57 Comments

1. Lindsey Thomas Martin:

Rabbi Hausman: ‘I was disappointed at the inability of those in attendance amongst the Yale community to place responsibility for the violence that has transpired on those who manifest such responsibility.’

I am always astounded that Western academics and others who excuse those with manifest responsibily cannot see that to do so is racist as it grants them infantile freedom from responsibility.

Oct 2, 2009 - 11:00 am 2. runbei:

I have two degrees from Stanford. I run often on the Stanford campus and am impressed by the great amount of noble work that is done there – in the medical school, the engineering school, the… – well, you get the point – the schools that deal with physical reality.

My Stanford education (in liberal arts) gave me no understanding of the natural laws that govern human life and, most important, the universal longing to increase happiness and decrease suffering. It was all relativistic balderdash. I tested its practical, real-world applications and found that none of it worked – Sartre and his nihilist disciples were all con men.

I only found a truly rational, reasonable, intuitively true portrait of life, and a devastating critique of Sartre & Co., when I read J. Donald Walters’s “Out of the Labyrinth: For Those Who Want to Believe, But Can’t.” At Stanford, I was part of a group of dissatisfied students who educated ourselves, passing groovy books back and forth and talking about them. I managed to get an education at Stanford, though it was not the one I paid for. Labyrinth was THE groovy book I sought as an undergraduate and graduate student. Read it – it’s the bomb (under many an endowed humanities department chair).

Oct 2, 2009 - 11:08 am 3. Instapundit » Blog Archive » RABBI HAUSMAN ON YALE: “In the final analysis, I believe that the university is lost.”…:

[...] RABBI HAUSMAN ON YALE: “In the final analysis, I believe that the university is lost.” [...]

Oct 2, 2009 - 11:16 am 4. biblio44:

“Asked for his overall impression of Yale, Rabbi Hausman was blunt: Honestly, I would not send my child to any school where there is such uniformity and conformity of thought and attitude.”

I’ll bet the number of applications to Yale plummets.

Oct 2, 2009 - 11:30 am 5. Stephen:

“I’ll bet the number of applications to Yale plummets.”

Sarcasm?

Applications to prestige schools such as Yale are driven by hysterical status-seeking, often on the part of parents. If you tell such people that their children won’t get a proper education at Yale they will give you a blank stare or say “so what?”

It’s the pedigree and the connections that are sought after, not the learning.

Oct 2, 2009 - 12:45 pm 6. Johnny Dollar:

Stephen is correct. It is the pedigree not the content that drives parents to send their kids to the Ivy League (at least in the humanities). If you wish to corrode the soul of an eighteen year old then send them to pretty much any university but especially the Ivy League and have them major in the humanities. Biblio44 is correct that applications will not plumment (regardless of Biblio’s bitterness – obviously an intelligent person but why cheapen his/her observations with such sarcasm?), however, it only proves that the affluent or connected or brainy are not immune to the herd instinct. I remain optimistic that the Academy will soon be facing its own healthy day of reckoning and the outside world cannot be ignored forever. To paraphrase Sarkozy, some live in a virtual world but the rest of us have to deal in the real world.

Oct 2, 2009 - 3:22 pm 7. Yale '80:

I would be careful to condemn a vibrant and multi-faceted community and institution numbering in the thousands and thousands soley because a number of hotheads, idiots or whatever among a group of only 65 demonstrated the way they did. Yale is not perfect but it is more diverse than you give it credit it for.

Oct 2, 2009 - 5:22 pm 8. Gregory Koster:

Dear Stephen & Johnny Dollar: Nope. Follow me through this decision tree:

a) Yale costs big dough, close to $200K for an undergraduate degree. That’s one hell of a lot of dough for “connections.”
b) If the parents have so much dough that 200K is a bagatelle, who needs connections?
c) Parents are sending children to Yale because they believe in Yale’s values i.e. the parents are rich liberal bigots.
d) Yale waives much of the dough for those with the right qualifications i.e. melanin content of skin, or belonging to an Officially Approved Group That Has Been Oppressed By The Man. Such people are likely to have as many chips on their shoulders as Michelle Obama (read her senior thesis to see what a perfect Ivy Leaguer she was), and are fertile soil for the zanies at Yale.

