AP:

Three Yale University students have been arrested on charges of setting fire to an American flag hanging from the porch of a private home.

The three were arrested early yesterday after police on patrol spotted the burning flag and tore it from pole where it was mounted to the house on Chapel Street, police said.

Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, also 19, were arrested on charges ranging from reckless endangerment to arson.

“Though the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated flag-desecration statutes in 1989 and 1990 on First Amendment grounds, that does not mean that individuals can burn flags and face no criminal charges,” said First Amendment scholar David Hudson of the First Amendment Center.

“There are generally applicable criminal laws, such as laws against vandalism, for which there is no free-speech defense,” Hudson said. “Justice Scalia alluded to this fact in his opinion in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) — a case involving a juvenile who burned a cross in a neighbor’s yard — when he said the city of St. Paul had ‘sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.’ Presumably, the authorities in this (New Haven) case have ‘sufficient means’ to prohibit such threatening conduct.”

Angelopoulos and Anklesaria, who are freshmen, are both foreign citizens. Anklesaria is British and Angelopoulos is Greek.

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan, according to police, but is a U.S. citizen. Both Anklesaria and Angelopoulos had to hand over their passports

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan but is a U.S. citizen, police said. He worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, ”Come Back to Afghanistan,” based on his experiences, the Yale Daily News reported Wednesday.

At the arraignment in Superior Court a few hours after the arrests, bond was kept at $25,000 for Angelopoulos and Akbar, but was reduced to $15,000 for Anklesaria. They remained jailed last night.

Police said the students had two encounters with officers. Officers Stephanija Van Wilgen and Diane Gonzalez were responding to an unrelated call Haven at about 3 a.m. and were flagged down by the students who asked for directions. A short time later, the two officers returned to Chapel Street to see if the students had found their way home and spotted the burning flag.

“There was a glow in front of the house which they identified as a flag mounted on a pole to the house and it was engulfed in flames,” police spokeswoman Bonnie Posick said.

Van Wilgen pulled down the burning flag to prevent the fire from spreading to the house and Gonzalez tracked down the three men.

A century ago, people, like both my grandfathers, came to this country from Europe to take humble jobs performing hard labor in the coal mines where fatal accidents were common and where the occupational disease of anthrasilicosis shortened every miner’s life, and they were still grateful all their lives that America had taken them in and provided as much opportunity as that.

Today, Ivy League Universities give scholarships to hairy primitives from exotic strongholds of barbarism hostile to our country and our civilization, who are so grateful for being here that they set American flags on fire.

They should revoke that one ungrateful wretch’s citizenship, and deport all three of them so fast their heads spin.

————-
On second thought:

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that they are all very young, after all. And there is the significant difference that my Lithuanian grandfathers settled in America in respectable communities possessed of decent values, where patriotism, gratitude, courtesy, and common sense were valued and part of expected conduct.

These little wetback arsonists get their values and attitudes from centers of contemporary anti-American elitism, like California’s East Bay and Yale University. Is it any wonder they have no sense of gratitude or appreciation toward the United States? They are obviously loyal enough to the treasonous community of fashion they currently inhabit.

Rather than deport the kids, we should probably be deporting the President of Yale and its administration and faculty.

————-
More details

Oldest College Daily:

Three Yale students, including the son of a former governor of an Afghan province, were arrested early Tuesday morning after burning an American flag attached to a home on Chapel Street.

Hyder Akbar ’07, Nikolaos Angelopoulos ’10 and Farhad Anklesaria ’10 were arrested for charges including first-degree reckless endangerment, third-degree criminal mischief, second-degree arson, breach of peace and conspiracy to commit second-degree arson, the New Haven Register reports today. The two freshmen are both foreign citizens, and Akbar is a United States citizen, though he was born in Pakistan. Akbar worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, “Come Back to Afghanistan,” based on his experiences there.

According to the police report, as reported in the Register, the students were arrested after police found the burning flag, which had hung off 512 Chapel St. The arresting officers had previously assisted the students by giving them directions back to campus from Chapel Street in Fair Haven and later found the students a few blocks away from the burning flag. The three students admitted to police that they lit the fire, according to the report. The New Haven Police Department was not available for comment Tuesday evening.

The students were set to spend Tuesday night in jail after a Superior Court judge refused to release the men without bail, the Register reports. The bail for Akbar and Angelopoulos was set at $25,000 and was $15,000 for Anklesaria.

Yale University may join the Louvre and the Guggenheim by opening an Arts Institute in Abu Dhabi.

