Category Archive 'Yale'
18 Feb 2024

Rob Henderson on the Luxury Beliefs of the Elect

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Rob Henderson

Back in 1966, extreme social mobility consisted of high scores on standardized tests delivering a free travel pass from a dying Appalachian coal town to somewhere like Yale. But I grew up with two married parents and a large extended family in what was really essentially a more backward and provincial version of Norman Rockwell’s America.

Rob Henderson, coming along about half a century later, had a rougher path, but made it to Yale anyway. He and I have in common the same skeptical resistance to conformity with the stupider aspects of the outlook of the national elect. Like me, he is an outlier who tasted the ambrosial privilege of the life of the top tier national elite but resisted intellectually and was not fully assimmilated. I have already pre-ordered his book.

A choice excerpt appeared in the latest Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition.

In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale a decade ago, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university—more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%—I found myself thinking a lot about class divides and social hierarchies.

I’d thought that by entering a place like Yale, we were being given a privilege as well as a duty to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, I often found among my fellow students what I call “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class but often inflict real costs on the lower classes. For example, a classmate told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her what her background was and if she planned to marry. She said she came from an affluent, stable, two-parent home—just like most of our classmates. She added that, yes, she personally planned to have a monogamous marriage, but quickly insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accouterments. As the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen famously observed in his 1899 book “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” status symbols must be difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing, such as top hats and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities, such as golf or beagling. The value of these goods and activities, argued Veblen, was in the very fact that they were so pricey and wasteful that only the wealthy could afford them.

Today, when luxury goods are more accessible to ordinary people than ever before, the elite need other ways to broadcast their social position. This helps explain why so many are now decoupling class from material goods and attaching it to beliefs.

Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top college.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary. Ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

When my classmates at Yale talked about abolishing the police or decriminalizing drugs, they seemed unaware of the attending costs because they were largely insulated from them. Reflecting on my own experiences with alcohol, if drugs had been legal and easily accessible when I was 15, you wouldn’t be reading this. My birth mother succumbed to drug addiction soon after I was born. I haven’t seen her since I was a child. All my foster siblings’ parents were addicts or had a mental health condition, often triggered by drug use.

A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will probably be just fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents is more likely to ride that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This may explain why a 2019 survey conducted by the Cato Institute found that more than 60% of Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree were in favor of legalizing drugs, while less than half of Americans without a college degree thought it was a good idea. Drugs may be a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain.

RTWT

They will not forgive him.

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson (Y ’18 -Calhoun) — available February 20.

11 Feb 2024

Touchdown, Yale vs. Princeton, Nov 27th, 1890,” by Frederic Remington

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12 Jan 2024

The Gramscian Long March Has Completed Passing Through Yale’s Ancient Eight

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The portraits have apparently come down in this room inside a building on High Street in New Haven.

The revolution of the oppressed underclass population belonging to the nuclear center of America’s national elite is busy these days purging its predecessors and putting Replacement Theory into action, reports the Atlantic.

Yale’s Eulogia Society, better known as “Skull and Bones,” was founded by General William Huntington Russell, Y 1833, who was himself a radical abolitionist and friend and supporter of the madman and murderous terrorist John Brown. What can one say, other than noting that the Revolution has a notorious habit of devouring its own?

Secret societies have long been the purest distillation of what makes Yale Yale. They are famous for their mysterious rituals, their arcane symbols, and the imprint they’ve left on the broader culture. Skull and Bones shows up, variously, in The Great Gatsby (the 2013 film version), Gossip Girl, and The Simpsons. It is among the wealthiest, most exclusive, most well-connected groups at one of the wealthiest, most exclusive, most well-connected universities in the country. Contemplating their own rarefied status, members of Yale’s secret societies aren’t entirely sure what to do with it. They face the question roiling America’s elite campuses taken to its logical extreme: whether the modern social-justice politics advanced by college students can coexist with the staggering selectivity and privilege that benefit those same students.

