Dear old Yale is going to provide some of her courses to the whole world via the Internet… for free!

Reuters:

Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible…

The 18-month pilot project will provide videos, syllabi and transcripts for seven courses beginning in the 2007 academic year. They include “Introduction to the Old Testament,” “Fundamentals of Physics” and “Introduction to Political Philosophy.”

No, they won’t give you a degree, if you watch them all. But, hey! they won’t charge you $46,000 a year either. I wonder if they’re going to offer Vince Scully’s History of Architecture.

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Hat tip to Ratty.

How Neal Katyal expresses his gratitude to the US:
Defending Osama bin Ladin’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan

This month’s Yale Alumni Magazine interviews celebrity alumnus Georgetown Law Professor Neal K. Katyal, ’95JD Yale Law, preening over his victory in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which challenged the authority of the President to consign illegal combatants to trial by military courts, and which elicited the absurd majority opinion, written by Justice Stevens, which erroneously applies the language of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, viz.,

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions (to):

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause…

to illegal combatants and terrorists captured outside the territory of the United States.

Katyal shares with the Yale Alumni Magazine the heart-warming story of his moving reply to Hamdan, when the imprisoned jihadi asked: “Why do you want to help me?”

So I paused for a long time, and then I said that I was doing this because my parents came to America to give their children better opportunities, and I couldn’t imagine another country on earth in which I would be able to do what I have been able to do. My parents came here from India, literally with eight dollars in their pockets, each of them. And what bothered me the most about the president’s order is that it said only foreigners would get this military justice system. If you were an American citizen, then you got a civilian trial. But if you were a green-card holder or a foreigner, then you got something really inferior. That was the first time that I felt our country was so fundamentally on the wrong path — and I had to do something.

I can relate to Mr. Katyal’s strong feelings of gratitude and appreciation toward the United States, as I come from immigrant background myself. My grandparents arrived here from Lithuania in the 1890s.

Professor Katyal and my father have a lot in common. Both were of the first generation brought up and educated in the United States. Both were grateful for the opportunities offered by the United States, though my father was not so quite so fortunate as Professor Katyal, who attended Dartmouth and Yale Law School.

Because his own father was dying of miner’s asthma, my father had to quit school after 8th grade and go to work in the coal mines to help support the family. But he was still grateful to grow up in the United States, rather than in Russian-occupied Lithuania, grateful for both America’s political freedom and for her economic opportunities, even though he had much less access to the latter than some others.

Despite the things they have in common, still, I cannot help reflecting that my father’s gratitude toward this country expressed itself in forms distinctly different than Professor Katyal’s, forms more recognizable as gratitude. I feel sure that my father left America better off by his relatively obscure contributions, a lifetime of hard labor and wartime military service, when he died in 1997. If Professor Katyal passed away tomorrow, I’m afraid I would find it very difficult to say the same of his more celebrated ones.

I do agree with Professor Katyal on one thing, though. I too cannot “imagine another country on earth in which (he) would be able to do what (he) ha(s) been able to do.”

How my father expressed his gratitude to the US:
Serving in the Marine Corps in the South Pacific

Yesterday evening, I caught a film, running on IFC, written and directed, by a more recent Yale graduate than most I know personally, Derek Simonds ’94, titled Seven and a Match.

It was a rather depressing Gen X-ers’ version of Big Chill, in which late 20’s friends from Yale re-unite at one of their group’s family home in Maine.

The hostess Ellie (Tina Holmes) is in bad shape. Her parents were killed in a car crash, leaving Ellie nothing but the house, whose taxes alone she cannot cover from her own income. Ellie used to work at a camp for disabled children. Driven to desperation, Ellie has gone into a tail-spin, losing her job, selling her house’s furniture to get by, and scheming to burn it down for the insurance. Her college friends have been invited to supply cover for the intended arson.

It’s one of those weekends: renewing old friendships and animosities, status insecurities, fear of commitment, drinking, infidelities abound. Two girls cheat on their down-market boyfriends, but decide they want them after all, when the boyfriends start to walk out.