The Oldest College Daily reports that

The University aims to make a final decision by June, Yale President Richard Levin said.

Over at National Review, Michael Rubin is trying to mau mau Yale over all this. Apparently the University of Connecticut canceled some sort of plans for a satellite campus in Dubai, so Yale should fall into line with the Israeli lobby, too, Rubin hints darkly.

Glenn Reynolds unfortunately seems to have swallowed his nonsense.

Let’s see now, we can’t discriminate against Muslims on our airlines, but we cannot allow companies from friendly Islamic countries to purchase port facilities in the United States, and we also should not be exporting fine arts education to them, either. Ridiculous.

Abstinence should be no problem for all those nerdy types at Harvard. They won’t be running into a lot of opportunities to sin anyway.

CNN story.

Meanwhile, at Yale….

La plus ça change, la plus c’est la même chose.

Elihu Yale with servant

Oh, Yale was begun back in Seventeen One
With a gift of books weighing nigh a ton.”

the old song inaccurately states.

In reality, it was in 1718 that the Welsh nabob Elihu Yale (1649-1721) responded affirmatively to a request from Cotton Mather, and bestowed 417 books, along with “nine bales of goods” worth over £560, and a portrait of King George I upon the then struggling Collegiate School of Connecticut. This bequest permitted the erection of a new building to house the college in New Haven, which was duly named for its benefactor.

The March/April issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine contains an article (not yet on-line) informing us that last month the University agreed to remove a portrait of Elihu Yale from the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall, in response to complaints.

The dark and antique portrait shows Yale sitting beside a window displaying his trading ships, attended by a dusky servant wearing a metal collar.

The forces of Political Correctness are long on outrage, and short on acumen, and have unhappily mistaken the dark-skinned Indian servant for an American Negro slave, and the servant’s ornamental silver collar as a yoke of bondage.

Yale may be an educational institution, but University Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer JD’77 has announced that the task of educating the offended is beyond Yale’s abilities. “Since the portrait is confusing without the explanation [that Elihu Yale did not own slaves], I have decided it would be prudent to exchange that portrait of Elihu to another one in the University’s collection,” Lorimer said.

Ah, the courage of our University officials!

Yale Daily News, February 7

Hartford Courant, February 8

David Starkey, a specialist in Tudor history, believes that he has identified a miniature in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art as the only known contemporary portrait of Lady Jane Grey (1537-1554), queen regnant for nine days (10 July – 19 July 1553).

Telegraph

His detective work began when he saw a photograph of the miniature, painted on vellum, in a book. He said: “Almost all the early miniatures such as this were of royal subjects. This one struck me instantly and I thought it had to be of Lady Jane.

“What I noticed was the evident youth of the sitter. It would be unusual for someone to sit for a miniature unless they had very high status.”

But it was the jewellery that eventually gave the evidence. He found that the brooch in the portrait matched one in an inventory of Jane Grey’s possessions at the British Library. It is described as being made of gold with an agate centre and bearing the profile of a classical face.

He also worked out that the “foliage” behind the brooch was the badge of the Dudley family. John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, effectively ruled England in the last days of Edward VI, the sickly boy king whose death propelled Jane to the throne. The duke married one of his four sons, Guildford Dudley, to Jane Grey, to assert his control of the throne.

The foliage includes the four-petalled gillyflower, a relative of the cabbage.

“Gilly” was the nickname or rebus of Guildford Dudley. A 16th-century stone carving of the gillyflower* survives in a wall of the Beauchamp Tower at the Tower of London where Guildford, his father, and his three brothers were incarcerated with Lady Jane before their executions.

Dr Starkey believes the portrait was made by Lavinia Teerlinc, the Belgian miniaturist who succeeded Hans Holbein as Henry VIII’s court painter. It may have been painted to record Jane and Guildford’s wedding or while Jane was at the Tower awaiting her death.

*Apparently, the wallflower (a number of members of the Genus Erysimum), which has four petals, but which is not –as the Telegraph says– a relative of the cabbage.

The Master of Calhoun was filled with indignation when a showering couple’s private activities flooded one of the college bathrooms, and is demanding that undergraduate aqueous trysts cease in Calhoun forthwith. Fiercely fueled with righteous wrath, he proceeded to bombard the residential college’s entire undergraduate population with an angry email, which was promptly leaked to the AP:

A randy couple’s frolic in a shower at one of Yale’s undergraduate residential colleges prompted a professor to issue an e-mail of protest, which in turn has sparked debate on the Internet.

