The Whiffenpoofs of 2005 at Mory’s

Old Blues thought it was depressing when the Yankee Doodle closed last January.

Well, things can get worse.

When students return after winter break, Mory’s, beset like General Motors with overly generous union contracts precluding any prospect of profitability, will have shut down, possibly permanently.

Mory’s, a 19th century bar and hangout of Yale undergraduates, upon the retirement of its beloved proprietor Louis Linder in 1912, was purchased by alumni, moved bodily from Temple Street (where it was in the way of development) to a new location on York Street, and transformed into a private club.

Yale undergraduates became eligible to purchase life memberships upon arriving at the dignity of Sophomore year. Membership was restricted in the first half of the last century to the rich, white, and Protestant, but by the 1950s, all Yale undergraduates were admitted.

Mory’s made permanent enemies of a large number of its members in the early 1970s when its board levied an unprecedented assessment intended to pay legal fees for resistance to coeducation. Yale had coeducated its student body in 1970. If you didn’t pay your assessment, Mory’s revoked your membership. A lot of Yale alumni did not support the males-only membership policy, or objected to an assessment they had no opportunity to vote on, and refused to pay.

Back in the 1970s, the union made Mory’s close in the early evening, shortening work hours, but permanently ending late night undergraduate conviviality and reducing business.

The rise of Puritanism and Paternalism more recently restored the 21 year old drinking age, reduced to 18 in the days of the Boomer generation’s youth. National attention was increasingly directed by the media to undergraduate mishaps resulting from alcohol, and the Yale administration and the police responded by stepping up enforcement of underage drinking prohibition.

It’s not easy making a go of it as an alleged undergraduate club, if you don’t let most undergraduates drink. Yale bureaucrats and urban haute bourgeoisie in provincial and decaying New Haven are not adequate as a replacement customer base, and the fatal influence of bien pensant liberal politics gave away the farm to the waiters’ union years ago.

The Yale Daily News talks about “updating,” “modernizing,” and getting into step with the spirit of the age, but the handwriting of doom has been overlaying undergraduate graffiti on the oak panelling in the old Temple Bar for years.
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In memory of the old Mory’s, listen to Rudy Vallee (Y 1927) singing The Whiffenpoof Song 3:13 video

One of the few places Yale undergraduates can smoke without persecution these days must be New Haven’s famous pipe and tobacco store, the Owl Shop which apparently has, in recent times, installed a bar and lounge.

An on-scene correspondent reports an amusing exchange via graffiti found at the Owl Shop:

“F*** Republicans”
and underneath in different script, of course:
“...because Democrats just lie there unresponsive.”
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Hat tip to Angie Chamberland.

Joseph Epstein has taught for too many years to believe that conspicuous success in today’s elite universities is commonly a testament to good character. Au contraire, Epstein argues: “Some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools.”

Last week the excellent David Brooks, in one of his columns in the New York Times, exulted over the high quality of people President-elect Barack Obama was enlisting in his new cabinet and onto his staff. The chief evidence for these people being so impressive, it turns out, is they all went to what the world—”that ignorant ninny,” as Henry James called it—thinks superior schools. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the London School of Economics; like dead flies on flypaper, the names of the schools Obama’s new appointees attended dotted Brooks’s column.

Here is the column’s first paragraph:

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

This administration will be, as Brooks writes, “a valedictocracy.” The assumption here is that having all these good students—many of them possibly “toll-frees,” as high-school students who get 800s on their SATs used to be known in admissions offices—running the country is obviously a pretty good thing. Brooks’s one jokey line in the column has it that “if a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.” Since my appreciation of David Brooks is considerable, and since I agree with him on so many things, why don’t I agree with him here?

The reason is that, after teaching at a university for 30 years, I have come to distrust the type I think of as “the good student.” ...

Read the whole thing.

Demonstrating once again the American propensity to entrust the education of the young to society’s biggest fools, the eminent Wilson G. Bradshaw, president of Florida Gulf Coast University, struck a blow recently for “diversity” by issuing a proclamation banning public acknowledgment of Christmas.

Fort Myers News-Press:

Christmas is just 30 days away, but Santa Claus won’t be stopping by Florida Gulf Coast University this holiday.

He’s not allowed on campus.

FGCU administration has banned all holiday decorations from common spaces on campus and canceled a popular greeting card design contest, which is being replaced by an ugly sweater competition. In Griffin Hall, the university’s giving tree for needy preschoolers has been transformed into a “giving garden.”

The moves boil down to political correctness.

“Public institutions, including FGCU, often struggle with how best to observe the season in ways that honor and respect all traditions,” President Wilson Bradshaw wrote in a memo to faculty and staff Thursday. “This is a challenging issue each year at FGCU, and 2008 is no exception. While it may appear at times that a vocal majority of opinion is the only view that is held, this is not always the case.”

The ineffable Wilson G. Bradshaw’s Holiday proclamation. .pdf
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UPDATE

11/27: Policy reversed.

Roger Kimball savors Sarah Palin’s arrival on the political scene as a kind of Joan of Arc of the culture wars.

