than you do, you will be expected to honor their free expression, even when what they have to say seems wrong or offensive to you.

No one is entitled to any “atmosphere” free of speech or expression he (or she) does not like. The erection by the political left of a variety of groups claiming, on the basis of historical grievances and ressentiment, special privileges and status is a moral and intellectual abomination.

In this case, a tiny minority of Yale’s most obnoxious and neurotic females, members of a gender comprising a slight majority of humanity, already empowered by Nature with staggering powers of influence and control over members of the opposite gender, particularly during a period of life when the reproductive impulse and any young lady’s powers of personal attraction are at their height, have been persuaded by ideological influences hosted and specially cultivated by Yale to see themselves on the basis of myths, stereotypes, and crude historical misunderstandings as victims, and then encouraged to exploit that status for personal and group power and rewarded for doing exactly that with attention and applause.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” is an ancient article of life wisdom imparted by parents to very young children over many generations. Modern liberal society has retreated in maturity to an intellectual state on the other side of childhood, to a state of infantilism, in which name-calling is inflated into a national issue superseding First Amendment rights and the tradition of free speech in Academia, and is viewed as demanding federal intervention and a coercive university response.

The tradition of academic freedom is based upon a general recognition that the period of the education of young people at university is a special period in which a completely open and unprejudiced approach to inquiry is appropriate and in which students traditionally enjoy special immunities from responsibility and conformity.

College students traditionally mock society’s sacred cows and college students are traditionally expected to let off steam and express high spirits through a variety of outrageous pranks. Only fools and outrageously presumptuous tyrants would ever take expressions made by fraternity pledges undergoing a ritual ordeal as statements accurately representative of real positions or as in any way meaningful at all. The fact that two incidents of fraternity ritual farce have been treated as matters of literal heretical expression and as gravely important transgressions by federal and university officials demonstrates only that both Yale and today’s United States are prey to ideological impulses capable of causing them to lapse readily into totalitarian regimes governed by nincompoops.
——————————
Yale’s 1975 Woodward Committee Report on Free Speech.

With the threat of federal grant money potentially being withheld, you can count on the Yale Administration to jump eagerly through the hoops of political correctness and the Yale Executive Committee confidentiality policy be damned. The Yale Daily News reports the ultimate denouement of last October’s terrible fraternity initiation chant nightmare.

In an email to students and faculty Tuesday afternoon, Yale College Dean Mary Miller informed the University community about the Executive Committee’s actions concerning the controversial Delta Kappa Epsilon pledge incident Oct. 13. After a full proceeding, Miller said, the Committee found that the Yale DKE chapter had violated the Undergraduate Regulations by threatening and intimidating others that night, when pledges were instructed to chanted phrases such as “No means yes, yes means anal” on Old Campus. The Committee also found several DKE brothers had breached the same regulations, resulting in individual penalties.

“Although it is unusual to send a memorandum regarding a particular Executive Committee decision to the Yale community, a wide range of community members have been affected by this incident,” Miller said in the email. “As a result, I have decided to share the Committee’s decisions regarding this case.”

Although Miller revealed that the Committee issued individual sanctions to fraternity members, federal and University privacy policies prevented her from communicating further details about these disciplinary actions, she said. But Miller did disclose that the Committee imposed penalties on the Yale DKE chapter — despite its status as an unregistered student organization — that prevent it from recruiting new members or holding any events on campus for five years. The sanctions also limit the group’s ability to communicate with the student body and use the Yale name in connection with DKE. ...

The Committee has formally asked that the fraternity’s national organization suspend the chapter for five years. After the Old Campus incident, DKE’s national organization promptly directed the Yale chapter to stop all pledge activities, including the initiation of new members. But the ban was lifted in early November, less than one month after it was imposed.

If, after five years, the fraternity has adhered to these measures and registers as an undergraduate organization, the Committee suggests that the Yale College Dean’s Office lift the penalties.

Although the national organization has yet to receive a formal request for suspension from the University, Executive Director of DKE International Douglas Lanpher said the measures detailed in Miller’s e-mail to the Yale community were “excessive” and that the fraternity’s headquarters would want to appeal the decision if possible.