Skull and Bones, the oldest of Yale’s senior societies, was formed in 1832. The other groups, composed mainly of Bones rejects, followed soon after. The Ancient Eight societies each own private buildings, known as tombs, where members meet twice weekly for dinner, debate, and “bios”—a ritual in which members share their life histories. Membership is for seniors only. Every spring, the current members “tap” a group of Yale juniors to take their place the following fall. The clubs were originally intended to prepare Yale men for leadership beyond the university. At this, they have found extraordinary success, producing a stream of C-suite executives, diplomats, and politicos. The reputation of society alumni as kingmakers and masters of the universe guaranteed that students would always be hungry to join.

Until they weren’t. In the 1960s, secret societies were criticized for elitism and discrimination. They faced pressure to disband. Instead, they adapted. Skull and Bones admitted its first Black member in 1965, and in 1975 tapped the head of Yale’s recently founded gay-student organization. The pattern repeated two decades later, as the societies feared they were becoming irrelevant by clinging to their all-male identity. In 1991, the Bonesmen tapped their first Boneswomen. (Alumni who didn’t want women in their secret society retaliated by changing the locks on the tomb.)

Today, many of the societies continue to resist students’ most progressive demands. When the Bones class of 2019 took down the portraits, some of their predecessors were aghast. It was “bad manners,” a former member of the Bones alumni board who graduated from Yale in the 1960s told me. (I interviewed 12 current or recent members for this article, along with several members from earlier generations; many of them requested anonymity, citing confidentiality agreements.) Given that the society’s former members were overwhelmingly white, he argued, it didn’t make sense to criticize Skull and Bones for accurately portraying its own legacy. “Their historical protest was silly,” he said. Still, the Bones board tried to appease students by putting up photographs of nonwhite alumni alongside the portraits. This year, the former board member told me, the board will unveil the society’s first portrait of a Black alumnus. Similarly, Berzelius agreed to rename the Colony Foundation. Elihu, however, is keeping its name.

Reports of alumni-student schisms within Yale’s secret societies are nearly as old as the societies themselves. Every decade or so, especially when a member of the Bush family runs for president (George H. W. Bush was also a member), opinion writers argue that left-wing students have trampled the values that sustained societies. That makes it easy to miss a much more significant shift within these groups. Picture a member of Skull and Bones, or any of the other Ancient Eight secret societies, and you’ll probably conjure a preppy white guy who summers on the Cape. In fact, in recent years, the demographics of Yale’s most elite organizations have been utterly transformed. In 2020, Skull and Bones had its first entirely nonwhite class. (Every year, the society admits around 15 rising seniors; selections must be unanimous, and members have final say.) Many of the societies now have only one or two students each year who aren’t from historically marginalized groups.

Today, the idea of Skull and Bones selecting someone whose dad was a Republican president seems inconceivable. The so-called tap lines—the tradition guaranteeing that the football captain and the student-body president would end up in Bones—are long gone, and few descendants of alumni members get in. Instead, the secret societies affirmatively select for students who are the first in their family to attend college, who come from a low-income background, or who are part of a minority group. This has created something of a diversity arms race. “People are, intentionally or not, thinking, ‘Does this cohort have too many white people?’” said Ale Canales, a member of the Berzelius class of 2020.

RTWT

14 Dec 2023

Yale Dining Hall Removes ‘Israeli’ From Couscous Dish, Then Puts It Back

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But, then:

Campus ReformDecember 13, 2023, 8:36 am ET

Yale University has reportedly promised to return the word “Israeli” to a dining hall nutrition label after it had been quietly removed as a descriptor of a “Couscous Salad with Spinach and Tomatoes” dish.

As images of the label without the word “Israeli” circulated on social media, Campus Reform reached out to Yale University to inquire whether dining staff had swapped out the grains in the dish or relabeled the same food– considering that Israeli couscous differs in size, texture, and production method.

A Yale University spokesperson told Newsweek that the word “Israeli” had originally been removed because of student concerns regarding country or ethnicity labels on dishes in general, but that in this case the word “Israeli” will be added back to the label, considering that ‘Israeli couscous’ is an “actual ingredient.”

HT: Frank Dobbs.

05 Sep 2023

Always Something New Out of New Haven

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“So, you go into Yale, now you can begin to experience rejection!” warns Rachel Shin in The Atlantic.