Sarah’s lucky that the establishment left is so thoroughly secularist, or they’d be preparing her stake now.

In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bill, a Yale man, was not singling out the Harvard faculty for special opprobrium. Harvard was merely a synecdoche. .. It was the smug, “progressive” liberal consensus that our elite academic institutions inculcated, even back then, that Bill objected to, not Harvard per se. ...

It’s only from the eyrie of the “Harvard” Weltanschauung that a largish random sampling of citizens is found culturally deficient. And this leads me to a crucial point about “Harvard” and the “progressive” consensus it represents: it is sophisticated about everything except its own naïveté. It champions cultural relativism–absolutely. It is suspicious when someone shows up peddling “the truth,” especially about moral matters; but it embraces its perspective on the world as inarguable. According to the gospel of “Harvard,” all right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) people agree with the various positions set forth in the catechism of liberalism. To champion the various dogmas set forth in that catechism, says “Harvard,” is simply to exhibit one’s contact with reality. To dissent from them is to exhibit one’s ignorance, bad faith, or malevolence. Nice work if you can get it!

If you can get it? The amazing thing is that there is nothing easier. The liberal consensus has tenure. I mean, it is thoroughly institutionalized, and not only in academia. It has metastasized throughout elite culture. It’s what you are likely to uphold if you were graduated from an Ivy League college, went to law school, or work for The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc. It explains the little frisson Chris Matthews felt travelling up his leg as Obama spoke last winter. It also explains the incredulous, spluttering rage that Sarah Palin has provoked in purlieus of liberal self-satisfaction. I call it “Palin Hysteria Syndrome.” Just this morning, for example, I received this email from an acquaintance (I preserve the original orthography and diction: he is a careful writer as a rule, but clearly his emotion got the better of him here):

i read you blog posting on Sarah Palin. Quite a suprise. Never would I have thought you suceptible to trailer trash. More suprising were the comments about Palin’s “executive experience” and being governor of the country’s “largest state.” Once upon a time, those were the sort of sphistries against which you waged glorious battle. The strange bedfellows induced by politics are not integrity and compromise.

“Trailer trash,” eh? Clearly, as Victor Davis Hanson put it yesterday, “Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia” are acting “as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.” “Cruise missile” is good: it suggests the unexpectedness and deadly accuracy of the blow. But I like to think that Boston phone book–or maybe it’s the Juneau phone book–is finally getting some of its own back. Bill Buckley would be pleased.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Paul Collins at Stale tries some recipes from Vincent Price (Y 1933)’s 1956 cookbook.

My wife and I—she being the Mary to my Vincent—began our day of all-Price cooking with one of his great culinary loves: pancakes. They’d already come a long way from the days of a 1935 cookbook like Someone to Dinner, where the recipe for crêpes Savannah reads, in full, “Pancakes, the ordinary size, served with hot maple syrup.” No such fainthearted stuff for Vincent: The name Banana Pancake Flambé Stonehenge alone murders all culinary competitors. You wrap sautéed bananas into crêpes, vigorously stab strips of bacon atop them, and flambé it all in banana liqueur. It’s a dish that rewards sleepy incompetence: If you don’t flambé it properly, the pancakes immediately soak up copious amounts of hooch, leaving you woozily imitating lines from The Abominable Dr. Phibes while you twirl a villainous moustache and choose your victims for lunch.

Amusingly enough, we’ve got a sinister bottle of banana cordial (inherited from Karen’s mother) right here in the house. It is certainly an appropriate elixir for Price-ian crêpe preparation. I often hear it whispering, whispering very softly, to me as I pass the liquor cabinet.

What’s that? What is it saying?

It wants me to show Karen’s new basset hound the special amontillado in the basement?

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers (Y 1975).

Roger Kimball, at PJM, has proposed a summer’s end contest

The Challenge: Name the silliest argument to be offered by a serious academic in the last 25 years and to be taken up and be gravely masticated by the larger world of intellectual debate.

Examples given include Global Warming, and Kimball’s current favorite, Francis Fukuyama’a “End of History.”

It’s not going to be easy to top those very deserving entries. Off the cuff, the best I can do to compete is to offer the obvious choice: Martin Bernal’s 1987 Black Athena contention that Ancient Greece cribbed Western Civilization from Afroasiatic and Semitic sources.

My proposed runner-up would have to be the late John Boswell’s 1994 thesis in The Marriage of Likeness that the early Christian Church blessed Gay unions via brotherhood ceremonies, a thesis equal in both creativity and impertinence.

Interestingly, both of my choices are theories emanating from, and central to, bogus academic departments created essentially as compensation to victim groups.

Allahpundit catches Obama teetering, one foot over the edge of a fantastic gaffe. Asked what currently-serving Supreme Court Justice he would not have appointed, he names the libertarian, strict constructionist Clarence Thomas, and proceeds to contend that Thomas lacked “EXP,” the first syllable of experience. Then Obama pulls back himself back from cliff edge and changes in mid-phrase to saying that Thomas wasn’t “a strong enough jurist or legal thinker.”