I was finding the film depressing, until there came a great moment.

After dinner, the gang retires to the living room to chat. Ellie reveals her problems and her plan, and the friends are not eager to participate, so Ellie sulks off to bed. Before long, struggling actor Sid (Eion Bailey) and bad blonde Whit (Heather Donahue, best known for the Blair Witch Project) are left alone, pouring down shots, and reminiscing about old times. “I had sex with Blair in that very chair,” boasts Sid, adding details about glassware broken during moments of passion. Whit rises, dims the lights, and pats the chair by way of invitation.

When he sits down, she climbs into his lap, then pauses, and observes: “There is something I like to say on occasions like this.” …pause.. “It has become something of a tradition.” ….longer pause… and throwing back her head… “I’m really drunk!”

A line like that will make you forgive a lot in a movie.

Diana Peterfreund’s Secret Society Girl is an agreeable example of High School/Adult Chick lit, with benefits.

(In a modest effort at discretion, names have all been changed.)

Smart and spirited Amy Haskell is a junior at “Eli University” (Yale), where she edits the “Lit Mag” (Yale Literary Magazine), and resides at “Prescott College” (Davenport or Pierson), and so on.

Amy had been expecting to be tapped for the humble literary Senior Society “Quill & Ink” (Manuscript), but instead receives an unexpected (and irresistible) invitation from the dreaded and all-powerful “Rose & Grave,” described as follows:

You’ve heard the legends, I’m sure. We’re the Ivy League’s dirty little secret. We run the country, even the states you wouldn’t think we’d care about, like Nebraska. We start wars, we coordinate coups, and we have a hand in writing the constitution of every new nation. Every presidential candidate is a member—that way, whoever wins, they’ll always be under our thumb.

The media fears us, which is silly, since the CEO of every newspaper and television network in the country is already a member of our brotherhood. We’ve been controlling every aspect of the media for more than a century, from deciding which movies get greenlighted to choosing the next American Idol. (Do you actually think your text-message votes count?)

We own most of the buildings of the university, as well as most of the land in the city, and we’ve got a good proportion of it bugged. The local police work for us. The mayor lives in our pocket. There’s not a student on campus who isn’t afraid to walk past our imposing stone tomb.

Election to our society is a ticket into a wildest dreams. Success is our birthright from the moment we emerge from our initiation coffins into our new lives as members of the society. Any job we want is within our reach, and any job we don’t want our enemies to have is out of theirs. We are given enormous monetary gifts upon graduation, as well as sports cars, valuable antiques, and a mansion on a private luxury island. We will never be arrested. We will never be impoverished. The society will see to that.

Our loyalty to the society supercedes everything else in our life—our families, our friendships, even our love lives. If anyone, even someone we care about with all our heart, mentions the name of our society in our presence, we must leave the room immediately and never speak to them again.

We can never tell anyone that we are members. We can never let anyone who is not a member into our tomb, or they’ll be killed.

We can never quit the society or reveal any of its secrets, or we’ll be killed.

Which of these rumors are true and which are overblown conspiracy theories?

I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

The author, Y ’01, serves up a thinly veiled, but still quite informative picture, of the customs and ceremonies of a certain nameless Yale organization (whose membership includes both candidates in the 2004 Presidential election), along with what seems to be a pretty accurate description of the interior of a certain well-known building on High Street.

She plays with history just a bit for purposes of her plot, moving the confrontation within a certain society which occurred in 1991 over the selection of female intitiates between that year’s graduating class and the society’s alumni forward to the present day.

Like many school story protagonists of earlier day, Amy Haskell experiences serious doubts about her own commitment to ancient and arcane school traditions, as her new association with these quickly produces ugly conflict and personal cost. At first, she tries to free herself by rejecting those traditions, but she soon comes to understand that they have already become part of herself, and she must defend her own right to be part of them.

Book web-page.