Earlier NYM coverage.

Randall Lee Gibson (above) was valedictorian of the Yale Class of 1853. He had been born a member of the planter aristocracy of Kentucky and Louisiana. He was a keen secessionist and fought for the Confederacy, serving first as an artillery captain then as colonel of the 13th Louisiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

Nonetheless, Randall Gibson, Class of 1853, deserves to be counted as Yale’s first African-American graduate rather than Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, MD 1857, or Edward Alexander Bouchet, Class of 1874.

Randall Gibson was the descendant on one Gideon Gibson, who arrived in the Colony of South Carolina in 1730 and who was “a skilled tradesman, had a white wife and … owned land and slaves in Virginia and North Carolina.” Gideon Gibson obtained land grants from the governor of South Carolina and he and his descendants married into the white planter class on the Western frontier. By the 1790s, the Gibson family had forgotten its African origin and ascribed a family tendency toward a dark complexion to Gypsy or Portuguese descent.

New York Times article.

Randall Gibson fought at Shiloh. His regiment saw action with the Army of Tennessee at Chicamagua. Gibson ultimately made it all the way to the rank of Brigadier General in the Confederate Army. He fought in the Atlanta Campaign and ended the war defending the city of Mobile.

After the war and Reconstruction, Gibson was elected to Congress as a democrat from 1875 to 1883 and served as senator from 1883 to until his death in 1892. He was a trustee of Tulane and a hall at Tulane University is named for him.

Reading all this moved the Atlantic’s race blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates to observe:

Race is such bullshit.

April 15, 2011

Dear Graduates and Friends of Yale,

As you may know, Yale was recently informed by the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education that it will be investigating a complaint made by a group of current students and graduates alleging that the University is in violation of Title IX of the Higher Education Act. Title IX mandates that no one be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any federally supported education program on the basis of sex. We have not yet received a copy of the complaint, and the notification from the Office of Civil Rights does not provide details. We believe that the investigation will focus on Yale’s policies and practices concerning sexual harassment and misconduct.

It is imperative that the climate at Yale be free of sexual harassment and misconduct of any kind. The well being of our students and the entire community requires this. Should transgressions occur, they must be addressed expeditiously and appropriately.

We will cooperate fully with the Office of Civil Rights in their investigation, but the Officers, the Dean of Yale College, and I believe that we should not await the investigation before asking ourselves how we might improve the policies, practices, and procedures intended to protect members of our community. I write to describe some of the measures we are taking immediately.

I have appointed an external Advisory Committee on Campus Climate, chaired by Margaret H. Marshall ‘76JD, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and a former Fellow of the Yale Corporation [famous for contriving to have heard, and writing the infamous opinion in, Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health which produced the ruling that the Commonwealth of Massachusett’s 1780 Constitution, adopted at a time in which sodomy was a capital offense, required Massachusetts to recognize Gay Marriage—JDZ]. The other members of the Committee are Seth P. Waxman ‘77JD, former Solicitor General of the United States and a partner at WilmerHale LLP; Kimberly Goff-Crews ‘83BA, ‘86JD, Vice President for Campus Life and Dean of Students at the University of Chicago; and Elizabeth (Libby) Smiley ’02BA, former president of the Yale College Council and a director at Barbary Coast Consulting in San Francisco.

I have asked the Committee for advice about how sexual harassment, violence or misconduct may be more effectively combated at Yale, and what additional steps the University might take to create a culture and community in which all of our students are safe and feel well supported. The Committee will spend time listening to members of our community about the situation as they live it and will make its own assessments. We have policies in place, and a number of recommendations developed during the last year are being implemented. Nevertheless, I am confident that there is more that we can do, and I am grateful to the members of the panel for contributing their time and wise counsel.

The Committee will advise me directly, and I will review its recommendations with the Yale Corporation after the report is completed early in the fall semester. After review by the Corporation, the Committee’s recommendations will be made public.

