Bari Weiss astonished mentally-normal people yesterday by sharing excerpts from a talk given last April at the Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center by Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a NY-based psychiatrist graduate of Cornell and Columbia, titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.”
Dr. Khilanani’s practice web-page is flashy and professionally-designed and manifests her keen determination to equate her own Hindu background with African-American ‘hood culture by employing as many Ebonic expressions as possible: “Yo!… Whatup… Are you down?.. My Steez.”
She proceeds to inform potential patients that she specializes in treating the psychological maladies of outsiders and marginalized groups, and she specifically includes conservatives and Trump supporters in her outsiders list.
However, in her April Yale talk, as Bari Weiss notes, she was decidedly the opposite of tolerant and inclusive.
A few weeks ago, someone sent me a recording of a talk called “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” It was delivered at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center by a New York-based psychiatrist as part of Grand Rounds, an ongoing program in which clinicians and others in the field lecture students and faculty.
When I listened to the talk I considered the fact that it might be some sort of elaborate prank. But looking at the doctor’s social media, it seems completely genuine.
Here are some of the quotes from the lecture:
This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil. (Time stamp: 6:45)
I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)
White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time. (Time stamp: 17:06)
We are now in a psychological predicament, because white people feel that we are bullying them when we bring up race. They feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. They are confused, and so are we. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall. It’s just like sort of not a good idea. (Time stamp 17:13)
We need to remember that directly talking about race to white people is useless, because they are at the wrong level of conversation. Addressing racism assumes that white people can see and process what we are talking about. They can’t. That’s why they sound demented. They don’t even know they have a mask on. White people think it’s their actual face. We need to get to know the mask. (Time stamp 17:54)
Here’s the poster from the event. Among the “learning objectives” listed is: “understand how white people are psychologically dependent on black rage.”
My observations:
This talk was one of the ways doctors could fulfill their continuing education requirements imposed by an activist busybody state legislature.
Obviously, it is absurd for a person who has benefited from the generosity of a majority-white country granting in recent years entry and access to citizenship even to exotic aliens from different races and remote countries with no ties whatsoever to America by culture or by blood, and who has additionally received an education at two Ivy League universities, to have cultivated such a huge and obsessive sense of racial victimization.
In this country in our current time, calling someone a racist is a very grave accusation, an insult, and an attempt to apply an intrinsically stigmatizing and discrediting label. It should be looked upon as a serious matter for a professional person to throw these kinds of accusations around, and an even more serious matter for one of the professional schools of a very elite university to endorse this kind of perspective.
There is a genuinely serious problem with Racism in Europe and America today and it really consists of a pattern of pathology in which elite institutions try virtue-signaling by endorsing, validating, and facilitating the communication of African American racial chauvinism, irrational grievances, and unlimited baseless accusations.
Yale, along with a host of our other colleges and universities, and elite institutions like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker, makes a habit of supplying platforms to, and groveling in agreement with malicious agitators, crackpots, shakedown artists, and peddlers of division like Al Sharpton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah Jones, &c.
All Aruna Khilanani has to do is keep up delivering these kinds of feverish rants filled with racial paranoia and hatred of the white majority and she’ll probably be in line for a McArthur Genius Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
There is a grave pathological racism abroad in the land these days, but it has nothing to do with ordinary people or the police. This racism is confined to large sections of the African-American community and to the elite establishment.
The new species of trap-jawed ant was discovered in the Chocó region of Ecuador.
The College Fix reports that a Yale researcher, in a new first, has decided to violate Linnaean nomenclature in order to make a political statement.
A Yale University researcher has given a newly discovered ant species the first of its kind — a “non-binary” scientific name.
According to New Scientist, taxonomic expert Douglas Booher, suggested to ant discoverer Philipp Hoenle of Germany’s Technical University that the new species get the “gender non-binary identifier ‘they,’” in this case Strumigenys ayersthey.
Keep in mind there is nothing about this particular ant’s characteristics which actually warrant a “non-binary” designation; as the Daily Mail notes, only humans can describe themselves as such based on how they perceive their gender.
Traditional species names are either masculine (suffix “-i”) or feminine (“ae”).
Booher wanted to honor Jeremy Ayers, an Andy Warhol protégé and human rights activist, with the new discovery. He enlisted the band R.E.M.’s frontman, Michael Stipe, to assist him in writing the etymology section for the paper on the new ant.
“[Ayers] identified as a gay man [note: not non-binary] outside of his Warhol character, but I’m naming it after him with the suffix added to include all non-binary people for his activism,” Booher said. He added that Ayers actually “would’ve shied away from himself being honoured.”