Yale officials told The Associated Press on Friday that the e-mail was sent Jan. 30 by Professor Jonathan Holloway, master of Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges at the Ivy League university.

About 330 students received the e-mail from Holloway, who runs Calhoun as master. He referred comment to Yale’s public affairs department.

His e-mail warns against “intimate activity” in the showers, “especially that kind of activity that leaves the showers in a decidedly less hygienic state.

“Several times since the start of the spring term some Hounies have come across a couple having the time of their lives in a shower stall,” the e-mail stated, referring to the nickname for college residents. “Last night, the shower flooded and the bathroom could not be used for over 90 minutes. To the as yet unidentified couple, this may be pleasurable and exciting for you, but it is a violation of community standards. Please stop.”

The note, first reported Friday by the New Haven Register, ended with a warning to the frolicking couple: “I really don’t want to explore this matter any further, as I respect your individual privacy. But such continued brazen public displays of affection will only invite public embarrassment. I beg of you, let’s not go there.”

What does he mean by threatening public embarassment, do you suppose? Email number 2 names names? Email number 3 includes .jpg’s?

Dan Gelertner ’09 thinks there’s trouble right here in Elm City. His fellow Calhoun undergraduates are sinking into the depths of degradation.

Maybe he could start a boys’ band.

I can remember some sophomores from Calhoun (I think it was) being expelled back in the 1960s as the result of being caught showering with a date. But in the early 1970s, Yale bathroom doors often featured interchangeable signs, reading “Male Inside,” “Female Inside,” or “Couple Inside.” I don’t remember any couples causing a flood, however. What could they possibly have been doing?

The 2007 Calhoun Shower Scandal is pretty tame stuff, I can tell you, compared to great Yale sex scandals of days gone by. Older Yalemen will remember the “Calhoun Suzy” affair of the late 1950s? early 1960s? in which a very naughty, and decidedly underage, townie took up residence in the then-uncoeducated residential college, providing horizontal refreshment to large numbers of undergraduates. The Suzy story ended unhappily with the arrival of the New Haven police, and the premature termination of some promising Yale careers.

Wick Sloane SOM ’80 reading through his monthly issues of the Yale Alumni Magazine observed a conspicuous absence of attention to war-time service on the part of the University.

What is Yale doing to recognize those from Yale — graduates, staff, faculty — who have served in combat in the Persian Gulf or in Afghanistan or the other troubled areas of the world, either for the United States or for their own country? What about any working in humanitarian jobs in these places? More than once I’ve asked this of Joel Podolny, dean of the School of Management. I’ve asked University President Richard Levin and the Association of Yale Alumni. No replies.

U.S. Army Col. Rich Morales SOM ’99 is back just now from at least his third tour in the Gulf in combat, including the first Gulf War. His e-mails to friends are inspiring in their courage and dedication to his troops. Not a syllable of politics or criticism. Most humbling is that he wrote to us that he understood that the debate at home over the war is what he and his troops are fighting for. I’ve asked the School of Management who else is serving, military or otherwise. Has anyone died? Any Yale staff called up in the reserves? Why not an edition of the Alumni Magazine on these people? The SOM Alumni Leaders’ Web pages have color photos and write-ups for the captains of industry and many fine people. Rich is there in name only. No photo or write-up. I am embarrassed for Yale here.

The University could make a powerful gesture of support to her alumni serving overseas by ending Yale’s Vietnam era posture of hostility to the US military and permitting ROTC programs to return to the Yale campus, but it won’t. As in the case of Vietnam, Yale will eventually inscribe the names of those who died on a slab of marble in Woolsey Hall, and that will be that.

Hat tip to Memeorandom.

AP:

Members of an all-male singing group from Yale University say they were taunted with anti-gay slurs, attacked and beaten after singing “The Star Stangled Banner” at a New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco.

At least three members of the Baker’s Dozen a cappella group were hurt. One suffered a broken jaw.

No arrests have been made. Police said they are investigating.

The trouble started when a couple of partygoers began mocking the 16 student singers _ who wore sports jackets and ties _ as preppies, witnesses said.

“You’re not welcome here,” Sharyar Aziz Jr., an 18-year-old Baker’s Dozen member whose jaw was broken, quoted one partygoer as saying. “He called a few members of the group, whether it was fag or homo, very, I would say, juvenile taunting.”