Even as the Committee does its work, I want to take advantage of the remaining weeks of this semester to ensure that student concerns are heard directly by the senior leadership of the University. I am grateful to the Women’s Center for initiating this week a series of dinners with students and administrators. Following this lead, I have asked senior administrators to join with masters and deans over a meal in every college dining hall and in Commons in Reading Period, during the days following Spring Fling when classes do not meet, and when I hope students will take the time to engage in a conversation about the campus climate and our policies governing sexual misconduct. These will be informal opportunities to engage with Deans Mary Miller and Marichal Gentry, Provost Peter Salovey, and Vice President Linda Lorimer, along with your master or dean. I have asked the Provost, Vice President, and Deans to report back to me on the suggestions for improvement that they receive and to share what they have learned with the external Committee as well.

I have also asked the Deans of the Graduate and Professional Schools to ensure that similar conversations occur in each school.

The deepest values of our institution compel us to take very seriously the issues raised by the complaint brought to the Office of Civil Rights. We welcome this opportunity to learn from our community and from best practices elsewhere to protect all who study and work here.

Those deepest values being sanctimony, cant, and conformity to fashion.

Glenn Reynolds (another Yale alumnus) observed with justifiable disgust:

[Y]ou used to be able to punish the sort of behavior complained of here on the ground that it violated general principles of decency and acceptable public behavior. But after a half-century or so of attacking even the notion of general principles of decency and acceptable public behavior — especially where sex is concerned! — that doesn’t work.

Universities have long told the larger culture that it must simply put up with whatever is said, however offensive, in the interest of free expression. Now we see more evidence that that was always a lie, a self-serving cover story that was really meant simply to protect speech that the larger culture didn’t want to hear, with no intention to protect speech that people at universities don’t want to hear. Universities, meanwhile, have become some of the most hostile environments for free speech anywhere in America.

.

Last year, the Yale Daily News reported:

Two years ago, the walls of the Yale Women’s Center bore paintings of female genitalia.

The artwork, abstract representations board members made of their own vaginas, was meant to welcome visitors to the Women’s Center, said Isabel Polon ’11, a former political action coordinator for the center.

“What’s more inviting than a vagina?” she said.

Drawing the loudest outcry are a 2006 episode in which frat pledges chanted, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” in front of the Yale Women’s Center (a refrain they reprised in 2009), and a 2008 stunt in which frat members posed for a photo in front of the center with a sign proclaiming “We love Yale sluts.”

But before you shed a tear for Yale or its feminists, consider the role that both have played in saturating the campus with vulgar sexuality. In an effort to foster “dialogue” and “acceptance” of every possible sexual choice or act, they’ve drenched students, faculty and administrators in images and vocabulary of graphic sexuality.

The Women’s Center has hosted screenings of lesbian pornography, workshops on drag and talks about “sex toys and how to get the most out of them.” In 2006, the event “Who’s on Top” was intended to address lack of “discussion about the act of penetrative sex itself” and to explore feminist Andrea Dworkin’s theory “that intercourse and patriarchy are inseparable.” The center even throws naked parties to boost Yale women’s sense of body image.

These are the shrinking violets shocked that a bunch of frat guys would gather around their front door crassly chanting about sex.

Those chants were disgusting, of course. But when every taboo around sex is systematically eradicated, aren’t cries of “We Love Yale Sluts” inevitable?

Hat tip to Ursula Hennessey.

Back in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Princeton ’17, in This Side of Paradise described “The Yale Thing” this way:

I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

Monsignor chuckled.

“I’m one, you know.”

“Oh, you’re different—I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic—you know, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors—”

“And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor.

“That’s it.”

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

The Yale man in fiction was typically portrayed as an All-American, square-shooting man-of-action, along the lines of Frank Merriwell, Dink Stover, Flash Gordon, and even Bruce Wayne.

The modern ascendancy of leftism can **** up anything, even the Yale identity.

Some years ago, Yale gained a national reputation for the size of its percentage of undergraduates playing for the wrong team.

The inverted community at Yale in typical fashion claimed a wildly exaggerated 25% as its membership, and before very long a jesting jingle was commonly quoted on the subject.

“One in Four, Maybe More.
One in Three, Maybe Me.
One in Two, Must Be You.
One in One, No More Legacies”

And where does modernity lead? To the Yale Thing, defined thusly:

0:19 (non-embeddable) video

Hat tip to R. Douglas Clegg.