What’s left after that? Not much. I find it hard to swallow that middle class folks automatically assume that Yale is worth 200K and will saddle themselves with that sort of debt without investigation.

Oct 2, 2009 - 5:37 pm 9. RKV:

The college bubble is upon us. Large fractions of what the level 1 research university deliver to undergraduates can be had elsewhere and for much less (see MIT’s Open Course Ware). I guess you can’t replace the binge drinking and the marriage market found at an Ivy, but some of that can be found pretty easily elsewhere.

For my part, I attended UC about the time Solzhenitsyn was first published in the West. That was enough for me to get a clear bead on what socialism really was.

Oct 2, 2009 - 5:39 pm 10. Kevin S:

biblio

It just doesn’t matter to you what the Left thinks, does it? All that matters is that you all think exactly alike. I am impressed, though, in how quickly you all fall in line.

Oct 2, 2009 - 5:41 pm 11. The A-train:

See, this just causes me to relax. With my first baby on the way, I feel no innate desire for my son, even though family members have attended, to be a Yale man or any other Brand A Ivy Leaguer. The pedigree only matters to those who are also lost. If my boy wants to go to the more modest Southern Connecticut State U (and my alma mater) well that’s just fine with me. Shoot…I’d rather he go to Gateway Community College and deal in reality.

Oct 2, 2009 - 5:50 pm 12. RKV:

“Honestly, I would not send my child to any school where there is such uniformity and conformity of thought and attitude.” Rabbi, yes you would – if it was your world view being conformed to.

Oct 2, 2009 - 5:55 pm 13. Kevin S:

Biblio

In contrast, on the right, there is constant argument, a constant sense of disagreement, and therefore a dialog, Libertarians argue with Neos, with conservatives, and there are gradations within each group. It’s something that the Left does not tolerate; group think predominates. I believe the Left looks more for validation of their particular ideas and outlooks and so looks for everyone to be on the same page (by the way, that is the definition of Fascism: a single voice).
If you look back, and are familiar with the 50s, it was Buckley at NR who threw the Birchers out of the conservative side (I await your declaration about Buckley and McCarthy…yawn). There was no place for them. Yet today, the Left will not throw out people who take billy clubs to polling stations, nor do they deplore the suppression of speech as evidenced by Yale. Just saying…
There have always been varying opinions within the Right…Russell Kirk, William Buckley, Chris Buckley(!), Krauthammer, Derbyshire, Sowell, Clarence Thomas…and one could go on. All, engaging in argument with each other….but on the Left…you make any disagreement anathema and you seek furiously to find evidence for personal defamation that can be used against the blasphemer.
If that floats your boat, keep at it; just don’t expect any respect for true thought and examination of issues.

Oct 2, 2009 - 6:09 pm 14. Carleronn:

Yale ‘80

Maybe in 1980 your statement was true but as Buckley pointed out in “God and man…” the alumni are the last to know what’s actually happening on campus.

Brown ‘72 (see how absurd that looks)

Oct 2, 2009 - 6:11 pm 15. Dan:

The Ivy league governing class geniuses have simply devised more intricate ways to

It’s time for community college graduates who can balance a checkbook to rise up and overthrow the ruling elite.

Oct 2, 2009 - 6:13 pm 16. Dan:

The Ivy league governing class geniuses have simply devised more intricate ways to scam the system.

It’s time for community college graduates who can balance a checkbook to rise up and overthrow the ruling elite.

Oct 2, 2009 - 6:14 pm 17. Daniel Crandall:

“In the final analysis, I believe that the university is lost.”