Rich stuff coming from a University of Chicago Affirmative Action Law School lecturer with no record of scholarship or publication, but think of the fun that could have been had by all discussing, as Allahpundit puts it, “what horrible outcomes can arise when people without experience are placed in positions of great power.” Oh heck, let’s discuss it anyway.

0:54 video

Rachel Toor (Br ‘84) responds to William Deresiewicz’s recent widely-read article on the Disadvantages of Elite Education.

She thinks Deresiewicz gets it wrong because he only taught at Yale. He didn’t go there.

With the ongoing admissions frenzy, I, too, have been wondering if people really know what they’re aspiring to. Certainly for less-affluent students, a name-brand college provides access to the power elite. But the costs can include rifts within families and scarring blows to self-confidence. Sure, when you arrive, you’re told you’re the cream of the crop. But you feel like skim milk. Most students, no matter their achievements, think they’re admissions mistakes. They pad insecurities in a blanket of bravado. For legacies, or development admits, a sense of having to prove oneself can lead to a passion to excel or to indecorous behavior. Kids from North Dakota may as well hang a sign that says “geographical distribution” around their neck. Football players — well, they know the score.

Who feels at home in a place like Yale, where your roommate has already published a novel and the person down the hall performed on Broadway? How do you explain that now, when you turn on the television or open a newspaper, you see someone you went to college with? It sounds like bragging.

People who didn’t attend elite schools want to hear about the dummies. They point to certain Yale alumni in high government positions to say, See? These places are overrated. That’s probably true, but unless you were there, it’s hard to know in which ways.

What Deresiewicz gets wrong is that, as a faculty member, he didn’t know what it was like to be a student at Yale, where, I would argue, much of the intellectual exchange and competition goes on in the dining hall or the dorm rooms, not in the classrooms. Students know who the scholars are and revere them. They pay attention to who writes the books, but tend to talk about the authors most often to their friends

They do, however, look for adults to connect with. An acquaintance told me that he had felt most at home at Yale with the librarians behind the checkout desk.

It’s unseemly to ask for sympathy for having survived Yale, but the truth is, I’m still recovering from my experience there. Perhaps only the self-deprecating sense of humor of a Calvin Trillin can get across to the non-Ivied public what it was like without sounding boastful about answered prayers.

There are disadvantages to an elite education; I’m just not sure that they’re the ones that Deresiewicz mentions. When I meet someone who went to Yale, I search for the haunted recognition beyond the Boola Boola. But no one wants to reopen old wounds. When pushed, some of my friends confess that Yale made them feel rotten and insecure, and they continue to judge themselves against the extraordinary achievements of their classmates. Others claim they have spent their lives disappointed to never again find such a rich intellectual environment. ...

It’s a chestnut of academe that students get in the way of the faculty’s “real” work, and an even more tired move to complain about the questionable work ethic and values of students. Deresiewicz’s essay, beautifully written and critically smart, flattens the variety of his students’ lives into the kinds of generalizations we try to nudge first-year composition students out of making. When I asked a student now at Yale what he thought of the essay, he said that he agreed with a lot of it, but he felt that it was “sour grapes.” I’d love for Yale to send copies to newly admitted students as a kind of informed consent: This is what the people who will be teaching your classes think of you. Still wanna come?

I didn’t feel overawed by the people I met at Yale personally. In fact, I thought I was in my own personal heaven, reveling in the opportunity to meet so many extraordinarily talented people. But even an egomaniac like me did feel the difference between a provincial background with limited educational opportunity like my own and the kind of college preparation people got at places like Andover and Hotchkiss or Scarsdale High School.

Years later, I read Crossing the Line, the WWII memoir of Yale professor Alvin B. Kernan, followed by his memoir of his academic career, In Plato’s Cave. I hadn’t taken any courses from Kernan, but many people I knew did, and his name was very familiar to me.

I found the academic memoir illuminating. Yale was a very different experience viewed from the everyday working life perspective of the junior faculty member laboriously climbing the academic ladder and commuting to campus from some modest house in a middle class suburb.

I suppose I should not have been totally surprised, particularly on the basis of personal acquaintance with Yale professors who clearly felt the same way, to find that Kernan envied and detested Yale students. From his outsider’s perspective, we were all insiders. He did not recognize the difference between the scholarship student from the working class mill town and the captain of the polo team.

To an associate professor, scraping by to make ends meet and worrying about his chances of ever receiving tenure, all Yale undergraduates seemed like carefree gilded youth, drifting happily between the Fence Club and a Senior Society tomb, having a fine time at college, before moving on to an already-reserved place at the Masters of the Universe table.

Of course, that stereotype was preposterously untrue in the 1960s and the 1970s. I doubt it fit a substantial percentage of the population of 1920s undergraduate Yale either. But some of the faculty really did think that way, and for those, delivering a bad grade seemed sweet revenge. One could see them gloating over every opportunity.