What accounts for such feminine timidity, this instinctive unwillingness or inability to talk or taunt back, without seeking the protection of university or government bureaucrats? Talking is apparently beside the point. “I just want to be able to walk back to my dorm at night without hearing all this crazy stuff from these guys,” one student complains. I sympathize (I was a young woman once, too), but “hearing crazy stuff” from people in public is part of life in a free society, a society in which you enjoy equal rights to say crazy stuff.

Putatively progressive feminists might agree, if only they regarded women as equal to the task of talking back, if only they distinguished between men who “say stuff” about women and men who “do stuff” to women. In the feminist view reflected in the Yale draft complaint, the misogynist rants of some undergraduate men (perhaps a relatively small percentage of them) is not speech. It’s a series of “dangerous,” “sex-discriminatory threats” that “intimidate” and “terrorize” women, constituting a hostile environment (or “rape culture”) that causes sexual violence.

That simplistic, practically hysterical anti-libertarian approach to offensive speech appears to be shared by the Obama administration. OCR [Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights] has initiated an investigation of alleged civil-rights violations at Yale, and, coincidentally, on April 4th, it issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to schools, colleges, and universities nationwide, clarifying their obligations to prevent and address sexual harassment. OCR’s letter conflates harassment and rape. It defines sexual harassment as “including” sexual violence and ignores the conflicts between sexual harassment regulations and free speech, or, in public schools, the constitutional limits on regulating “offensive” speech. Given OCR’s expansive and potentially repressive approach to punishing and preventing “bullying,” it’s not surprising but still distressing to find no concern for speech in its letter on harassment.

The only nod to civil liberty in OCR’s letter is a reminder that students accused of sexual harassment (including sexual violence) should be accorded due process. Indeed, “(p)ublic and state-supported schools must provide due process to the alleged perpetrator”—but not too much due process, it seems: “However, schools should ensure that steps taken to accord due process rights to the alleged perpetrator do not restrict or unnecessarily delay the Title IX protections for the complainant.” This suggests, oddly and ominously, that the statutory rights of the accuser trump the constitutional due-process rights of the accused.

Generally, the OCR letter displays much more concern for the sensitivities of accusers over the rights of the accused. Schools should, for example, separate complainants and alleged perpetrators while investigations are pending, and in doing so, they should “minimize the burden on the complainant.” Why not also minimize the burden on the alleged perpetrator? The Obama administration, like the administrations of so many colleges and universities, implicitly approaches sexual harassment and sexual violence cases with a presumption of guilt.

Campus investigations and hearings involving harassment or rape charges are notoriously devoid of concern for the rights of students accused; “kangaroo courts” are common, and OCR ’s letter seems unlikely to remedy them. Students accused of harassment should not be allowed to confront (or directly question) their accusers, according to OCR, because cross-examination of a complainant “may be traumatic or intimidating.” (Again, elevating the feelings of a complainant over the rights of an alleged perpetrator, who may have been falsely accused, reflects a presumption of guilt.) Students may be represented by counsel in disciplinary proceedings, at the discretion of the school, but counsel is not required, even when students risk being found guilty of sexual assaults (felonies pursuant to state penal laws) under permissive standards of proof used in civil cases, standards mandated by OCR.

I don’t know the ages of Obama’s OCR appointees, but they seem to be operating under the influence of the repressive disregard for civil liberty that began taking over American campuses nearly 20 years ago. As FIRE President Greg Lukianoff remarks, students have been “unlearning liberty.” Concern about social equality and the unexamined belief that it requires legal protections for the feelings of presumptively vulnerable or disadvantaged students who are considered incapable of protecting themselves has generated not just obliviousness to liberty but a palpable hostility to it.

The Left simply invokes a simplistic kind of sophistry to re-define speech it doesn’t like as an aggressive act and to transform disapproval and displeasure at oppositional mocking speech into victimization.

“Those DEKE and Zeta Psi initiations dared to ridicule our self-important ideology of victimization, and that created ‘a hostile atmosphere’ preventing us from feeling equal, and that should be a federal offense.”

The claim being made here is arrant nonsense, which any rational adult should recognize immediately, but American society has not been headed by rational adults since at least the 1960s.