So … what … should we then retreat to our libraries and think tanks and institutes, where we continue to write accounting after accounting about how the university is lost? Meanwhile, those “lost universities” confer degree after degree and devour millions upon billions of taxpayer dollars. While this goes on those who truly grasp the value and content of a liberal arts education, but who reside and work outside this academic land of the lost sip their cognac, puff their pipes and mutter, “tsk, tsk.”

To quote the good rabbi, “I abjure this notion.”

I have not seen a critic yet that inspires young people’s moral imagination. I’ve known quite a few artists, writers, filmmakers, teachers and journalists who can do this, but never a critic.

Oct 2, 2009 - 6:18 pm 18. Gaffe Prices:

In his Book of Tahwid, ibn Abdul Wahhab wrote, “We must find out what true Islam is: it is above all a rejection of all gods except God, a refusal to allow others to share in that worship [shirk] which is due to God alone. This kind of shirk (worship) becomes evil, no matter what the object, whether it be king or prophet, or saint, or tree or tomb”.

What he is saying is that the prophet is not worthy of any form of worship, period. To do so relegates worship that “is due to God alone” to pagan Polytheism; that of worshipping more than one god or veneration of saints and prophets. In fact he calls it evil. He considered those (muslims) who engage in this sort of thing to be “denounced as an infidel and be killed”.

In a letter, ibn Wahhab identified this type of moslem impostor as one “who has known the religion of the Prophet and yet stands in its way, prevents others from accepting it [in its true monotheistic form of worship], and shows hostility to those who practice it [in its true monotheistic form of worship].

So these muslims, and the Yale’s for $ale-ies that love them are all engaging in the polytheism that ibn Wahhab considered to be behaviors of “disbelievers and polytheists”, by engaging in improper religious practices; even and especially by those who utter the proclamation of Islamic faith, the shahada, and yet still make an idolatry of the Prophet.

Doing something these apostates of Islam consider to be “offensive” is not of concern to ibn Wahhab; he destroyed the tombs of the companions, or first disciples of the Prophet, which had become objects of veneration, as well as a shrine to the Prophet himself, to stamp this kind of thing out. He went on to demolish the tomb of Zayd bin al-Khattab, the brother of the second caliph of Islam, Umar bin al-Khattab.

Just after its birth, Islam became divided between two branches- Sunni and Shia. Initially, these two branches fought over who should be the Prophet’s successor (kalifah, or caliph).

The Shiittes, who were “the partisans of Ali”, Muhammad’s son in law, added a theological dimension to the debate. They attributed special religious qualities to Ali and his sons, Hasan and Hussein, as well as to their descendants. Ali and his successors established a imamate, a hereditary dynasty, of spiritual leaders who possessed secret knowledge ans miraculous powers; the twelfth imam is expected to return as a mahdi, or messianic savior, an intermediary between man and God. According to some shiittes, Ali shared the power of prophesy with Muhammad.

Something ibn Wahhab considered to be right out. And explains why Saudis don’t share any enthusiasm for Iran acquiring the bomb, and why they are supportive of Israel destroying such capability, including the use of Saudi airspace to accomplish this.

In other words, open season on Muhammad venerationan other polytheisms.

So these trouble making phonies of Islam (mushrikun) only serve to corrupt the proper practice of Islam in the first place, and to their ilk, ibn Wahhab had a prescription- it was permissible “to kill them and confiscate their possessions”.

So look out if those purifiers of Islam come a gunnin for you Yale’s and moslem polytheists (mushrikun).

Oct 2, 2009 - 6:42 pm 19. cubedweller:

The Ivy League, like the New York Times, and other once respectable institutions that have caved to progressivism, are crumbling and coasting on their reputations.

Oct 2, 2009 - 6:49 pm 20. M. Simon:

My #2 son went to U. Chicago, majored in humanities (Russian language), graduated with honors. Never lost his libertarian perspective.

Oct 2, 2009 - 6:56 pm 21. David Thomson:

“In the final analysis, I believe that the university is lost.”