I know what she meant about friendships with the working staff, too. There was a sweet old lady who commonly occupied the entrance desk at Sterling Library, charged with scrutinizing identity cards for access to the library stacks. She always delivered a friendly greeting to me, in the manner of someone you knew and smiled at daily in your hometown. That kind of less-than-Olympian human contact could be peculiarly comforting to young men far from home.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Herbert E. Meyer, in a speech to a Seattle conservative women’s group (they have those in Seattle?), pointed out that members of America’s best educated classes, our urban elites, see the world differently from the rest of us.

Their difference in perspective is also no accident, he argues, the media and our educational institutions created that perspective by political indoctrination.

What’s going on today in our country isn’t normal politics. In normal politics honorable people will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how best to deal with the issues that confront us – national security, border control, healthcare, education, energy, the environment, and all the rest. What’s going on today is a kind of domestic Cold War—a seemingly endless standoff, with the occasional hard skirmish—between those of us who see the US for what it really is, and those of us who are seeing the US through a prism. And remember, unlike real prisms these intellectual prisms—or, if you prefer, these political prisms—are invisible. If you’re looking at the US through a political prism, you don’t know you’re seeing through a prism and you won’t believe anyone who tries to tell you that you are. ...

No one is born with a political prism in his or her mind. It has to be implanted there. And for more than 40 years, since the mid-1960s, this is what the Left has been working to do. While we’ve been arguing with them about issues, they’ve been working—steadily and stealthily—to implant political prisms into the minds of Americans. They’ve done this by seizing control of our public education system, and of our mainstream media.

Today, our schools and universities are less designed to educate our children than they are designed to indoctrinate them into believing that the United States is an evil country in which the rich oppress the poor, in which business pollutes rather than produces, and whose armed forces wreak havoc around the world rather than keep us safe while liberating entire populations from tyranny. And the mainstream media is less focused on informing than on reinforcing what our schools and universities are teaching.

Forty years of hard work by the Left have paid off. Our schools, our universities, and the mainstream media have successfully implanted political prisms into the minds of nearly half our population.

Read the whole thing.

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Hat tip to the Barrister.

James Kirchik, a liberal writing at the libertarian DoubleThink, describes undergraduate political life at Yale, the parties currently making up the Yale Political Union, and winds up ruefully paying tribute to an organization I belong to: The Party of the Right (POR).

Mr. Kirchik is misinformed on one detail. The current Conservative Party was formed in the 1990s by a gentleman who had been defeated for a second time seeking election as Chairman of the Party of the Right. The name “Conservative Party” was technically vacant, since the real Conservative Party, tracing its history back to Union’s 1930s beginning, had in a moment of 1980s flaccidity changed its name to the “Independent Party,” having become ashamed even to be called Conservative.

The Party of the Right, early in its history, chose to create a cult of devotion to the memory of King Charles I of England, on the basis of his martrydom for the simultaneous causes of Legitimacy and Liberty. The POR Chairman wears a medal commemorating Charles I, and POR toasting sessions (a formal drinking bout held at Mory’s) are opened by the Chairman reciting Charles I’s scaffold speech, which, in part, goes:

For the people. And truly I desire their Liberty and Freedom as much as anybody whomsoever. But I must tell you, that their Liberty and Freedom, consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.

Sirs, It was for this that now I am come here. If I would have given way to an Arbitrary way, for to have all Laws changed according to the power of the Sword, I needed not to have come here; and therefore, I tell you, (and I pray God it be not laid to your charge) That I Am the Martyr of the People.

It’s easy for the average student to poke fun at the bow-tied, intellectual conservative. The conservatives have fewer (though closer) friends; they are not members of the once-vaunted secret societies (with few exceptions, visible campus conservatives have been unofficially barred from Yale’s secret societies); they are not characters on the campus party scene, opting instead for “game nights” with their fellow party members. But, I suspect, many Yale students know, deep down, that they are missing out on something by avoiding the political union and its misfits. Amidst all of the average Yalie’s resume-whoring extra-curricular activities, hard-partying, and frantic searching for top internships and jobs, the intellectual life they had hoped to find at Yale, indeed, that they assumed would just appear the minute they walked through its ivy gates, proves ever elusive. Having become pre-professional training colleges, the modern liberal arts university is simply not what it appears to be in the movies and novels of old. Meanwhile the right-wing subculture at Yale has become the bastion of intellectual life on campus. At the PU, I always knew that getting into a debate with a Tory, Con, or a member of the POR would be more challenging than any classroom discussion. Yale students suspect that this is more or less the truth of the matter. They just wish it weren’t so.

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

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

Hat tip to Matthias Storme.

Megan McArdle does to the leftwing professoriate at University of Chicago who signed a letter protesting the establishment of a Milton Friedman Institute (God forbid!) at their university what a Jack Russell terrier does to a rat.

I haven’t heard such transparently wishful claptrap since my fifteen-year-old boyfriend tried to convince me that sex provided unparalleled aerobic exercise.

Racial brouhahas based on fictitious circumstances and wildly paranoid interpretations have become a news staple from the time of the Tawana Brawley hoax to the forced resignation of a white member of the mayor of DC’s staff for using the word “niggardly” to the recent fictitious connection with a racially-motivated black-on-white gang beating in Jena, Louisiana of nooses supposedly used as a symbol of racial intimidation.