The ABC reporters fail to remark that 12 complaining feminists (including alumnae), seconded by a small supportive chorus of 4 poofters, do not represent a terribly significant portion of a student population of roughly 12,000 or of an alumni community of a few hundred thousand.

Both the (October, 2010) misogynistic chants so vulgar that prim ABC could not replay them (which went “No means yes. Yes means anal.”) and the (January 2008) “derogatory signs” outside the Yale Women’s Center which were the alleged tipping point that prevented Hannah Zeavin from having “Bright College Years” were fraternity initiation ordeals, inflicted respectively by Delta Kappa Epsilon and Zeta Psi.

Ms. Zeavin clearly tips very slowly, over a period of years, and her Yale education has clearly done little for her skills at hermeneutics. If Ms. Zeavin were a better interpreter of meanings, she would grasp the fact that fraternity initiations are ordeals intended to demonstrate the pledge’s worthiness for admission to membership by his voluntary undergoing humiliation and suffering. The misogynistic chants and sign were, obviously, intended to embarrass and inflict discomfort on the initiates, so one must be awfully dense to interpret them as authentic representations of the political views and moral sentiments of those pledges. If DEKE sent them out chanting, “I’m a conventional, politically correct Ivy League undergraduate who supports Barack Obama,” there would have been no ordeal to it at all.

Hannah Zeavin and her fellows, who chose to make a federal case out of nothing, are either viciously irresponsible and malicious or as dumb as a bag full of hammers. Which is it, womynists?

Zeavin seems uncertain about whether her years at Yale are the “the shortest, gladdest years of life.” She doesn’t feel that she “necessarily” thinks hers are, and that has to be Yale’s fault. If an academical auto-da-fé burned sexist males on the Old Campus once a week every Tuesday, clearly Ms. Zeavin would have a spring in her step as she went off to classes.

It is the absence of such public manifestations of protective authority which bother her, it seems. “No one has ever been expelled for rape and there have been 41 years of coeducation.” Zeavin observes. It is, I think, generally known that some authentic rapes have occurred at Yale. Several were committed by intruders from the nearby inner city underclass community. A major explosion of new security measures, locked gates, cameras everywhere, buses to Science Hill, followed. I think I can recall hearing, many years ago, of an authentic rape by one undergraduate of another, but rather than expulsion, I would expect that such an incident would have led to arrest and incarceration. The removal of that kind of offender from society would tend to render his expulsion from Yale beside the point.

The university naturally avoids publicizing attacks and assaults on students, so reliable statistics and detailed factual accounts are unlikely to be readily available to the leaders of Yale feminism.

The final evidence of an intolerably hostile atmosphere for women at Yale was another trivial politically incorrect scandal from 2009, an anonymous email ranking 53 freshmen women in order of attractiveness. Obviously, a federal injunction needs to be issued commanding Yale men to stop making comparative judgments about female Yale undergraduates’ sexual attractiveness, and if Yale men persist and ignore that federal order, Barack Obama can federalize the Connecticut National Guard and send soldiers with rifles and bayonets to stop male students from checking out the available female talent.

The Oldest College Daily reports that Yale is under investigation by the feds:

[Yale] University is under investigation by the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights stemming from an alleged mishandling of several instances of sexual misconduct in recent years.

The Office for Civil Rights will open an investigation into the University “for its failure to eliminate a hostile sexual environment on campus, in violation of Title IX” — which prohibits discrimination or exclusion from education programs — according to a press release by the complainants sent to the News Thursday afternoon. Yale administrators said they have not yet received a copy of the complaint and cannot comment.

The measure comes after 16 Yale students and alumni filed a formal complaint March 15 informing the Office for Civil Rights about Yale’s breach of Title IX by citing a slew of “inadequate response[s]” to public episodes of sexual misconduct on campus, such as the controversial Delta Kappa Epsilon chanting incident on Old Campus last fall.

“We have tried so many avenues,” complainant Hannah Zeavin ’12 told the News Thursday. “We exhausted every internal process [available at Yale].”