I have long argued that these academic institutions must be abandoned. The lunatics are in control—and they have jacked the system sufficiently to make it virtually impossible to get rid of them. They can easily sue the administrators and turn everybody’s life into something of a living hell on Earth. The University of Colorado spent enormous sums of money and effort before it finally got rid of the proven plagiarist and scam artist Ward Churchill. By all rights, this scoundrel should not have had a leg to stand on.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the other Ivy League schools are often nothing more than intellectual whorehouses. This is has been an open secret for years among insiders. However, many outsiders are now finding out the truth. The con game will last only a little bit longer. Might as well take action now.

Oct 2, 2009 - 7:32 pm 22. Robert:

I took my son, a high school senior, to see an Ivy League school a few weeks ago. On that day, the new freshmen had moved in but upperclassmen had not yet arrived. What my son and I saw was quite a surprise. What we saw looked like the result of a selective breeding program, but nobody would dare call it eugenics. I am guessing that we saw at least 10 percent of the freshmen walking around and in a dining hall, a fair sample. Almost every student we saw was tall, thin (granted this was before they will gain the “freshman 15″) and shockingly good-looking. Admittedly, some must have been athletes returning early for practices. My son, who doesn’t look like that, wondered whether he could fit in socially with these superstars, who were undoubtedly as smart as they were physically intimidating. I wonder if three generations from now, after more of these Ivy students marry each other and send their children to Ivies, there will be a super elite who will rule the rest of us. The thought is a little scary.

Oct 2, 2009 - 7:34 pm 23. Lions:

Dan,

Good luck with that one.

Oct 2, 2009 - 7:40 pm 24. Stephen Rittenberg:

To my mind, Yale is redeemed by Donald Kagan and his lectures on Ancient Greece (available free ! at Itunes.) Just get his lectures and save the 50M/year.

Oct 2, 2009 - 7:46 pm 25. HMI:

Speaking as a conservative academic: let the kid go to Yale, if they can get in. It certainly won’t be any worse ideologically than many dozens of others schools. With luck, they will find themselves in class with Donald Kagan, say, and might actually learn something about thinking their way through a position. If they are so inclined, they will find conservative students there who have formed societies and who write for journals. If not, there is at least the chance that they will be well positioned for financial success and thus more likely to eventually acquire the conservatism that often goes with the interests of property.

Oct 2, 2009 - 7:54 pm 26. Da Coyote:

Thankfully, the folks I hire are science types. They do not fit the stereotype of geeks. A considerable number of them are excellent musicians, and have a creditable knowledge of history, economics, and even some art.

The humanities majors – on the other hand – are largely illiterate (nope, I didn’t stutter) and couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag. If one wants to know why American businesses all resemble Dilbert’s company, one can look to Yale, Harvard, and the rest of the sorry collections of marshmallow universities that produce the pointy haired bosses. (Apologies to the few who manage to actually grow up whilst attending these schools.)

Oct 2, 2009 - 7:55 pm 27. Letalis Maximus, Esq.:

Yale lost?

Gee, that’s a shame. Will the last one who leaves please turn out the lights?

We’ll loot the place later.

Eat the rich.

Oct 2, 2009 - 7:57 pm 28. Patrick Carroll:

Thank God I read Physics.

Or “Natural Philosophy” as it was known, once upon a time.

O tempora, o mores, etc.

Oct 2, 2009 - 8:00 pm 29. Pink Pig:

Since credentials seem to matter more than they should, let me begin by saying that I am a Harvard English Lit graduate (1964). That doesn’t mean a whole lot in my case, for a couple of reasons: 1) I have always been a professional computer programmer — I would have majored in that, but it wasn’t available at the time; 2) while at Harvard, I converted from a vague leftist to a libertarian conservative. I can’t say that I belonged to a stellar cohort; one of my classmates was Jim Guy Tucker, who got himself thrown in jail for corruption as Governor of Arkansas; on the other hand, Michael Crighton was also a classmate, so it wasn’t all bad (nor was I the only one who turned away from leftism).