Reno Rapagnani, a retired San Francisco police officer whose daughter hosted the event, shut down the party. As the singers headed back to a nearby home where they were staying, another group of young men got out of a van and jumped them, according to Rapagnani.

“They were surrounded, then tripped _ and when they were on the ground, they were kicked,” Rapagnani said.

Two other Yale students needed medical treatment following the fight, one for a concussion and the other for cuts and a swollen ankle.

Police said they arrived and found about 20 people fighting in the street. They interviewed some of the participants but let them go after taking their names.

KESQ:

There’s a growing sense of outrage among some in San Francisco over a New Year’s Eve fight in which members of a Yale University singing group was beaten and some ended up in the hospital.

As first reported by Dan Noyes of A-B-C affiliate K-G-O T-V, members of Yale’s all-male a capella group — The Baker’s Dozen — were reportedly jumped by a vehicle full of young men after they left a New Year’s Eve house party in San Francisco.

One Yale student — Sharyar Aziz — had his jaw broken in two places during the fracas. Others in the group were bloodied and bruised as well.

The party was being held at the home of Reno Rapagnani, a retired San Francisco Police Department lawyer. The trouble started at midnight after The Baker’s Dozen sang “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Witnesses say some of the local men didn’t appreciate the attention the Yale students were getting, called them derogatory names and made threats that they apparently followed up on.

The Yale Daily News has more details.

A bit over a year ago (22 Nov 2005), the New York Sun was reporting on the spread of Naked Parties from Yale (and possibly Brown) to Columbia.

But the earliest public report probably appeared in the novel Chloe Does Yale published in March of 2004 by then Yale Senior (Timothy Dwight) Natalie Krinsky.

Today’s Times reports that the fad for naked parties was created in 1995 by the Yale Pundits, an undergraduate society which in earlier days contented itself with jokes and champagne-and-lobster lunches on the library steps.

The Pundits, founded in 1884 as a society of “campus wits,” have a history of rebelling against Yale tradition, often through elaborate pranks. They organize six to eight covert naked parties a year, which attract anywhere from 30 to 300 people to off-campus houses, neglected rooms in classroom buildings and even small libraries on campus.

“It’s one of those things people feel they need to do before they graduate,” says Megan Crandell, a senior who estimates that she has been to a half-dozen naked parties during her time at Yale. “The dynamic is completely different from a clothed party. People are so conscious of how they’re coming across that conversations end up being more sophisticated. You can’t talk about how hot that chick was the other night.”

News of Yale’s contribution to modern undergraduate social life has spread all the way to Scotland. The Scotsman.

While one campus source at Yale… says naked parties are “the No1” thing to do before graduation, students who attend the six to eight parties held each year say it can be a life-changing experience, far from the “frat-house” bawdiness portrayed in films such as Animal House…

Another Yale student, who did not want his name to become known by campus authorities – which do not try to stop the parties but do not encourage them – said: “Part of it is just the mystique of not knowing where you’re going. It’s become a hip thing to do.”

The events are magnets for social-climbers at other top academic institutions, including Columbia, MIT and Brown.

A better history, and a first person account from a Yale coed, appeared in the Yale Herald back in March of last year.

La plus ça change, la plus c’est la même chose.

James Kirchik Y ’06, at the America’s Future Foundation blog, serves up an account of the recent Conservative political scene at Yale, describing the current character and ethos of the various political parties of the Yale Political Union.

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.

This blog’s author is, for the record, a member of the Party of the Right.

Hat tip to SC Maggie Gallagher Y’82.

Sam Heller is only a junior at Yale, but he wrote this colorful, but politically non-commital column, which was actually posted on Free Republic.

Goodbye, boys, I die a true American.” So went the apocryphal last words of Bill “The Butcher” Poole as he died on March 8, 1855. He’d been fatally shot in the heart, but he’d hung on for another 11 days, presumably to think of something totally metal to say…

Thing is, though, here at Yale, we have a political climate maybe an inch or two to the left of center – not sure if you’ve heard… My political views hover on the right-most end of Yale’s political discourse, and I’m not even that conservative.

Worth a read. You’ll be seeing this kid in the future. Who knows? Maybe he’ll become conservative after all.

Ballroom dancing

Four days ago, IvyGate (an Ivy League miscellaneous news and humor blog) linked a 6:46 minute YouTube video produced by Yale senior Aleksey Vayner to accompany the cover letter, resume, and research paper he was using to apply for investment banking jobs.