On March 15, 16 students and recent alumnae of Yale filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights; I was one of them. The signatories were a diverse group, representing men and women, current students and recent graduates, those who have been involved in campus feminism and those who have not. The complaint itself was a detailed and heavily sourced 26-page document that outlined incidents of sex-based harassment and intimidation that have occurred at Yale every year for the past seven years, and argued that these incidents — and the University’s inadequate response to them — have resulted in a hostile educational environment for women at Yale. ...

For the past seven years, Yale has demonstrated… tolerance towards harassment of women: in 2004, when fraternity members stole (and photographed themselves wearing) four t-shirts from the annual Take Back the Night Clothesline Project, in which past victims of rape record their testimonies on t-shirts and display them; in 2005, when a new class of fraternity pledges stole 20 more of the t-shirts; in 2006, when yet another class of pledges gathered by the Yale Women’s Center and chanted, “No means yes! Yes means anal!”; in 2007, when over 150 Medical School students wrote a letter of protest about the conditions of sexual harassment on campus in which eight specific instances of sexual assault were cited; in 2008, when Zeta Psi pledges posed in front of the Yale Women’s Center with a poster reading, “We Love Yale Sluts,” photographed themselves in the pose, and disseminated the photo on Facebook; in 2009, when anonymous male students at Yale authored and circulated a “Preseason Scouting Report” e-mail that rated incoming freshman women according to how many beers it would take to have sex with them, and listing their names, hometowns and residential colleges; and this past October, when DKE pledges congregated on Old Campus chanting, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f—- dead women and fill them with my semen.”

So what do we mean when we say that Yale is a hostile environment for women? What we don’t mean is that every female student at Yale has experienced sexual harassment or assault. What we mean is that the University has consistently demonstrated an attitude of tolerance for highly public acts of misogyny and sexual aggression. Female undergraduates see their peers call them “Yale sluts” and hear still other peers chant that “no means yes.” They live with the knowledge that the University has failed to punish those peers for sexual harassment. It takes little imagination to understand the effect of this kind of atmosphere on female students’ ability to engage in campus life on a basis of safety and equality.

Oh me! oh my! Stolen t-shirts! Frat members displaying “Yale Sluts” posters… and on Facebook, too! DKE pledge chanting slogans which were crude!

And no one was expelled or conspicuously punished and ostracized for politically incorrect expressions in mocking and parodistic contexts. It is easy to understand how the failure of President Levin personally to horsewhip those rowdy and insensitive fraternity men inevitably drove Yale’s womynist leaders to drop a dime on their alma mater.

After all, as a lot of Old Blues warned back when Kingman Brewster started talking about coeducating the place in the 1960s, many womyn are just to emotionally frail, too politically refined and sensitive, to bear uncouth, oppositional speech or mocking expressions of political incorrectness.

Such females may suffer untoward intellectual confusion, ideological indignation, and hyper-emotional distress. They may suffer from feelings of persecution and harassment. Thus, a real sector of the female community cannot possible function at an equal level in a university environment which naturally and inevitably features high-spirited young men, and in which ideas and perspectives are intended to be challenged, ridiculed, and vigorously contested. Some of these poor lambs are simply too delicate, too frail, too easily upset for all that.

Females of this kind need protection. As we see, some 16 unhappy Yale womynists felt vulnerable and persecuted, simply because their preferred ideological positions had been mocked or derided on several occasions in the course of a period of years, and no masculine protector had come forward to avenge them. In the end, they had to turn to the ultimate alternative masculine surrogate, Big Brother himself.

I was talking about all this with one of my pre-coeducation friends from Bones and DKE, just this afternoon.

“I warned you that this kind of thing was bound to happen.” Tripp observed, taking another sip of his gin-and-tonic. “Political ideas and higher education just mess up some female heads. They become fanatical and they egg one another on. Sexual frustration, of course, is endemic among politicized females. And the combination of sexual frustration and their hormonal cycle leads directly to delusions of victimization, paranoia, and vicious and destructive behavior. Imagine complaining about Yale to the Federal Government! It’s the behavior of a cad and a bounder, but for a politicized feminist it’s par for the course. That radical Brewster sowed the seeds, and Levin is reaping the harvest.”