I don’t know all that much about Yale — I expect it is similar to Harvard — and I really don’t care if a private institution wants to promote oddball views. The problem is twofold: 1) a college education has too much value these days; 2) among colleges, the Ivy League has an unjustifiably exalted position.

As to the first, I think that one of the most devastating errors that Congress has made in my lifetime has been the GI Bill. I’m sure it was well-intentioned and all, but it is practically a case study in the Law of Unintended Consequences. It has destroyed the value of a high school education, since nobody cares about that any more, so high schools don’t even much bother to teach students. And it has created a working environment in which everybody except those with McJobs is required to have a college degree, and people are evaluated not by what they have learned or how clearly they think, but solely by which college they went to; it’s the degree that counts, not the education.

It also created the ridiculous precedent that professional athletes were expected to go to college — that at least may be coming to an end, with the career of LeBron James. The fact is that for many years, competent athletes were forced to work for nothing for four years, while the college athletic departments cleaned up. They’ve even had the gall to bar any form of compensation for the money that the athletes’ prowess generated. To this day, college sports matter more to more people than professional sports, particularly for basketball and football.

As to the second, it was repeatedly drummed into me during my time at Harvard that the undergraduate body didn’t count for anything — it was there solely to bring in money. Why bother with an Ivy League degree if you are regarded just as a vestige of Daddy’s deep pockets?

Well, to be perfectly honest, my Daddy didn’t have deep pockets, so I was on a partial scholarship. Even so, tuition, room and board back then was all of about $4000 a year, so all I had to do was figure out how to make up the $2500 difference, which I did by learning computer programming. Harvard wasn’t much help — they offered exactly one half-year course in computer programming, which I took in my first term. An architect in my home town (Asheville, NC) hired me sight unseen that summer and sent me to school for a week at NCR in Dayton, Ohio, so that I could program one of their feeble accounting machines to do architectural calculations. It worked out, amazingly enough. I probably learned more doing that than I had learned taking Harvard’s computer course. It got easier after that, but I didn’t set out to write my life story.

The young people that I have met who strike me as the real best and brightest are those that dropped out of college early. The disease of going to college just to bring home a trophy degree hasn’t yet hit Europe. I lived in Italy for 5 years (thereby cleverly getting away from Carter), and very few of the people I knew there had college degrees (if you had one, you were entitled to call yourself Doctor). But they were almost to a soul more knowledgeable than most of the college grads that I have met in the US, despite having for the most part a high school education, in some cases supplemented by a couple of years at a technical school.

So anyway, my prescription is straightforward, if difficult. The overemphasis on the Ivy League won’t matter if the overemphasis on going to college is eliminated, so it should be enough to get rid of that. We should aim to restore the pre-GI-Bill environment, when maybe 10% of the high school seniors in any year go on to college, and those that do should be there primarily to learn a profession. This is essentially the same as adopting the European system, so maybe we should just go the whole hog on that. It has the advantage that it would be nearly impossible for any leftist to argue that we should adopt the European health care system, but not their educational system. Along the way, we could well consider adding an extra year to high school, since high schools in Europe (Lycée in France, Liceo in Italy, Gymnasium in Germany) is five years long. We should consider abolishing kindergarten and anything before that, because it is just gussied-up day care; do what the Italians do — practically every large corporation in Italy maintains an “asilo”, so that workers can return to work rather than take care of their kids. It would be very helpful to get government out of the higher education business, but that’s going to take a long time, not to mention abolishing the Department of Education and the teachers’ unions. Oh, and it’s important to note one other thing — generally speaking, college education in Europe is “free”, though it is quite difficult to qualify for in the first place. After all, some things (other than sex) should be free, and ensuring that you have a strong professional class for future generations strikes me as something that the government might well spend money on — better than what it spends it on now. (Note: I am not an absolutist, so it doesn’t bother me that the government collects taxes and spends money per se; I just object to dishonesty, inefficiency and nannyism.)