Arrow Zhang came to Yale last fall eager to try new things. In high school, she had spent most of her free time writing and practicing piano, but at Yale, she envisioned dividing her time between activities as disparate as finance and international relations. Zhang did not anticipate how competitive Yale’s clubs would be.
She quickly learned that, not unlike the admissions process to the university itself, entrance to student clubs often requires written applications and interviews. She filled her Google Calendar with hours of info sessions and application tasks. After more than a month of nonstop auditions, applications, interviews, and even tests, Zhang found herself rejected from multiple clubs, including ones that had no obvious reason to be selective. Most of the clubs she was able to join—The Yale Herald, a dance group, the clock-tower bell-ringers —involved skills she’d already honed in high school.

“Everyone would say, You don’t need any experience to apply,” she said. “But then everyone who gets in are already pros.”

Yale’s competitive-admission clubs include many that are notoriously exclusive but also more surprising entries, such as the community-service club. One of Zhang’s rejections came from the Existential Threats Initiative, which meets to discuss issues such as climate change and AI. Zhang was turned away for not having enough experience dealing with existential threats. Her rejection email encouraged her to listen to more podcasts, such as 80,000 Hours (tagline: “In-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems”) or otherwise gain expertise in the field.

Ben Snyder, a recent Yale grad who co-founded Existential Threats in 2022, told me the club is simply not for beginners.

“We wanted to be more selective so we could have more advanced conversations,” said Snyder, whose expertise in this subject includes having researched the risk potential of pandemics at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation last summer.

High barriers to entry are no longer just for historically elite groups on campus like secret societies and the acapella group the Whiffenpoofs, or even for club sports teams, which can field only so many players. The investing club turned away 236 people last year. The “teach kids to code” club turned away 20. The musical-improv group turned away several dozen, leaving its rejectees to find more loosely organized ways to burst into song. Half of the applicants to the magic club saw their hopes vanish into thin air.

RTWT

13 Jul 2023

Un Type Pas Ordinaire

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    Nous sommes des dégourdis,
    Nous sommes des lascars
    Des types pas ordinaires.
    Nous avons souvent notre cafard,
    Nous sommes des légionnaires.

From the Yale Alumni Mag 1974 Class Notes:

I have been honored and grateful for a stream of communication from —- ——— – one of our class Vietnam vets – about the passing of Vic Corcoran [SM] in Tahiti on March 23rd. It appears Vic eschewed the “grim professionalism” Kingman Brewster claimed to see in us and led a life that more belongs in a novel than in the class notes.

According to —–’s emails, Vic, who had previously turned down the opportunity to swim in the 1968 Olympics, carried his aquatic skills both to Vietnam and, in 1979, to the French Foreign Legion special forces as a “reconnaissance swimmer” where he specialized “offensive nautical intervention” for the balance of his career, including eight months of the Gulf War, ultimately receiving the Croix de Guerre which I understand is more or less the equivalent of our Silver Star.

Vic retired to Tahiti and ultimately passed from cancer. —– wonders if the cancer was connected to exposure to Agent Orange.

—————–

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle:

After a life of activity and adventure, Victor (“Wick”) died March 22, 2023 of a brief illness at age 72.

Victor graduated from The Hotchkiss School, CT, where he was an All-American breast stroke swimmer; Yale University (swimming team); and The Ocean Corporation, TX for under water construction.

He served in the French Foreign Legion in parachute and then scuba regiments. Tours of duty included Corsica, Djibouti, the Central African Republic, and the Persian Gulf in Operation Desert Storm, including acting as liaison to the French General and US Gen Schwarzkopf. He retired as Master Sergeant, having received numerous decorations.

Before the Legion, Victor worked as a commercial diver, including on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.

After the Legion, he served as a security officer on French cruise ships. He retired to Tahiti, where he enjoyed hiking, swimming, and sailing.

Victor had a wonderful sense of fun, made friends easily, and saw the good in people.

Predeceased by his parents, Victor Francis Corcoran and Merrill Holmes Corcoran. Survived by family in Nice, France: Son, Alan Victor Corcoran, Daughter, Alison Kate Corcoran, and Granddaughter, Cailey Kahila Mjot;

Also family in Rochester, NY: Brother, Christopher H. Corcoran (Mary), Sister, Melissa C. Hopkins (Ed), nieces, nephew, and cousins.