Her values and perspective fly in the face of the Left’s politics of Identity Group helpless victimization and grievance culture. So it should not be surprising that Yale Law School and the undergraduate newspaper are both going after Amy Chua.
She is being cancelled, we learn, for the hideous and outrageous crime of hosting private dinner parties, and (The horror! The horror!) sharing alcoholic beverages with Yale Law students and prominent members of the legal community.
Law students are all obviously over 21 and of legal drinking age, but apparently Chua was warned off any outside school socializing with law students in 2019 as a result of her husband Jed Rubenfeld receiving a two-year suspension after a Me-Too-style witch hunt investigation into rather vaporous accusations of “disparate treatment and boundary crossing” with females, drinking with students, “inappropriate employment practices,” and “retaliation against disloyal students.”
When I was at Yale, middle-aged male professors had affairs with attractive grad students and even sometimes with teenage undergrad coeds, and nobody thought this was a problem. The girls were of the age of consent, after all, and college students were thought to be entitled to live as adults.
So, with new allegations of recent off-campus dining and wine-bibbing with adult students and distinguished jurists, Yale Law School apparently moved silently to deprive Amy Chua of a minor academic responsibility, leading first-year small groups, and leaked details of her punishment and supposed disgrace to the Oldest College Daily before even notifying Chua.
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The witch-hunt & attempted cancellation of @amychua is a giant unforced error by @YaleLawSch.
Professor Chua is a stalwart advocate of women & minority students & the single best professor I had.
Back in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Princeton ’17, in This Side of Paradise described “The Yale Thing” this way:
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“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.
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The Yale man in fiction was typically portrayed as an All-American, square-shooting man-of-action, along the lines of Frank Merriwell, Dink Stover, Flash Gordon, and even Bruce Wayne.
The modern ascendancy of leftism can **** up anything, even the Yale identity.
On Facebook, some self-appointed younger alumni (nearly all female) and some Albertus grad who merely works at Yale set up and run the “Yale Alumni Group.”
Typically, that group has a rules regime created by sanctimonious left-wing goo-goos.
1. Agree to Abide by the Rules of this Group by Joining it
By joining this group, you agree to abide by its policies below and understand that group Admins and moderators will enforce those policies at their discretion.
This page is heavily monitored. Posts that do not contribute to alumni community-building or are determined to be antagonistic, racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise rude or insulting, will be deleted and the user may be muted, blocked and/or banned from the group immediately without notice.
In other words: Surrender your free speech rights at the door.
2. No Hate Speech, Bullying, Insulting or Rude Language
This page is heavily monitored. Posts that do not contribute to alumni community-building or are determined to be antagonistic, racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise rude or insulting, will be deleted and the user may be muted, blocked and/or banned from the group immediately without notice. …
6. Be Kind and Courteous. Like at Yale.
We’re all in this together to create a welcoming environment. Let’s treat everyone with respect. Healthy debates are natural, but kindness is required. …”
“Be Kind and Courteous. Like at Yale.”? What Yale is that? Not the Yale I was at. The Yale I knew was full of intensely competitive, sharp-tongued young men with a talent for cutting remarks who were not inclined to suffer fools and simps gladly.
Obviously, the more recent Yale has been sensitized and feminized, neutered and house broken, and politically corrected and pansified to a fare-thee-well.
Yalies today clearly do not wear big blue sweaters and smoke pipes, they get tattoos and piercings and emote a lot. They are not a bit reminiscent of November. They are like a sticky, humid day in August in the rainy season in a Third World swamp.
Over the last 48 hours, that Facebook Yale Alumni group featured a thread started by a typical female specimen who wanted advice about how to cope with “bullying and intimidation” when “speaking truth to power” at an upcoming meeting of some unnamed non-profit board.
It seemed obvious to me that anybody who started off telling you they enjoyed some sort of privileged possession of the truth, and who regarded debate and disagreement as “bullying and intimidation” was a deluded and outrageously self-entitled nuisance with a penchant for posing as a victim. I thought all this cowardice about facing oppositional speech and eagerness to play the victim card was decidedly unbecoming in a graduate of Dear Old Yale and consequently a card-carrying member of the national elite, and said as much. I carefully phrased all my observations as blandly and politely as possible (knowing perfectly well that censorship was a hair-trigger away).
A number of other females rushed immediately to her defense, accusing me of “mansplaining,” not entirely inaccurately describing me as “arrogant and insufferable,” and demanding that I check my white male privilege.
I responded with this poster meme:
Within a few minutes, when I went to read the responses, I found that all of my comments had been purged.