William N. Wallace, along with another 53,000 Americans, as a ten year old boy, attended an epic battle between Yale and Princeton on November 17, 1934, in which the Yale eleven, playing both offense and defense for all 60 minutes, rose up from a previously mediocre record to best an undefeated Princeton team, favored by three touchdowns, and widely believed to be headed for the Rose Bowl.

Playing both ways without substitutions won this Yale team, five seniors, three juniors, and three sophomores, the title of Ironmen. Only three other teams, post-WWI had ever played 60 minutes without substitutions (Michigan and Illinois in 1925, and Brown in 1926). Yale’s 1934 team at Princeton played the last Ironman game of college football ever played.

Stanley Woodward of The Herald Tribune declared of the upset:

Eleven Yale football players with constitutions of iron and dispositions of wild cats perpetrated the signal outrage of modern athletics in Princeton’s Palmer Stadium today.

Robert Kelley of the Times:

Yale defeated Princeton today by a score of 7-0. In that sentence is packed all the deep excitement of the most popular drama that football or any other sport knows, the rise of the man without a chance, the refusal of the underdog to play the role that has been assigned to him.

This Yale-Princeton game set the ten year old boy on his path in life. He grew up to become a professional sportswriter, and at the close of a fifty year career (including 35 years with the New York Times), has produced a book on the unforgettable 1934 game. His profiles of the members of that illustrious Yale team (and several of their Princeton rivals), offer fascinating snapshot portraits of American life in last century via his investigation of the players’ origins, and his account of Ivy League life during the Depression, the impact of WWII, and their varying ultimate fates.

Two old Yale Political Union debaters clashed at Senate hearings on John Bolton’s confirmation as UN Ambassador.

And John Bolton. former Conservative Party Chairman, Yale Class of 1970, got the better of John Kerry, former Liberal Party Chairman, Yale Class of 1966.

video

Yale University received subpoenas from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation requesting 10 years of the university’s financial records connected with some 47 Federal research grants amounting to approximately $45 million dollars.
WebCPA:

A February report by the Department of Health and Human Services that referred to a gene research program found that more than a third of the university’s more than $500,000 in invoices did not comply with federal standards, and costs were improperly transferred across budget cycles to make up for shortfalls.

“Regardless of the outcome of the current investigation, we must get all our processes right and make sure that we are good stewards of the funds entrusted to us by the federal government,” Yale president Richard Levin said in a statement.

The most detailed press reports seem to indicate that the discrepancies are associated with stem cell research.

LifeNews.com

Dear old Yale was goofy enough to cooperate with a New York Times’ Sunday Mag feature all about how former Taliban roving ambassador Sayed Ramahtullah Hashemi was now studying at Yale, and wasn’t that so cool?

What with world events, the Taliban’s generally negative reputation, and the ready availability of some rather colorful interviews gven just a few years ago by Ramahtullah himself, poor Yale really got clobbered with the proverbial million dollars worth of bad publicity over all this. And it seems that those stout-hearted Yale administrators are getting tired of replying “No comment” to sarcastic questions from the Press.

The Yale Administration reflected long and hard, and came to the inevitable conclusion that fewer and better Ramahtullahs at Yale amounted to less grief for themselves, so (with the characteristic courage of their breed) they denied Ramahtullah’s application for admission as a degree candidate.

H/T to Michelle Malkin.

The indiscreet New York Times Magazine feature last February rejoicing in the presence at Yale (in the capacity of a special student) of former Taliban roving ambassador and international spokesman Sayed Ramahtullah Hashemi led to a heap of controversy and proved a major embarassment to the university administration. But it’s an ill wind, and all that.

All the flak brought down upon liberal heads at Yale during the brouhaha over poor little Ramahtullah’s presence on campus intimidated the rascals. It was the million dollars worth of Ramahtullah-associated bad publicity that persuaded the powers that be at Yale to refrain from a far worse decision: the appointment of an egegrious apologist for Midde Eastern terrorism, the infamous Juan Cole, to a senior position on the faculty at Yale.

The decision is in. Cole is out.