Victor was buried in Tahiti after a military funeral. The family plans a memorial service in Penn Yan, NY. Instead of flowers, gifts may be made to the YMCA of Greater Rochester, 444 East Main St., Rochester, NY 14604. Rochesterymca.org/donate.

22 May 2023

Today’s Revolutionaries, Tomorrow’s Haute Bourgeoisie

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Remember Yale’s Shrieking Student? Jerelyn Luther is just graduating from Columbia Law this Spring.

Leftie Substacker Freddie de Boer has a cynical prediction about those Woke Stanford Law Students who recently shouted down a conservative judge and prevented him from speaking, and I suspect he’s perfectly right.

[H]ow are we to assume that law students at Stanford Law School are anything other than the next generation’s shock troops of the bourgeoisie, whatever their professed politics?…

(Do people ever do postmortems about, say, the Yale protests from 2015ish and ask whether those students became committed revolutionaries, or whether they just went on to be the busy little meritocrats they were destined to be?)

There’s a lot of different ways to approach the Stanford controversy; it’s a rich text, as an old English professor of mine would say. For one thing… what do people think is going to happen, exactly? That every one of these Stanford Law students is going to go on to be a virtuous public defender? That they’re all going to go do pro bono work for Erin Brockovich? What role do you think the average Stanford Law graduate plays in our nation? This isn’t even an indictment of anyone’s character, either. I try to point this out all the time: becoming functionally a tool of the status quo doesn’t require ideological transformation. I don’t think people become conservatives en masse as they age. I do think that people get busy with life and find themselves increasingly deepening inequality and supporting unjust structures as they just try to get ahead. I’m sure that will happen with a lot of these Stanford law grads. But I’m also sure a lot of them are going to wave the black flag right up until they get a cush $350K/year entry-level job at a major firm and then get busy helping cigarette manufacturers avoid lawsuits. And I’m also sure they’ll never feel bad about any of it.

That’s certainly what happened to most of the bomb-throwing radicals in my Yale Class who shout down the University on May Day of 1970.

20 May 2023

“What Has Yale Become?”

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“The reason no one will talk to you is there is no professional benefit to saying interesting or controversial things.”

HT: The Anonymous Professor.

09 Apr 2023

Harvard/Yale/Princeton, Then and Now

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My residential college (Berkeley) at Yale.

The images of Yale and Princeton seem to be at least slightly different today from what they were a century ago. Harvard’s, on the other hand, seems not to have changed really all that much.

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.

—————————

Quora is loaded to the gills with questions about elite colleges (mostly from ambitious Third World residents).

Some common themes are prestige and college character comparisons. These inquiries are commonly jejune and amount to nothing more than presumptuous expressions of adolescent fantasy on the part of people with no chance of being admitted to these kinds of schools, and they generally are simply ignored.

But every now and then the question provokes an interesting response. Somebody asked:

What type of students does each Ivy League look for?

Harry Lee responded:

Just because a school has more choices in picking students does not guarantee the wisdom of its pick. Steve Jobs would have been rejected by all Ivies today. But since the same AO has been picking students over many many years, we do see some pattern that reflects the AO’s taste in part.

I will answer this based solely on my prejudice, for what its worth. Take it at your own peril. (Don’t give me which school is not Ivy stuff – I know.)

Harvard: Model human beings with presentable stats and characters (yes, they are genuinely nice), with no evidence of glaring mental disease (see Yale and Princeton for comparison). Most balanced Ivy. The only Ivy with human mascot; all others are beasts. Earth’s answer to alien invasions. Must be, and look, strong across the board, but more importantly, must have no weakness, nothing controversial, especially on paper. Certainly a fox type, not a hedghog type. (“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.”) Righteous and virtuous. Downside: Naive, bookish, unresourceful, unresilient, weak mental, carrying self-congratulatory smile. Often fall preys to determined and/or scheming underdogs. Diploma likely to end up being life’s greatest achievement. Real life is very different from school. Too risk-averse to try something that may be “unworthy” of alma mater; looking respectible becomes a burden after a while. Unable to reject expectation of others. Haunted by the self-question: “What is ‘me minus Harvard’ worth?” Bullied abruptly by bosses: “Let’s test how smart a Harvard guy is.” Bullied abruptly by spouses: “[You don’t even know how to turn off the dang faucet] – tell me, did you really go to Harvard?”