Having taken great care to avoid any actual pejoratives or colorful expression, I was much annoyed. I had drink taken as well, and I lost my temper. I sat down and wrote a posting specifically insulting the group’s management characterizing their sexual proclivities and existential status and urging them to commit obscene acts, some actually impossible. I’m afraid my boyhood roots in a mining town in the Hard Coal Region came out under provocation.
Not surprisingly, a minute later, I was no longer a member of the Facebook Yale Alumni Group.
But I’m not done with those wee slinkit cowerin’ beasties. My next step will be to create a Free Speech Yale Alumni Group on Facebook.
Steve Smith at McSweeney’s has a go at briefly capturing the typical student character and personality.
Harvard: I would shiv someone to answer a question in class.
Yale: I wrote a Pulitzer-nominated play about the time I shivved someone to answer a question in class.
Princeton: I’ve structured a derivative, the Shiv Swap, whose price reflects the probability that a given shivving is successful in allowing one to answer a question in class.
Brown: We must ensure equal distribution of shivs across all socio-economic strata of American society.
I get press release emails from Mother Yale pretty much every day.
This morning in came a triumphant notice boasting that Yale, this year for the first time, earned a gold rating via STARS, The Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, “a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance”.
Now “Sustainability” is one of those major shibboleths constituting obsessions and the foci of ersatz-religious devotion for the contemporary elite community of fashion.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Sustainability is a superstition, based essentially on the fallacious theory of Malthusianism, which contended that an ever-expanding human population would inevitable out-grow the food supply and other essential resources.
We have all lived through decades of constant media propaganda about the imminent apocalyptic crisis produced by excess population, peak oil, exhaustion of availability of this or that, despite Norman Borlaug, Fracking, and (most hilariously) the Simon-Erlich Wager. No evidence, no factual refutation will ever suffice to dispel this nonsense.
As Oil Company Executive Don Huberts observed in 1999: “The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones.”
The ability of human ingenuity to innovate and create new solutions and to multiply existing resources is consistently and reliably wildly underestimated by our Grand Establishment Pseudo-Intelligentsia.
I think their real underlying motivation is a religious one. The elite community of fashion has long since abandoned Judeo-Christianity, but its members still are afflicted by guilt and a profound sense of their own unworthiness of the privilege and prosperity they enjoy. They subconsciously feel a need to propitiate some higher power. They yearn to find some way to sacrifice and flagellate themselves and hanker to perform some kind, any kind of penitential acts.
Thus, Gaia has replaced the Puritan Jehovah. So the Yale Administration, for instance, confirms its own membership among the Elect by gravely immolating large sums of cash and by public testimony.
It’s all really the recrudescence of the ancient Manichaean heresy: there is this wonderful, good, natural stuff over here, and there is this awful, naughty, intrisically violative stuff over there. The former is the natural world, and the latter is anything man-made, anything and everything connected to human economic activity.
There is also an imaginary past or current state constituting the only perfect and legitimate set of conditions. Any change or modification of this alleged ideal represents a disaster, a crime, and a tragedy. If some obscure mugwort, insect, or rodent happens to go extinct, mankind is to blame, and no possible expense or inconvenience can be spared to preserve every single species and subspecies, and they’ve got the taxonomists ready to promote any subspecies to species status.
Yale, of course, is fully committed to the good fight. Yale has even built its own shrine to Gaia, Kroon Hall, a $33.5 million dollar Rube Goldberg exercise in spending several thousand dollars to save a nickel, in deploying top-level expertise and engineering to find dazzlingly innovative work arounds for trivial items available at any Ace Hardware Store.
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Sustainability, Mr. Salovey? How’s this for your Sustainability?
Yale College
2020–2021 Tuition and Fees
Tuition $57,700
Room $9,750
Board $7,450
TOTAL $74,900
Yale Health Hospitalization & Specialty Care Insurance $2,548
Student Activities Fee $50
Total: $77,498
When I arrived at Yale in September of 1966, the total cost was $3000 a year.
Why does the cost of attending Yale rise so much more rapidly than the rate of inflation? It probably has a great deal to do with the proliferation of special imaginary problem/bad idea offices filled with administrators burning incense in front of false idols.
Yale “Sustainability” Office has no less than eight left-wing academic bureaucrats disseminating nonsense, perpetually grasping at unwarranted powers (“Ask me about” World Governance”), and wallowing in undeserved prestige. And this ridiculous and nonsensical office has been operating, and wasting pots full of money, for fifteen years!
Just imagine how many similar Offices of Empty Superstition and/or Terrible Ideas are cluttering up the landscape all over Yale’s campus.