Our poster child can be Bill Gates, and maybe Microsoft could be the first company in the US to establish an asilo.

I’m not likely to be around to see all of this happen, but it would be nice to see some progress rather than the usual pissing and moaning. Lenin didn’t live to see his dreams come to fruition, but we are still suffering the consequences, particularly in the educational and entertainment spheres.

I never got around to commenting about the entertainment business, because I was trying to stay on topic. But it strikes me as useless to make snide remarks about people like George Clooney and Susan Sarandon. Instead, we should find out who thinks differently and promote them heavily. That’s how Stalin took over Hollywood in the first place. It’s especially important to promote those who change their mind.

Oct 2, 2009 - 8:21 pm 30. MarkJ:

Immutable Truth of Life:

There are some ideas so outrageous, so hideous, so insane, and so evil…that only academics could believe in them.

Oct 2, 2009 - 8:49 pm 31. Kurt:

I’m a Dartmouth alum from the late 80s when that campus was the site of an active struggle between loud voices from the left and the right. At the time, it was also the most conservative of the campuses in the Ivy League–but that described the students more than the faculty or the administration. Since that time, the administration has pretty much won, and the left is predominant. Still, what shocks me now, looking at my classmates, is how far left most of them have become in middle age. In college I fancied myself a left-leaning moderate, a position, I tried to cling to through graduate school, but one which became increasingly untenable as I saw the unprincipled way that leftists and Democrats rushed to Clinton’s defense in the late 1990s. By that time, I had also started teaching college, and I was dismayed by the mindless partisanship of my colleagues, who often knew only how to repeat the talking points from one leftist rag or newspaper or another. Within a few years I left teaching, and although I don’t actually call myself a conservative, I abhor most of what the left and the Democrats stand for these days. What’s incredible to me, though, is how few of my classmates seem to have made similar journeys away from leftist ideology since our youth. An alarming number of them–even many of those who voted for Reagan in the 80s–now seem to be members of the “Mmmmmm Mmmmm Mmmmmmm”-chanting Obama chorus.

Oct 2, 2009 - 9:09 pm 32. dphorstick:

My two sons took pre engineering and spent as little time as possible in humanities. There was always a fight with some narrow minded TAs. My younger son asked me about Harvard and I said there are some seriously brilliant people there; unfortunately, there is a lot of collectivized thought and you would be bored silly. Both spent most of their time on the dean’s list and partying like the world would run out of beer. Now they have great jobs and opportunities with unlimited futures.

Oct 2, 2009 - 9:22 pm 33. John:

Gregory Koster,

a.) All private colleges cost the similar exorbitant rate, even most of the small schools with much less prestige. Going to a public university from out of state can typically result in costs that almost rival going to a private college. For the 2009-2010 academic year, tuition at Yale is $36k. An out of state student attending the University of Michigan in 2009-2010 has tuition costs of roughly $35k.

b.) Kids from families making under $60k get a free ride to Yale. Families making between $60k and $120k are expected to contribute between 1% and 10% for the cost of tuition. This makes the cost comparable to in-state students at many state universities for those who fall into the mid to lower income levels.

c.) Many conservative or moderate parents send their kids to Yale because the quality of the school is more important than sheltering their kids from political viewpoints they don’t agree with.

d.) I’m not sure where you got these falsehoods from. Yale does not have merit scholarships. Like a lot of the other top schools in the country, Yale only offers need-based scholarships. They’re the ones I mentioned above. These scholarships are offered based completely on your family income level with no regard to your academic achievements or race. They’re the very definition of color-blind.

The upper middle class(but not quite rich) bear a pretty heavy burden for sending their kids to Yale, but as I already pointed out poor students of any race or color get a free ride and families who make under $120k(which would account for a significant portion of the middle and lower middle class in most parts of the country) have costs comparable to a state school.

Please do not allow your blind Ivy League hate to lead you to spread falsehoods about their policies. Harvard and Princeton have similar generous financial aid packages.