Mullen examines two four-year colleges located within two miles of one another: Yale University and Southern Connecticut State University. In racial terms, the two institutions are not all that different. Yale is 69 percent white, while Southern is 70 percent white. But as Mullen finds in interviews with 50 Yale students and 50 Southern students, the class divide is significant, and that difference has enormous implications for the attitudes, experiences, and expectations of students.

Mullen’s insightful new book, Degrees of Inequality, notes that Southern students tend to be the sons and daughters of “shopkeepers, secretaries, teachers, and construction workers,” about half of whom never completed college. By contrast, about 80 percent of Yale students sampled had parents with BA’s, two-thirds had some form of graduate education, and more than half came from the top 15 percent by income nationally. These students often “arrived on the back of tremendous childhood advantages.”

Among the advantages, she writes, were high parental expectations. In interviews, she writes, it was clear that most Yale students “never actually decided to go to college; it was simply the next step in their lives, one not requiring a rationale.” Although less than one percent of four- year college students attend Ivy League institutions, for some Yale students interviewed, “it was a question of which one.” She writes, “It is not simply that they aspired to attend the most elite institutions; rather, they planned on it.

Southern students, by contrast, made a conscious decision to pursue higher education and then mostly chose Southern based on “cost and convenience.” Neither factor was mentioned by a single Yale student. Over 90 percent of Yale students were from out of state, while over 90 percent of Southern students came from in-state. The Southern students never thought of applying to Yale, and the Yale students have never even heard of Southern.

The differences in opportunities and outlooks of Yale and Southern are then amplified once they reach college, Mullen finds. Yale, founded 300 years ago, has a $15-billion endowment “about two thousand times greater” than the endowment of Southern, which became a four-year institution in 1937 and became part of the Connecticut State University system in 1983.

The economic chasm between the schools and their students also drives profound differences in the experiences at each institution. To save money, only about one-third of Southern students live on campus and only 24 percent participate in extracurriculars, as many have to work 20-30 hours a week. By contrast, almost all students at Yale live on campus, and 67 percent participate in extracurriculars, from playing tennis to singing a capella.

Asked what they value most about college, Yale students tended to mention learning from friends and peers and participating in extracurricular activities. Southern students were only half as likely as Yale students to mention peers and friends.

Academic pursuits also differ greatly. Deciding on a college major is usually portrayed as a matter of individual choice, Mullen notes, but economic constraints are strongly felt. “For the Southern students,” she says, “majors represented not bodies of knowledge or academic disciplines, but rather occupational fields.” By contrast, Yale students were “quite cognizant” that their Ivy League degrees made the field of study chosen less important. One student told Mullen, “I’m getting a diploma with four letters Y-A-L-E on it. I should be able to have the sky be my limit.”

Surprise, surprise! Professor Mullen discovers the third-oldest and one of the most competitive colleges in the country attracts a more affluent and more cosmopolitan student body with larger ambitions and wider career options than those of students attending the local neighborhood’s uncompetitive teacher’s college.

Certainly a lot of Yale students come from more affluent and better educated family backgrounds, but comparing Yale and Southern most meaningfully would have to be done on the basis of academic talent. Southern’s students have average SAT scores in the 480-490 range on the three parts of the current test. Yale quotes different 25%/75% figures, which indicate that only 25% of Yale students got under 700 on any of the three parts of the SAT, and another 25% got 780 to 800. Yale admits around 7.5% of applicants these days. Southern admits 71% of applicants.

Yale students have different majors and different career options from students at Southern Conn, not because Yalies have inherited clout, but because they are, on the average, a great deal more academically competent and competitive.

In my day, Southern and Yale did interact a bit socially, most commonly via contact within the Connecticut Intercollegiate Student Legislature (CISL). Yalies dated girls from Southern, and I knew some people who married them.

Hat tip to David H. Nix.

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.

IvyGate coverage

CBS tell all

New York Post story
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Some helpful (inside Yale) background.

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.”

The resulting Rachel Aviv story.

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.

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.

Hat tip to Tristyn Bloom.

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.)

Hat tips to Leah Libresco and Tristyn Bloom.

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.

Hat tip to Leah Libresco.

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.”