Category Archive 'Harvard-Yale Game'

02 Dec 2019

“Today’s Yale Grads Aren’t Qualified to Lead in the 21st Century”

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Esteban Elizondo is only a senior at Yale, but he’s indignant enough to be an alumn.

Last weekend, 148 students stormed the field at the Harvard-Yale game to protest climate change, causing a 50-minute delay and forcing the players to finish in the dark. The Post editorial board called it “the college-version of a toddler’s meltdown,” and that is exactly right. As a current Yale student, I am constantly stunned by the childish behavior of my peers, who are voting-age adults attending what is supposedly one of the most prestigious colleges in America.

At Yale, there is seemingly a new protest every week. Each protest carries the same juvenile self-righteousness, enabled by a university administration that never dares to challenge its student body.

Yale “first-years” arrive on campus curious and mostly capable, but the university quickly proceeds to bubble-wrap their young minds, eliminating any trace of discomfort from their college experience. Rather than allowing students to learn through adversity, the administration creates a safe space where students are never told “no.” Instead, they’re provided with amenities ranging from therapy puppies to sandboxes — more fitting of a day-care center than a university.

Rather than confront its student body with uncomfortable truths, the university creates an alternate reality, where the only opinion that matters is yours, especially if you’re a leftist. Earlier this month, a group of students painted their faces white and began wailing outside a classroom as part of a protest against professor Emma Sky, whom they lazily branded a “war criminal” because she once served as an advisor to the commanding general of US forces in Iraq and the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

To be clear, professor Sky has dedicated her entire adult life to peace in the Middle East, and her calming influence during the war no doubt saved countless lives. But the students made no legitimate attempts to academically engage with her and claimed this was “interdisciplinary research” on the “ethnography of power.” Incredibly, this antic was part of a student’s senior project that was awarded both funding from a residential college and school credit.

The Harvard-Yale football protest, meanwhile, called for both schools to divest from fossil fuels, as though this could actually solve climate change, when the real answers are far more difficult and complicated. Apparently, America’s most academically successful students believe that conducting juvenile demonstrations is a more effective way to fix problems than proposing actual solutions.

But at Yale, there is little interest in challenging infantile thinking, because doing so would not advance the university’s objective: making sure students stay happy in school and get employed after graduation to satisfy its paying customers (parents). As a result, Yale undergrads spend four years totally detached from the rest of America and graduate without the skills needed to become future leaders who can meet the complex challenges of the 21st century.

In Yale’s defense, the college and other “elite” schools are successful at placing their students in influential positions. And we are now beginning to see the consequences of these graduates entering the real world. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, for example, was stacked with Ivy League-educated staffers, including Robby Mook (Columbia ’02, campaign manager) and Amanda Renteria (Harvard MBA ’03, national political director).

However, acquiring a good job and being good at that job are not the same thing. In the same way that Yale students believe in progressive ideas about climate change and intersectional politics with a religious certainty, Clinton’s campaign arrogantly assumed that voters from Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would never pull the lever for Trump. Had Clinton’s team questioned their beliefs, as the best colleges once taught its students to do, staffers would have made her visit those states rather than taking victory laps in October.

Listening to the latest Democratic presidential candidates — whose ideas were mostly forged in ivory towers — suggests this won’t change anytime soon. Given their academic pedigrees (14 of the original 24 declared candidates attended Ivy League schools), it isn’t surprising how out of touch they are. Promising to eliminate private insurance and advocating for open borders does not endear oneself to the average American.

This sense of immunity from the real world could be heard at last Saturday’s protest, where some students shouted “My father is a lawyer!” to police officers trying to persuade them off the field. These protesters did not sound like people who have faced true hardship or even learned the basics of a proper argument. But then again, why would they? They were taught to avoid all that at Yale.

26 Nov 2019

The Snowflakes Who Delayed The Game Really Shot Themselves in the Foot

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John Ziegler, at Mediate, argues that the bad behavior of those left-wing millennial snowflakes at last Saturday’s Harvard-Yale Game is exactly the kind of thing producing the opposite results from those the perpetrators desire.

[T]he annual Harvard-Yale football game, known as “The Game” as one of the most storied rivalries in all of college sports, was delayed for about an hour because of students protesting “Climate Change” on the field at the end of halftime. No big deal, right?

To most observers this seemingly minor development was viewed as somewhere between a source of mild amusement and trivial nuisance. But to me, it was a total outrage, and symbolic of how liberals losing their damn minds is paving a path, via extreme political correctness, for President Donald Trump to somehow win reelection.