Mr. Vayner’s video (which showed the youthful job applicant lifting astoundingly large weights, skiing, playing tennis, ballroom dancing, and karate-chopping a tall stack of bricks) produced very much the opposite of what he had intended. No one called him for an interview, but amused NY bankers quickly began sharing his credentializing video’s link by email as the humor item of the week. That video soon went viral. Aleksey did not become any company’s newest AVP, but he did become the next Star Wars kid.

Dow Jones/AP:

Vayner, a self-described “CEO and professional athlete,” submitted a cover letter and resume to UBS AG, describing his “insatiable appetite for peak performance.” By Friday afternoon, both the cover letter and resume — which includes a link to the video, titled “Impossible is Nothing” — had circulated among employees at Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group and Wachovia Corp., to name a few.

UBS spokesman Kris Kagel said the firm is looking into the forwarding of the e-mail. “We’re looking at whether it did come from UBS and if so, we’ll take action,” he said. “As a firm we obviously don’t circulate (job applications) to the public.”

And it gets worse and worse.

One thing led to another. Curious viewers looked closely at Aleksey’s investment firm, charity, and book listed on his resume, finding major problems (like non-existence, misrepresentation, and plagiarism) with each.

The Yale Daily News joined the pack now barking at Aleksey’s heels, with other students supplying more stories.

Daniella Berman ’07, who knows Vayner through the Yale Ballroom Dance Team, said she has heard “outlandish” stories about Vayner both from him and from other students. Among the claims she said she has heard is one that Vayner is one of four people in the state of Connecticut qualified to handle nuclear waste.

Berman said that while she thinks that kind of claim is fairly harmless, she thinks Vayner crossed a line by misrepresenting himself to a potential employer…

Vayner was profiled (as Aleksey Garber) in the Yale Rumpus in May of 2002 after visiting Yale as a prefrosh. The profile outlined Vayner’s many fabrications, including his claims that he was employed by both the Mafia and the CIA during his childhood and that he gave tennis lessons to Harrison Ford and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Today, IvyGate returned for a final coup de grace.

A member of the Yale tennis team wrote in to dispute Aleksey’s claim that he competed on the Satellite tour: “I played for Yale tennis, and he tried to walk on the team. He got cut the second day. I had one conversation with him, and he claimed to have KILLED 24 people in the caves of Tibet.”

(Other great comments: “I too played for Yale tennis, and Vayner/Garber claimed that he has trouble flying on planes because he has to register his hands as lethal weapons each time he goes to an airport.” And: “The giveaway on the investment firm was that he said his firm specialized in “risk-aDverse” strategies. The other giveaway was that he’s fucking crazy.”)

We decided to not be too scared of the cease and desist letter Aleksey emailed us, given that he copied and pasted it from the first Google hit for “cease and desist letter,” right down to the “very truly yours” signoff. Attorney Ron706@aol.com, Esq., really earned his fee there.

At Yale, Aleksey has offered to treat sports injuries using various “Eastern” therapy methods, including massage and acupuncture. Before “treating” a “patient,” he sent them this letter. You simply have to read it in full. Somewhere in there he claims that his brother is “head of pediatrics at Columbian Presbyterian hospital in NYC.” A search on the Columbia Presbyterian Physician Network turns up no one with the last name “Garber” or “Vayner.” But our favorite part is this line: “I am not certified in any Western sense of the word, neither in Chinese medicine, Tui-Na, Shaolin trauma medicine, nor in acupuncture, all of which I practice extensively never-the-less.”

And, um, not quite so humorously, the SEC and dean of Yale College have been notified of Aleksey’s transgressions.

God, what theater. You cannot make this shit up. Unless, y’know, you’re Aleksey.

You can bet that Yale will now review this lad’s admission application materials, looking for discrepancies. Ouch!

Hat tip to Andrew Olson.

———————-
UPDATE

Mr. Vayner has (not unwisely) gotten YouTube to pull the video, by claiming copyright infringement.

The vindictive IvyGate is defying him, and has placed the video in a new posting.

———————–
UPDATE 10/16

He now has a Wikipedia entry.

Aleksey is being ridiculed by Gawker.

And poor Aleksey’s story, and some comments on this posting by classmates on my Yale College Class email list made the New Yorker.
———————–
UPDATE 10/18

There is now an Aleksey Vayner Repository web-site, where readers post suggested new claims and accomplishments for Aleksey. The order of precedence of new alleged Aleksey accomplishments is determined by reader votes.

And, we missed this earlier posting in which Bess Levin communes with Aleksey’s brain.