There is undoubtedly a well-staffed Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Yale, devoted to pandering to Snowflakes of Color’s amour propre and enforcing political correctness.
Back in the 1830s, Lord Melbourne declared he liked the Order of the Garter best of all his titles because there was “none of that damned nonsense about merit” connected to it.
The elite community of fashion’s current enthusiasm for what is referred to as “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” has a basic similarity to Lord Melbourne’s perspective, except his merit-free inclusion in the Garter Order was based on a supposed inherited excellence, while the Identity Groups singled out for special treatment under DEI base their claims to special privilege upon ressentiment.
David Swenson has a long record of achieving superior returns by his management of Yale’s endowment. Apparently, he now has decided either that other goals are more important or that anyone can achieve the same.
America’s most prominent endowment chief has a message for the firms that manage the school’s money: Hire more women and minorities, or possibly lose the university’s backing.
David Swensen is the veteran investment chief of Yale University’s $31.2 billion endowment. Earlier this month, he told the dozens of firms that manage Yale’s money they would be measured on their progress increasing the diversity of their investment staffs. Mr. Swensen said the Yale Investments Office would be working to improve its own team’s composition, too.
It is hilarious the way people like this talk about Meritocracy, but their idea of Meritocracy has a heavy thumb on the scale in several class cases.
The old-time Jewish quota (which I strongly suspect still exists) is denounced, but the Asian quota is defended vigorously in court. Certain groups absolutely must be awarded super-proportional representation, at any cost, on the basis of historical disadvantage. But, other outsider groups, Appalachians and working class ethnic Catholics, for instance, also conspicuously historically little represented in Ivy League admissions and in elite financial circles are completely overlooked, simply due to their failure to agitate and complain. The hypocrisy and irrationality is astonishing.
Peter Salovey, God help us! President of Yale. My dog would do a better job.
When Yale President Peter Salovey intends to make a grandiose concession to the small minority of radical student demonstrators, he first protects himself from reproach by forming an “expert committee” to develop applicable principles to be applied to the issue in question.
Salovey’s cherry-picked committee, of course, will be composed of ultra-liberal profs specifically ideologically-committed to the intended radical course Salovey intends to pursue.
A few years ago, the goal was renaming Calhoun College. This time, Yale is going to bow to student activist demands to use its investment program to make political statements stigmatizing fossil fuels.
Yesterday, Yale issued the following pretentious claptrap initiating the whole ridiculous sham process.
Yale University has formed an expert committee to guide the university as it evaluates its investment policies in relation to companies producing fossil fuels, President Peter Salovey announced Oct. 22.
The new committee is charged with recommending a set of principles that will inform Yale’s Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility (CCIR) as it applies the university’s ethical investment policy to fossil fuel companies. The CCIR works in consultation with the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR).
The new committee, which will collect input from the Yale community, will begin its work immediately and will deliver the report during the Spring 2021 semester.
After a Feb. 20, 2019, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Senate meeting on fossil fuels divestment, the FAS Senate proposed that the president appoint a committee to reexamine ethical investing at Yale with respect to companies that extract or produce fossil fuels.
In Salovey’s charge to the Committee on Fossil Fuel Investment Principles (CFFIP), he noted that the changes necessary to avert an irreversible climate catastrophe “cannot be implemented overnight, and depend not only on scientific advancement but also [on] significant political, economic, and personal contributions.â€
“Nonetheless,†he continued, “climate change poses an existential threat to life on our planet, and we have a responsibility to examine whether our investment policies are appropriate or need to be modified with respect to this challenge.â€
In 2014, Yale, acting in its role as an institutional investor, asked its external investment managers to incorporate the full cost of carbon emissions in investment decisions. At the time, managers were told to avoid investing in companies that disregard the social and financial costs of climate change and that fail to take economically reasonable steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Without diminishing the significance of these [past] efforts, I am fully aware that the alarm bells are growing louder, as scientific projections worsen, natural disasters intensify, and governments are slow to develop and implement effective policies,†Salovey wrote in the committee charge.
Salovey said the new committee will produce a “concrete framework†for applying to fossil fuel producers the guidelines set forth in “The Ethical Investor,†Yale professor John Simon’s highly influential 1972 book. That book established general criteria for universities to consider factors beyond economic return when making investment decisions and exercising rights as a shareholder.
The committee will identify the activities, behaviors, and/or characteristics of fossil fuel producers that would constitute “social injury†of such grave character that divestment could be warranted.