And Juan Cole is now posting on his blog all about just how sour grow the grapes in old New Haven:

I am very happy at the University of Michigan, which has among the largest and oldest Middle East Studies programs in the United States. It is like Disney World for a Middle East specialist. To its credit, the University invested tens of millions of dollars in creating positions and building library and other resources in this field at at time when it was considered marginal by many other universities. Michigan also has a History Department that is among the very best and largest in the country, characterized by diversity of area specialization and innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship. It is a nurturing and congenial intellectual environment. Many fine departments in the US have a North Atlantic focus or bias, but Michigan for decades has had a global emphasis.

The press has some out of date impressions about our major research universities, imagining that the old hierarchy of Ivy League versus the rest is still meaningful. It is not. Research universities, whether state (Berkeley, the University of Michigan) or private, are much more similar than they are different. Were I ever to go to another place, it would likely be as a pioneer in a less well-developed Middle East Studies program, for the purpose of building up something that we already have at Michigan. That is, it would be a personal sacrifice for some purpose, and not a decision easily made.

Ah, yes! Michigan is just as good. We’re all sure you’ll be very happy staying there, Juan, old boy. And a good many Yale men are even happier than you are that you’re staying there.

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Just how disgraceful a faculty appointment Juan Cole’s would have been may be discerned from a perusal of this Front Page article.

The Millionaires’ Unit makes for ironic reading in an era when elite universities like Yale won’t even allow ROTC units on campus, dining hall offerings include vegan, and pampered students are tutored by a corps of bolshie profs in fashionable poses of anti-American sophistication and smug Pacifist moral superiority.

Publisher’s Weekly describes Marc Wortman’s new book on the history of the Yale Flying Club, an aviation unit formed by Yale undergraduates even before America’s entry into into WWI to train to fight, as harkening

back to a bygone era when campus regattas were the place to be seen, Harvard-Yale football games drew crowds 80,000 strong and, perhaps most jarringly, American isolationism placed the country’s air command not just behind Germany’s fearsome air service, but behind British and French forces as well. Preparing themselves for fire fights and bombing missions that generated harrowing casualty figures, these wealthy, elite Yale students saw it as their responsibility to fight on the front lines, and in the first wave. In a brief but important epilogue, Wortman spells out just how profoundly the times, and in particular the Yale campus, has changed in the past 90 years.

Poor Louis Auchincloss Y ’39, in the Wall Street Journal, makes a gallant attempt to stand up for his own class:

I seemed to sense at the end of Mr. Wortman’s narrative — I may have been wrong — an implication that the heroic spirit of the Millionaires’ Unit has somewhat departed from our land. But that spirit, which existed in World War II as well, was inspired in both conflicts by the barbarous attacks on our nation by dangerous and mighty foes. The sons of the rich have not seemed tempted to leave Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley to enlist in wars in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq, where a good half of our youth, if not more, saw no real threat to the country. But if attacked, I believe, we would find the same spirit that the old unit so splendidly showed. I know some of the descendants of those men, and I am sure we could count on them.

But, unless you count the British-flagged Lusitania, whose sinking cost the lives of 128 Americans, Germany did not, in fact, attack the US prior to US entry into WWI. And if we substituted today’s American elites for the WWI-era’s, Ivy League undergraduates would have obviously been found demonstrating against the Wilson Administration and the War, not training to fly combat missions. Pace Mr. Auchincloss and his WSJ editor, some of us do actually think America was attacked this time.

A Yale Senior Society Building

The Wall Street Journal today published a story (based on an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine) featuring just the kinds of themes illustrative of the arrogance and oppression of the ancien regime beloved by the hearts of liberal journalists.

Skull and Bones, the most prestigious of Yale’s senior societies, derives its public name from its use of that emblem, typical of the Freemasonry-inspired imagery adopted unversally by student fraternities founded in the 19th century Romantic era. Memento mori were characteristically exhibited to remind fraternity members that life is fleeting.