Yale: Creative, Passionate Artists with ADHD. Most artistic Ivy. Possess one big thing, lack others and proud of it. Ivy with greatest number of mathematically challenged – you can still succeed in life without understanding calculus. Certainly the hedgehog type (“All I need is making one big hole”) – an outlier with a nuclear punch. Flexible, witty, resourceful, irreverant, pungent, unique. Capable of counter-intuitive, original thinking. Social and gregarious like wolves (in contrast to the tigers that come below) and carry “secret club” antic to life after college. Think they can beat nerdy Harvard any time. Think they cannot beat Princeton, but rarely think of Princeton anyway. Downside: George Bush, George (another) Bush. Can be too creative for own good. Superficial and/or scheming (Many early CIA members were Yalies). Lazy underachievers – and proud of it.

Princeton: Rigorously Trained Tripartite Aristocrats (Gentleman+Scholar+Athlete) – with OCD. Most analytic Ivy. No weakness in reality (ie, not just on paper). Most hard working among HYP. Superachievers and fierce competitors. Mathematically comfortable. Motto: Only paranoids survive. Regularly beat both Harvard and Yale in almost everything. Prefer working alone, like tigers (why collaborate when perfection is attainable as solo?). Downside: Robot. Can be too perfect for own good. Serious, ambitious, studious, logical, wicked smart. Brutally efficient like Amazon dot com, lacking idealistic, romantic, human touch. …

Way too complimentary to Princeton, of course. (You can tell that Harry Lee went there.) Yale beats Princeton all the time.

27 Sep 2022

Yale University Announced $1 Million Research Project to Combat Racist Hair in Video Game

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Second Life Avatars.

Tennessee Star reports:

Yale University’s Computer Science Department recently announced a $1 million donation given to them from the Bungie Foundation for a research project that fights against racist hair graphics in video games.

“It is widely assumed that the algorithms used to generate virtual humans are based in biological underpinnings that accurately reflect all races and ethnicities,” the announcement reads. “In reality, however, these algorithms are deeply biased and based on predominantly European features.”

The project will be led by Theodore Kim, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Yale.

According to Kim, the project will “serve as an example of how to identify the products of systemic racism in computer graphics and demonstrate how to take concrete steps to ameliorate their harm.”

Kim believes that this racial bias in video game hair stems from Computer Graphics Researchers that have “historically favored the simulation and rendering of straight hair, which is racially coded as European or Caucasian hair.

RTWT

25 Sep 2022

The Yale Alumni Magazine Asks: “Tell Us Your Thoughts About This Article.”

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Judith Schiff 1937-2022, Chief Research Archivist, Sterling Library, Yale University.

OK.

The latest Yale Alumni Magazine arrived yesterday. Its key feature article this issue is a tribute to Judith Schiff who had contributed a popular “Old Yale” column to the alumni mag since 1987.

There is nothing wrong with the eulogy to the late archivist in itself. But there were all those little infuriating details that get the blood pressure of an elderly alumn seething.

In the midst of noting the admirable contribution those 219 “Old Yale” columns constituted over the long decades, Alumni Mag editor-in-chief Kathrin Day Lassila ’81 (the ever reliable source of left-wing self gratulation and cant) clocks in to gloat over persuading Ms. Schiff not to omit a pious condemnation of the Pro-Slavery views of John C. Calhoun, Class of 1804, in a column actually discussing Calhoun’s role in leading the House of Representatives in the direction of a Declaration of War against Britain in 1812.

Representatives of the Woke Left, like Ms. Lassila, never overlook any opportunity to point fingers in condemnation at, and to preen in moral superiority over, the errors of persons long dead. How can one possibly say enough about the spiritual magnificence and boundless generosity of members of today’s Community of Fashion in refraining from owning and trafficking in any slaves and their bravery in forthrightly denouncing an institution extinct for over a century and a half and absolutely lacking any current defenders?