The latest outbreak of major league racial lunacy began last Fall at Purdue, Dorothy Rabinowitz tells us in the Wall Street Journal.

Keith Sampson, a student employee on the janitorial staff earning his way toward a degree, was in the habit of reading during work breaks. Last October he was immersed in “Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan.”

Mr. Sampson was in short order visited by his union representative, who informed him he must not bring this book to the break room, and that he could be fired. Taking the book to the campus, Mr. Sampson says he was told, was “like bringing pornography to work.” That it was a history of the battle students waged against the Klan in the 1920s in no way impressed the union rep.

The assistant affirmative action officer who next summoned the student was similarly unimpressed. Indeed she was, Mr. Sampson says, irate at his explanation that he was, after all, reading a scholarly book. “The Klan still rules Indiana,” Marguerite Watkins told him – didn’t he know that? Mr. Sampson, by now dazed, pointed out that this book was carried in the university library. Yes, she retorted, you can get Klan propaganda in the library.

The university has allowed no interviews with Ms. Watkins or any other university official involved in the case. Still, there can be no disputing the contents of the official letter that set forth the university’s case.

Mr. Sampson stood accused of “openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers.” The statement, signed by chief affirmative action officer Lillian Charleston, asserted that her office had completed its investigation of the charges brought by Ms. Nakea William, his co-worker – that Mr. Sampson had continued, despite complaints, to read a book on this “inflammatory topic.” “We conclude,” the letter informed him, “that your conduct constitutes racial harassment. . . .” A very serious matter, with serious consequences, it went on to point out.

That was in November. Months later, in February of this year, Mr. Sampson received – from the same source – a letter with an astonishingly transformed version of his offense. And there could be no mystery as to the cause of this change.

After the official judgment against him, Mr. Sampson turned to the Indiana state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose office contacted university attorneys. Worse, the case got some sharp local press coverage that threatened to get wider.

Ludicrous harassment cases are not rare at our institutions of higher learning. But there was undeniably something special – something pure, and glorious – in the clarity of this picture. A university had brought a case against a student on grounds of a book he had been reading.

And so the new letter to Mr. Sampson by affirmative action officer Charleston brought word that she wished to clarify her previous letter, and to say it was “permissible for him to read scholarly books or other materials on break time.” About the essential and only theme of the first letter – the “racially abhorrent” subject of the book – or the warnings that any “future substantiated conduct of a similar nature could mean serious disciplinary action” – there was not a word. She had meant in that first letter, she said, only to address “conduct” that caused concern among his co-workers.

What that conduct was, the affirmative action officer did not reveal – but she had delivered the message rewriting the history of the case. Absolutely and for certain there had been no problem about any book he had been reading.

This, indeed, was now the official story – as any journalist asking about the case would learn instantly from the university’s media relations representatives. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved – if not much – by the extraordinary efforts of these tormented agents trying to explain that the first letter was all wrong: No reading of any book had anything to do with the charges against Mr. Sampson. This means, I asked one, that Mr. Sampson could have been reading about the adventures of Jack and Jill and he still would have been charged? Yes. What, then, was the offense? “Harassing behavior.” While reading the book? The question led to careful explanations hopeless in tone – for good reason – and well removed from all semblance of reason. What the behavior was, one learned, could never be revealed.

There was, of course, no other offensive behavior; had there been any it would surely have appeared in the first letter’s gusher of accusation. Like those prosecutors who invent new charges when the first ones fail in court, the administrators threw in the mysterious harassment count. Such were the operations of the university’s guardians of equity and justice.

William Deresiewicz, like some other people around here, spent time at Yale, and has some apt criticism of both the objectives and results of American elite education.

Even though he’s a liberal and a romantic who seems to think we need to be producing poets and revolutionaries, he is not wrong in noting that independent thought is not exactly what our most prestigious educational institutions are aiming at.

As one student responds to Deresiewicz in class: “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”

No, he’s calling you “tools,” actually.

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. ...

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

The excerpt below is from an article, titled “On the Sadness of Higher Education,” by Alan Charles Kors, which appeared in New Criterion, was later quoted by the Wall Street Journal, and was subsequently republished here.

Under the heirs of the academic ‘60s, we moved on campus after campus from their Free Speech Movement to their politically correct speech codes; from their abolition of mandatory chapel to their imposition of Orwellian mandatory sensitivity and multicultural training; from their freedom to smoke pot unmolested to their war today against the kegs and spirits-literal and metaphorical-of today’s students; from their acquisition of young adult status to their infantilization of “kids” who lack their insight; from their self-proclaimed dreams of racial and sexual integration to their ever more balkanized campuses organized on principles of group characteristics and group responsibility; from their right to define themselves as individuals-a foundational right-to their official, imposed and politically orthodox notions of identity. American college students became the victims of a generational swindle of truly epic proportions. If that part of the faculty not complicit in this did not know that it was happening, it was by choice or willful blindness.