Skull and Bones, from the time of its foundation in 1832, has had a policy of deliberately encouraging wild rumors of its own dark secrets, influence, and power in order to enhance its prestige. One of the most popular legends, right up there with tales of guaranteed lifetime incomes, and Skull and Bones’ alleged control of governments and national economies, is the legend of the Bones collection of the skulls of famous individuals, including that of the famous Apache warrior, Geronimo.

The association of skulls with the society’s emblem supposedly makes their aquisition highly desirable to the society, so generations of enterprising and influential Yale men have spent their spare time bribing officials and excavating graveyards by moonlight in order to carry back prizes to be housed in the recesses of its High Street headquarters. The reality seems to be that the senior society does possess a human skull and pair of femurs, purchased as anatomical specimens back in the 19th century, which have been used emblematically since in annual photographs of class delegations.

A skull is a skull is a skull, and nothing has ever prevented dark hints that this particular skull is Geronimo’s, or Pancho Villa’s, or President van Buren’s. And like the legends of subsidized incomes, or the immense swimming pool supposedly in the club’s basement, the wilder the story, the more eagerly it was taken up and repeated as gossip in the college community. Bonesmen smiled behind the closed doors of their impressive clubhouse, as the hints they dropped, and the rumors they spread themselves, blossomed into wide acceptance, inspiring outsiders with awe.

The Geronimo skull legend made the news wires back about a generation ago, and in 1986 the Yale Society offered to return the supposed Geronimo relic to Indian possession, but Indian representatives were not satisfied with the skull they were offered and were unwilling to sign a receipt for its delivery.

Another account.

William Sloane Coffin Jr. was born in 1924 in New York City to a wealthy and prominent family. His great grandfather founded the prestigious W.& J. Sloane and Company department store in 1843. His father and grandfather attended Yale, where both were members of the illustrious Skull and Bones senior society.

Coffin attended the Buckley School in New York, Deerfield Academy and Andover, and Yale. His undergraduate education was interrupted by the draft in 1943. In the Army, he did not seek out combat assignments, but instead won admission to OCS, and trained as an interpreter. His most notable contribution to the war effort consisted of successfully sending some 1500 Russian prisoners of war back to death or prison in the Soviet Union. For which feat, he received the Army Commendation medal and a promotion.

He returned to Yale as a member of the graduating class of 1949. In accordance with family tradition, he was tapped for Bones. He wrote a senior paper revealingly titled: Notes Towards a History of Bolshevik Trade Unionism. In 1949, he entered Union Theological Seminary, then headed by his uncle, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, also a Yale graduate and Bonesman.

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 prompted Coffin to leave the seminary to serve as an Operations Officer with the CIA. Coffin was assigned to recruiting agents from refugee camps for covert entry into the Soviet Union. His first two groups of agents simply disappeared. Pravda ran a front page cover story detailing the capture of Coffin’s third and largest group of agents.

In 1953, Coffin left the CIA and returned to the seminary, this time, however, attending Yale Divinity School. He became famous as a Divinity Student for dashingly riding a BMW motorcycle, and for regaling fellow students with tales of war-time derring-do (stories of parachute drops behind enemy lines and secret missions), and for singing Russian songs.

In 1956, he married Eva Rubinstein, daughter of the famous Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein. They separated in 1968, and he married again later twice.

In 1956, he also accepted the position of chaplain at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He moved on to Williams College after one year, where he made a reputation as a radical by attacking fraternities for a dearth of minority admissions. In February 1958, he was finally offered “the only job (he) really wanted:” the chaplaincy at Yale.

Coffin brought the ideal combination of personal assets to the Yale Chaplain’s position: an impeccable blue-blood background (featuring deep Yale roots), and superior intelligence, combined with energy, charisma and dramatic flair. William Sloane Coffin could actually attract an audience to college chapel for the pleasure of watching him perform. A Coffin sermon would reliably be original, timely, and delivered with both humor and emotional depth.

Coffin’s career as chaplain coincided with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, and he quickly found that Civil Rights presented the perfect opportunity to utilize the message of Christianity to attack the existing order of Society from an unanswerable moral high ground. Predictably, elderly and sclerotic alumni demanded his dismissal, and equally predictably the Yale Establishment chose to view him as an invaluable asset: a brave, eloquent, and original in-house conscience.