Personal Tribute No. 1 comes from a member of the Class of 1971, a transfer who became one of the first female graduates of Yale College, and who “received the Yale Medal for projects highlighting Women and Minorities.” IMHO, there ought to be a much bigger medal for persuading whiny minority identity groups to go away and shut up for a change.

The Schiff article includes several warm personal tributes from Yale functionaries and factotums who were personally acquainted with the lady which are in themselves perfectly fine. However, the faithful reader discovers that Personal Tribute No. 2 is the product of the collaboration of one chap (M.A. 89) who is a “New Haven-based cultural organizer” (a term that inevitably tempts any right-thinking alumn to start reaching for his revolver) and another guy (’87, ’93MDiv) who is the Beinecke Library’s “director of community engagement.” What in hell is a Rare Book Library doing throwing away an annual full-time salary on paying somebody to “engage” the inner-city welfare/criminal class of New Haven? Are gang-bangers, coke dealers, hip-hoppers, and the ever-dwindling actual working class of a ruined rust-bucket small city supposed to have some sort of healthy and legitimate interest in the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio, or some really cool manuscripts in Carolingian Miniscule?

Tribute No. 5 is from a member of the Class of 1979, ’84MD, and an adjunct psychiatry prof at Yale, who (inevitably) wrote a book about Yale and the Jewish Question, who tells us Ms. Schiff was a terrific help in researching one whiny identity group issue after another after another. That, of course, is what research universities and research university libraries are really for.

And it goes on and on. “When Judy Schiff went to work at Yale there were no senior women teaching at Yale College and no women undergraduates. There were no women officers in the university.” begins Tribute No. 6.

In Woke University-land and Woke-Alumni-Magazine-land, the entire universe, the entire corpus of human learning, and the whole focus of history is centered upon the amour propre, the grievances, and the glories of the triumphant elite establishment representatives of the sacred ressentiment-based Identity Groups.

It’s not that most articles are bad in themselves. It’s the fact that the rancid, worm’s-eye-view perspective of leftist grievance politics permeates everything and is accompanied by an inevitable associated tone of orthodoxy and dogmatism.

The great minds running Yale these days, and editing its publications, obviously never read John Ruskin:

Of all the insolent, all the foolish persuasions that by any chance could enter and hold your empty little heart, this is the proudest and foolishest,–that you have been so much the darling of the Heavens, and favourite of the Fates, as to be born in the very nick of time, and in the punctual place, when and where pure Divine truth had been sifted from the errors of the Nations; and that your papa had been providentially disposed to buy a house in the convenient neighbourhood of the steeple under which that Immaculate and final verity would be beautifully proclaimed. Do not think it, child; it is not so.

Bang! All over America, you can hear the sound of one more issue of the Yale Alumni Mag flung from the hand of an older male alumn hitting the circular file.

14 Sep 2022

Secret Report on Yale’s Administrative Bloat Leaked

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Last November, the information came out in connection with a secret internal report that Yale now had more administrators than faculty or students:

The numbers:

4,664 undergraduate students

4,962 faculty

5,042 administrators

——————————————

“I think we don’t yet have a Vice President for the rights of the left-handed, but I haven’t checked this month.” — Professor Leslie Brisman.

——————————————

The report discussing this astounding proliferation of bureaucracy (and its negative impact on teaching) was never released and quickly swept deeply under the Woodbridge Hall rug.

But these things have a way of coming out, despite coverup efforts and, what do you know? somebody evidently leaked the damaging report to the alumni reform organization “Fight for Yale.”

Sample:

“[T]here are currently 31 people with the title of ‘Vice President’ (or ‘Associate Vice President’) at Yale and also 7 with the title of ‘Vice Provost’; this may be compared to only 5 Vice Presidents in 2003-4 and 14 in 2012-13. Table 4 provides some
other counts of people with titles with the words ‘student affairs,’ ‘student engagement,’ ‘student life,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘strategic initiatives,’ or ‘sustainability’ in their job titles. …”

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