In the academic university-the curriculum and classroom, and the hiring that underlies them-it all varies by where one looks. To understand why and to understand one of the few vulnerabilities of universities to actual accountability and reform, one must understand the hierarchy that predicts academic institutional behavior: sexuality (in their language, “sexual preference”) trumps neutrality; race properly conceived easily trumps sexuality; sex properly conceived (or, in their language, “gender”) easily trumps race; and careerism categorically trumps everything. From that perspective, the careerists who run our campuses have made a Faustian bargain (though they differ on which is the devil’s portion).

Being careful, on the whole, to keep the natural and physical sciences, mathematics, and a variegated Column A of departments (sometimes psychology, sometimes philosophy, sometimes linguistics), and the professional schools that relate symbiotically to practical America relatively free of political agendas-though even in these cases, the barriers to crude politicization may break down-the careerist administrators have kept largely intact those disciplines where added value might be measured. From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case-the professoriate and the curriculum-it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become. ...

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten “minorities,” including women (the majority of students), about the “internalization” of their oppression (today’s equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them?

The power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials. As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his “Going Broke by Degree,” they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. They hire there despite, not because of, that. Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify. So long as recruiters pay premiums, however, it is rational for parents who wish to gain the most options for their children to send them to the university with the most prestigious degree. That will not change in the current scheme.

We now have closed-shop, massively subsidized, intolerant political fiefdoms, and they are the gatekeepers of society’s rewards. Without incentives for different models of higher education, we shall have this same system of colleges and universities as far as the mind can foresee. The tax-free mega-endowments will grow. The legislators and the public will not end the subsidy. The alumni will continue their bequests. The trustees will proudly attend the administrative dog-and-pony shows, the most efficient act on any campus. Well-intentioned donors will support ghettoized “centers” (without faculty lines, cross-listed courses, graduate fellowships, or degrees) that marginalize inquiries that should be central to the academy. These provide protective coloration for administrators, help with fund raising in certain quarters, and permit a transfer of funds to the accelerating thirst for ever new forms of regnant campus orthodoxies. Until civil society makes administrators pay a price for the politicized hiring, curriculum and student life offices they administer, nothing truly will be reformed.

Neal Boortz, a conservative AM talk radio host (whose program I wish were featured on my local station) says: This speech has never been delivered at a college or a university. It was written to protest the fact that such an invitation has never been offered!

Now, I realize that most of you consider yourselves Liberals. In fact, you are probably very proud of your liberal views. You care so much. You feel so much. You want to help so much. After all, you’re a compassionate and caring person, aren’t you now? Well, isn’t that just so extraordinarily special. Now, at this age, is as good a time as any to be a Liberal; as good a time as any to know absolutely everything. You have plenty of time, starting tomorrow, for the truth to set in. Over the next few years, as you begin to feel the cold breath of reality down your neck, things are going to start changing pretty fast .. including your own assessment of just how much you really know.

So here are the first assignments for your initial class in reality: Pay attention to the news, read newspapers, and listen to the words and phrases that proud Liberals use to promote their causes. Then compare the words of the left to the words and phrases you hear from those evil, heartless, greedy conservatives. From the Left you will hear “I feel.” From the Right you will hear “I think.” From the Liberals you will hear references to groups—The Blacks, The Poor, The Rich, The Disadvantaged, The Less Fortunate. From the Right you will hear references to individuals. On the Left you hear talk of group rights; on the Right, individual rights.

That about sums it up, really: Liberals feel. Liberals care. They are pack animals whose identity is tied up in group dynamics. Conservatives and Libertarians think—and, setting aside the theocracy crowd, their identity is centered on the individual.

Liberals feel that their favored groups have enforceable rights to the property and services of productive individuals. Conservatives (and Libertarians, myself among them I might add) think that individuals have the right to protect their lives and their property from the plunder of the masses.

In college you developed a group mentality, but if you look closely at your diplomas you will see that they have your individual names on them. Not the name of your school mascot, or of your fraternity or sorority, but your name. Your group identity is going away. Your recognition and appreciation of your individual identity starts now.

If, by the time you reach the age of 30, you do not consider yourself to be a libertarian or a conservative, rush right back here as quickly as you can and apply for a faculty position. These people will welcome you with open arms. They will welcome you, that is, so long as you haven’t developed an individual identity. Once again you will have to be willing to sign on to the group mentality you embraced during the past four years.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

How about the endowments of major universities? Massachusetts is thinking about doing just that.

WSJ:

Massachusetts legislators, demonstrating a growing resentment against the wealth of elite universities in tight economic times, are studying a plan to levy a 2.5% annual tax on the portion of college endowments that exceed $1 billion.

After all, as Jim Manzi notes:

Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

Hat tip to David Nix.

Yale’s Harkness Tower

Bert Prelutsky, at PJM, has a few choice remarks on presidential politics and the Ivies.

Ivy certainly looks nice, but you wouldn’t want to stroll through it. Here in Southern California, it’s common knowledge that most of our rodents hang out in the stuff. If bubonic plague ever breaks out in L.A., the source will be found lurking in the shrubbery.