The US War in Vietnam emerged in the mid-1960s as the pre-eminent leftist cause, and Coffin was among the earliest of Establishment luminaries to oppose the war. He joined the opposition’s ranks in the Summer of 1965. In addition to organizing protests, signing petitions, and servng on committees of opposition, Coffin employed his position as Chaplain of Yale University with tremendous skill in service to the cause.

Yale undergraduates inevitably experienced a certain moral discomfort, protected by student deferments and able to enjoy the all-too numerous pleasures of Ivy League Unversity life, with the knowledge that others of their own generation were being drafted to fight, and sometimes die, in their stead. It was naturally, therefore, highly agreeable to Yale undergraduates of those 1960s to be assured in the stentorian baritone voice of authority of their admired chaplain that the war was wrong, they were not only justified in avoiding serving, they were far, far morally superior to those who did!

Coffin used every means to indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates, starting (even prior to the beginning of Freshman year) at a Summer Retreat held for the benefit of religiously conscientous Protestant students, which he turned into an indoctrination seminar through which the youthful admirer of Reinhold Nieburh from the hinterlands was commonly transformed into Lenin’s useful idiot.

Doonesbury ©1972 G.B. Trudeau

The Anti-War Protest Movement made William Sloane Coffin a national figure. In 1968, along with Benjamin Spock, he was one of the “Boston Five,” indicted for conspiracy to violate the Selective Service laws (by public advocacy of resistance and evasion). The government ultimately dropped the case.

He was prominent in the 1970 protests opposing the trial in New Haven of several members of the Black Panthers for the torture-murder of Alex Rackeley, erroneously believed by his tormentors to have been a police informer. Coffin proclaimed in a sermon: “I am prepared as an anguished citizen to to confess my conviction that it might be legally right but morally wrong for this trial to go forward.”

In 1972, Coffin went to Hanoi to “accept” the release of three America POWs as part of a major North Vietnamese propaganda operation. He repeated the same kind of stunt in 1979 by accepting the invitation of the Iranian government to celebrate Christmas with the American hostages in Teheran.

But as the 1970s advanced, with the Vietnam War and the Protest Movement winding down, Nixon in the White House, and the old Yale passing away as the result of the impact of coeducation, Coffin experienced increasing problems in his personal life. He took a year’s sabbatical from Yale in 1973, hoping to write his memoirs and save his second marriage. The effort failed. In November 1974, he inflicted a hairline skull fracture on his second wife. He had begun to beat her when they quarreled.

In January, he informed President Brewster that he would not be seeking another five year extension of his contract as Yale’s chaplain.

His career seemed at an end. He moved in with Arthur Miller for six months, and finally took refuge in a barn at his brother’s house in Vermont. He began keeping company with the female manager of the local general store, whom he eventually married seven years later. In 1977, however, he was called to the pulpit of Riverside Church on Manhattan’s liberal Upper West Side.

The Riverside appointment allowed Coffin to enjoy again a comfortable position of suitable social importance which he could also use as a base for political activism. He stepped down in 1987 (after a confrontation with a prominent Black minister over the church’s position on homosexuality) to accept the presidency of SANE/Freeze, the well-known Soviet front organization. He retired circa 1990.

He died yesterday at his home in Stratford, Vermont, at the age of 81, of congestive heart failure.

His talents were as great as his views were unsound. William Sloane Coffin undoubtedly contributed as much as any other single individual to the conversion of the American community of fashion to political Radicalism. I strongly suspect that he was a knowing and conscious Soviet Agent of Influence.

Nearly a hundred million people in Southeast Asia today live under despotism and in poverty, and 58 thousand Americans died in vain, because William Sloane Coffin (and a small group of allies) succeeded in changing the opinions of the majority of Yalemen, and the majority of Americans, in a few short years in the late 1960s.

Associated Press