“The formation of this committee demonstrates significant concern at the highest level of the university about climate change and a commitment to act proactively,†said CFFIP chair Jonathan R. Macey, the Sam Harris Professor of Corporate Law, Corporate Finance and Securities Law at Yale Law School. “Our principles for making decisions related to divestment should reflect changing circumstances and the lack of decisive action by entities such as governments that we might normally rely upon for coordinating the nation’s response to existential threats like global warming.â€
The committee will include experts drawn from the Yale faculty, and may also consult with other experts in relevant fields. Its members, in addition to Macey, are Ruth Blake, professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences; Benjamin Polak, William C. Brainard Professor of Economics, School of Management, Department of Economics; Mary-Louise Timmermans, professor and director of undergraduate studies, Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences; Xinchen Wang ’09, director, Yale Investments Office.
The committee additionally will seek input from the wider Yale community.
Asher Liftin ’21 admiring the new portrait of Edward Bouchet, Y’ 1874.
If you were born white, in order to have your portrait painted and hung in one of Yale’s residential colleges, you would need to have been an exceptionally important and renowned scholar who had made major contributions to his field.
If you were African-American, the standard is just a little easier. All you have to have done is be supposedly the first representative of your identity group to attend Yale.
[A] committee established by Head of [Saybrook] College Thomas Near … recommended commissioning Bouchet’s portrait. Near, the students, and some of their fellow residents in Saybrook College had been having conversations about how to more fully represent Yale’s history in the dining hall.
“In the very Gothic space, we have a collection of portraits that were loaned from the Yale University Art Gallery in 1933 when the college opened,†said Near. “We also have a set of what I call ‘family portraits’ — those who served Saybrook as the heads and deans of the college and their spouses. All of the people pictured are white, which is not representative of Yale’s true history.â€
The addition of the Bouchet portrait is just the start of bringing “the narratives of people who have for too long been ignored, overlooked, and marginalized, to come to the surface†to campus spaces, Near said at the unveiling. “In North America there is no history that is not Black history, and this is absolutely true for the history of Yale.â€
Edward Bouchet is very probably the only Yale alumnus with merely a pedestrian career as a high school teacher to be so honored.
Unfortunately, on top of everything else, the powers that be at Yale, and at Saybrook College, are just plain wrong. Edward Bouchet, Class of 1874, was not the first student of color to graduate from Yale. That distinction belongs to Confederate Brigadier General, later Congressman and Senator from Louisiana, Randall Lee Gibson, valedictorian of the Yale Class of 1853.
Yesterday, Yale President Peter Salovey announced nine actions “to enhance diversity, promote equity on campus, and foster an environment in which all community members feel welcome, included, and respected,” causing rational alumni, en masse, to go and throw up in the street.
If you want to read a really choice example of vacuous and pretentious academic blather, go and check out:
Dollar quote: “Yale can and must improve in how it creates a climate where all feel safe and valued.”
The mind boggles. Snowflakes don’t feel “safe and valued” at Yale, surrounded by all that opulent and luxurious architecture; their needs attended to by an immense staff of servants; with access to the tutelage of world-ranked scholars, one of the top research libraries, as well as the nation’s finest recreational facilities; their future paths to wealth, power, success, and fame stretching shining before them? What more could it possibly take?
A friend of mine used to remark that “Life after Yale is a constant struggle to live as well as you did as an undergraduate.”
Outsiders at Yale, sons of working class families, those of us of non-New England blue-blood Protestant descent, used to consider ourselves truly blessed to be permitted to attend Yale, to share in a different people’s and a different class’s ancient and illustrious tradition, and to obtain thereby potential entry into membership in the national elite.
Today’s outsiders expect not only admission. They expect to revise the identity and character of the university. They demand faculty and administrators and academic departments of their own. They want the university’s, the nation’s, and the world’s history censored and revised to flatter their own amour propre and to punish historical figures they’ve decided, on the basis of their slender knowledge, are their enemies. They expect to move in, replace the furniture, remodel the house, and change the address.
In today’s America, alas! the national establishment elite has so declined in character and intelligence that its members routinely manifest guilt and a consciousness of their own unworthiness. They are only too eager to grovel, abase themselves, and surrender to the insolent and irrational demands of a deluded radical fringe, addled and intoxicated with a pernicious ideology hostile to Civilization, America, and Yale itself. The people entrusted with custodianship of the Culture and the Canon are classic examples of C.S. Lewis’s “Men Without Chests,” who care for nothing, who believe in nothing beyond personal advancement and the sweet smell of success, and who will reliably pay homage to the latest emotional upheaval afflicting the national community of fashion. Men like Peter Salovey are incapable of conserving anything, of defending anything.