First, let’s lay out the situation. These protesters, who had apparently been planning this stunt for months, took the field at the very end of the halftime intermission (as opposed to the beginning of it) for the expressed purpose of causing a delay to the game and therefore getting more media attention.

It appears that the authorities at Yale, where the contest was played at the venerable and historic Yale Bowl, were well aware of what was going down. They treated the students, who were clearly trespassing, with the kind of kid gloves which this generation, one that has spent their childhood receiving trophies they never earned and being constantly protected from having their feelings hurt, has come to fully expect.

These spoiled-brat demonstrators apparently thought nothing of selfishly disrupting the most important game of the year for their fellow students, many of whom were playing the final football games of their lives, and all of whom had worked their asses off to prepare for it (Yale was playing for at a least a share of the Ivy League championship). In response to their terroristic tactics, the administrators of each super-liberal super school were clearly terrified of disrupting their political statement, which was completely irrelevant to anything having to do with football, or really even Harvard and Yale.

After taking quite a bit of time to allow for the changing of the diapers of the student protesters (apparently many other woke students, never wanting to be left out of an attention-seeking act of virtue-signaling, joined in from the stands as the demonstration dragged on), the authorities then decided to grant the request of many of the activists to be arrested. All of this caused the teams to go back into their locker rooms, thus creating further delay because they had to warm up all over again once the field was finally cleared of all the remaining wokeness.

It should be noted that there seems to be zero doubt that, because being against climate change is considered by liberal elites to be inherently good, the protesters were treated vastly differently than if they had somehow decided to champion a conservative cause. Does anyone serious believe that if a group of “Pro-life” students had done the same exact thing to protest abortion (an issue over which a college has a heck of a lot more control than climate change) that they would not have been immediately kicked off the field and probably suspended, or worse, from each school?!

On ESPN, which was broadcasting the game, the coverage of what was going on was about as liberally biased as it would have been if MSNBC had been doing the commentary. Led by former network political analyst and anchor Jack Ford, the whole fiasco was treated as if was simply a weather delay without even a hint of condemnation of the students for the significant chaos they had caused to the game (by the way, the weather for the game was absolutely perfect for football, so perhaps climate change isn’t really so horrible).

As it turned out, the anarchy provoked by the protesters had even more impact than would be initially understood because of a perfect storm of circumstances. You see, the Yale Bowl, built in 1914, has no lights, and New Haven, Connecticut is one of the very first cites on the East Coast to lose sunlight this time of year.

Consequently, when Yale made a furious comeback to send the game into overtime, the most critical plays of the game ended up being played in near total darkness. Had Harvard pulled off just one more good play, the lack of light would have forced the game to be declared a tie, thus costing Yale the share of their league title that they would eventually win.

I get mocked on Twitter all the time whenever I mention a crazy episode like this helping Trump’s re-election efforts. Obviously, no one is going into the voting booth next November with this debacle on their minds (though, now that this horrible precedent has been set, I can see stuff like this happening more frequently and becoming a prominent news topic).

Instead, what I mean by this is that there is a whole group of key voters, particularly in critical states, who are more than willing to ditch Trump as long as that doesn’t mean giving liberals the power to completely mess with their lives in a radical way. Seeing a major college football game almost destroyed because of this kind of liberal nonsense and overt hypocrisy is the exact type of story which makes those voters very nervous about handing everything over to a bunch of lunatics.

As I have said many times before, Trump’s political rocket-ship is fueled by the extremely negative reaction Middle America has to political correctness. What the kids at Yale did was just add a bit more gas to his tank (which is ironic given their protest of fossil fuels).

The funny part here is that I am quite sure that these children are all quite proud of themselves today. But in reality they did more to help a man they hate than they did to combat climate change.

21 Nov 2017

“Look What Yale Made Me Do”

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Harvard-made video insulting Yale which was released just before last Saturday’s The Game. Poor Harvard, for the record, got slaughtered 24-3.

I was surprised by all the inaccurate boasting about Harvard’s alleged academic & test-score superiority. I fear these young people are deluded and misinformed. I’m not up on current stats, but I know my own Yale Class beat the same entering Harvard Class’s SAT scores.

The bit at the end, mocking all the other Ivy League schools, was amusing.

22 Nov 2015

The Game This Year

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HarvardYale2015
Harvard won 38-19.

Quote from the Yale Class of ’69 list-server:

Harvard had more points but we had a more diverse defensive line. Does that mean we won?”

Reply:

“Yes. Because that diverse line didn’t inhibit Harvard’s freedom of expression and opposition to our view they should not score more points than us and win, but was allowed to express and implement that point of view at will with almost no resistance from us.”

Hat tip to Frank A. Dobbs ’69.


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