What has me dwelling on ivy is my recent realization that much of what I don’t like about American politics — namely, American politicians — can be traced back to Ivy League schools. It can’t just be a coincidence that four or five universities keep spitting out presidential candidates and their spouses with the sort of regularity that Notre Dame used to turn out All American football players.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

The artist at the time of her high school graduation

Helaine S. Klasky, Yale University Spokesperson, raised some interesting issues in the administration’s statement denying the reality of that naughty Aliza Schvarts’ senior art project:

(Yale now has at least one Spokesperson, forsooth! Demonstrating that the current president and his entire skulk of deans are too self-important, or know themselves to be too inarticulate, to speak for the University. Jesus wept.)

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

But Ms. Schvarts fired back a manifesto, repeating the story of her project, and artfully identifying it as “myth,” while darkly hinting at a purpose and meaning capable of shaking the Yale art department and the University’s administration to their very foundations.

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. ...

To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators (Note the term -JDZ) who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms . copies of copies of which there is no original. ...

The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.

In other words: the supposed piece of art never existed at all, except as a concept, a narrative, and a spoof.

Then, embedded in more jargon, Schvarts delivers the ultimate ambiguity.

Is she spouting a bunch of ridiculous leftwing cant, or is she producing what looks like a classic example of the genre in order to mock and satirize it? Is Aliza Schvartz possibly really a nice, ethically-concerned Jewish girl, taking a shrewd whack at the conventional liberal consensus on sex, reproduction, and abortion in the contemporary elite university with a vicious parody of the methodology and hermeneutics of fashionably politicized “art?”

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. ... This central ambiguity defies a clear definition of the act. The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming . an authorial act.

It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it.

As an intervention into our normative understanding of .the real. and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are .meant. to do from their physical capability. The myth that a certain set of functions are .natural. (while all the other potential functions are .unnatural.) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives.

Just as it is a myth that women are .meant. to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are .meant. for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not .meant. for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are .meant. to birth a child.

When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction . the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth . the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.

Roger Kimball, at PJM, notes that Ms. Schvartz’s “art” has successfully challenged some orthodoxies, and recognizes that the question is exactly which ones?

Yale’s response was a masterpiece of evasion. “Had these acts been real,” their statement continued, “they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.” You don’t say?... And what, by the way, was the standard being violated? I wonder, for example, whether the Yale spokesman would say that abortion itself violated a basic ethical standard? Or maybe the violation requires first deliberately impregnating oneself? (But why would that affect the “basic ethical standard” involved?) Or maybe it was videotaping the performance that was the problem?

I know that in the universe occupied by Ivy League academics, the spectacle of a woman repeatedly inseminating herself, quaffing abortifacient drugs (“herbal” ones, though: we’re all organic environmentalists here), and then video taping the resultant mess poses a problem. I mean, in that universe there really are basic ethical standards: Thou shalt not smoke, for example. Thou shalt not support the war in Iraq. Thou shalt not vote Republican. There really are some things that are beyond the pale. ...

Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Perhaps—just possibly—Aliza Shvarts has reminded us how untrue that statement is. If so, we are in her debt.

James Taranto, too, at the Wall Street Journal, sees the ironic possibilities.

When Yale says that Shvarts’s project, “if real,” violates “basic ethical standards,” what kind of ethical standards does it have in mind?

It seems unlikely that Yale is making a moral claim against the putative Shvarts project. The abortion debate is driven by two irreconcilable moral premises: on the antiabortion side, that it is wrong to take a human life deliberately at any stage of development; on the pro-abortion side, that a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body.

In practice, most people’s actual positions on abortion amount to a compromise between these two absolutes. If Yale has an institutional view on abortion, surely it is closer to the pro- than the antiabortion side. And if Shvarts did what she claims to have done, she destroyed protohumans (for want of a better neutral term) no later than the embryonic stage of development—a stage at which, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, a woman has an absolute “constitutional” right to terminate her pregnancy.

Is Yale claiming that Shvarts violated academic ethics? This is a real head-scratcher. Academic ethics center on honesty; the most important prohibitions are against such actions as falsification of data or plagiarism (misrepresenting another’s work as one’s own). But Yale is claiming that Shvarts’s project violated “basic ethical standards” if she was honest in describing it. If Shvarts perpetrated a hoax, then according to Yale she was exercising “the right to express herself.” The implication is that if she was lying, she was behaving ethically.

Yale therefore is either taking a moral position in opposition to abortion or standing academic ethics on their head. Which raises an intriguing possibility: Could it be that Aliza Shvarts is an opponent of abortion who has staged a hoax aimed at embarrassing those who support or countenance abortion?

Earlier postings

Artist scamp hard at work

A new report from the Oldest College Daily advises the well-and-truly-grossed-out news-reporting and news-reading worlds that Aliza Schvarts (Y’08)’s miscarriages-as-art project was merely a naughty undergraduate joke intended to spark conversation and debate.

Aliza Shvarts ’08 was never impregnated. She never miscarried. The sweeping outrage on blogs across the country was apparently for naught — at least according to the University.

As the news of her supposed senior art project chronicling a year of self-induced miscarriages was greeted with widespread shock on campus and elsewhere, the Davenport College senior traded barbs with Yale officials on Thursday over a project she described as an exhibit documenting a nine-month process during which she claimed to have artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically inducing miscarriages.

But while Shvarts stood by her project and claimed that administrators had backed her before the planned exhibition attracted national condemnation, the University dismissed it as nothing more than a piece of fiction.

“The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body,” Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said in a written statement Thursday afternoon.

Klasky said Shvarts told Yale College Dean Peter Salovey and two other senior officials Thursday that she neither impregnated herself nor induced any miscarriages. Rather, the entire episode, including a press release describing the exhibition released Wednesday, was nothing more than “performance art,” Klasky said.

“She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” Klasky said. “Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”

But in an interview later Thursday afternoon, Shvarts defended her work and called the University’s statement “ultimately inaccurate.” She reiterated that she engaged in the nine-month process she publicized on Wednesday in a press release that was first reported in the News: repeatedly using a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself, then taking abortifacient herbs at the end of her menstrual cycle to induce bleeding. Thursday evening, in a tour of her art studio, she shared with the News video footage she claimed depicted her attempts at self-induced miscarriages.

“No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen,” Shvarts said, adding that she does not know whether she was ever pregnant. “The nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Told of Shvarts’ comments, the University fired back. In a statement issued just before midnight on Thursday, Klasky told the News that Shvarts had vowed that if the University revealed her admission, “she would deny it.”

“Her denial is part of her performance,” Klasky wrote in an e-mail message. “We are disappointed that she would deliberately lie to the press in the name of art.”

Yale’s response to the supposed exhibition came at the end of a day of widespread shock. The blogosphere erupted in stunned indignation over Shvarts’ detailed description in Thursday’s News of her supposed exhibition, which she said would include the display of blood she preserved from her nine-month endeavor.

As more news outlets posted their stories online early Friday morning, Shvarts responded to the University’s second statement, asserting that her project was, in her words, “University-sanctioned.”

“I’m not going to absolve them by saying it was some sort of hoax when it wasn’t,” she said. “I started out with the University on board with what I was doing, and because of the media frenzy they’ve been trying to dissociate with me. Ultimately I want to get back to a point where they renew their support because ultimately this was something they supported.”

It was a media frenzy that Shvarts triggered herself. The article in Thursday’s News was prompted by a press release Shvarts circulated on Wednesday in which she discussed — in graphic detail — what she called a cycle of self-insemination followed by “repeated self-induced miscarriages.”

The Drudge Report linked to the News’s story early Thursday, overloading the newspaper’s Web site with traffic and attracting the attention of news outlets across the country. The article generated more press inquiries from the University than any matter since the controversy surrounding Yale’s admission of former Taliban diplomat Rahmatullah Hashemi flared up in 2006, according to a Yale official.

In an interview for the article in Thursday’s News, Shvarts explained that the goal of her exhibition was to spark conversation and debate about the relationship between art and the human body. She said her endeavor was not conceived with any “shock value” in mind.

“I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,” Shvarts said. “Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.”

Shvarts said her project would take the form of a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Holcombe T. Green Jr. Hall. Shvarts said she would wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around the cube, with blood from her self-induced miscarriages lining the sheeting.

Recorded videos of her experiencing her miscarriages would be projected onto the four sides of the cube, Shvarts said.

And while some news stories late Thursday dismissed Shvarts’s exhibition as a wholesale hoax, the Davenport senior showed elements of her planned exhibition to News reporters, including footage from tapes she plans to play at the exhibit. The tapes depict Shvarts, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed, alone in a shower stall bleeding into a cup. It was all part of a project that Shvarts said had the backing of the dean of her residential college and at least two faculty members within the School of Art.

Davenport College Dean Craig Harwood — whom Shvarts said supported the project — and Shvarts’s thesis adviser, School of Art lecturer Pia Lindman, could not be reached for comment Thursday. The director of undergraduate studies in the School of Art, Henk van Assen, referred a request for comment to Yale’s Office of Public Affairs.

Which denoument makes a lot of sense. The whole business did sound just a little too far out there in a variety of ways to receive academic approval. And it’s true, we all gaped and marveled, but accepted the story at face value.

Does this prove that news organizations and bloggers are unbecomingly credulous? I don’t think so. The alleged miscarriage project was not all that far removed from any number of real examples of purported art featuring unlikely materials of organic origin, in some cases personally provided by the artist.

Aliza Schvarts’ alleged art project made news on the basis of its man-bites-dog outrageous character, but these days the relationship of major universities and the arts to perversity and shock is so warm and intimate that it all had a distinct air of plausibility.

Despite the unfortunate aesthetic and moral aspects of her prank, my own disposition is to smile and extend congratulations to Aliza Schvarts for successfully pulling so many legs. What is undergraduate life for, if not for shocking and outraging the adult bourgeois world?

Well done, Aliza.

Her taste may be questionable, but she demonstrated admirable quantities of imagination, flair, and enterprise. The world should keep an eye out for this girl. What an advertising campaign manager she is liable to make!