Oct 2, 2009 - 9:48 pm 34. NY:

On the uniformity of thought Ivy League schools, I’m reminded of Andrew Lahde’s (hedge fund manager who made a killing betting against the market) resignation letter:

“The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking [...] All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades.”

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2008/10/17/17194/andrew-lahde-bows-out-in-style/

Conformity bears its cost, literally.

Oct 2, 2009 - 10:39 pm 35. gs:

RKV writes, “The college bubble is upon us. Large fractions of what the level 1 research university deliver to undergraduates can be had elsewhere and for much less (see MIT’s Open Course Ware).” Consider also licensing exams like Microsoft’s MCSE.

It’s been said that today’s American university system is comparable to Detroit in the 1960s: nominally the world leader, but astonishingly vulnerable to determined competition.

Perhaps upper-caste America’s emerging career path is to major in something multiculti in the Ivy League, go on to a prestigious law school, and then enter the ruling class–all without ever meeting an empirical fact or a payroll. It will be interesting–as in “interesting times”–to see if they can impose that system on the nation.

Oct 2, 2009 - 10:51 pm 36. AST:

We’re all postmodernists now. When everything is assumed to be true, then nothing can be proven to be true.

I was a little hurt by his statement, “Honestly, I would not send my child to any school where there is such uniformity and conformity of thought and attitude,” since I went to BYU. But from what I’ve seen of the rest of the universities in this country, I wouldn’t want my children to go anywhere else without a BYU undergraduate degree first. It’s a lot easier to lose one’s virtue, than to get it back.

Oct 2, 2009 - 11:05 pm 37. Aurora:

Please delineate the logic the connects these two statements. And,if you will, expand your opinion statement.

“When I was in college, it seemed that the point of education at the university level was to use the subject matter under study to encourage independent, critical thinking.”

“Today, all truths are equal. I abjure this notion.”

Thank you.

Oct 3, 2009 - 12:28 am 38. Synova:

From the very beginning the decisions not to show the pictures make it impossible to understand what happened because unless I’m horribly mistaken the cartoons that the Imams used to stir up trouble (after enough Danish flags were obtained for the protests) had additional pictures added.

There are cases, no doubt, when the truth doesn’t require illustration. This is not one of them. Without *both* sets of images what the Imams did isn’t clear, so how could anyone understand the blame properly?

Oct 3, 2009 - 12:36 am 39. Beartix:

I am a full professor in the sciences at an Ivy league school.
Yes, it is very frustrating dealing with the group-think of
colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. However,
please note that it is precisely these fields within the
University that have experienced the greatest decline in
student enrollment; have experienced the worst of the
budget crises; and whose prospects are bleakest. Rest
assured that the medical, business, and engineering
schools within these (and other) universities are not
intellectually corrosive: quite the opposite. There is good
reason for optimism about the state of the University, if
not the Humanities.

Oct 3, 2009 - 2:17 am 40. David Thomson:

“These scholarships are offered based completely on your family income level with no regard to your academic achievements or race.”

With no regard to your academic achievement? Did you actually say this with a straight face? Merit seems to matter little in the decision process. What happens when these less than intellectually brilliant students get into the university? The answer, of course, is affirmative action grading. It is more than likely how the intellectually shallow and poorly read Barack Obama got into Columbia and Harvard. Our country is presently being severely damaged because of this academic con game. Naive voters thought that Obama’s Harvard law degree meant something. They had no idea that such a credential is often nothing more than a joke. At best, it indicates that a graduate should be able to pass a state board exam. There is no guarantee whatsoever they will be another John Adams.

“There is good reason for optimism about the state of the University, if not the Humanities.”

How do you avoid the inevitable law suits? These folks will sue at the drop of a hat. This is a question that cannot be ignored.

Oct 3, 2009 - 4:53 am 41. linda skountzos:

Van Jones statement that he chose Yale over Harvard because they don’t actually give grades says it all.

Oct 3, 2009 - 5:18 am 42. Tom Perkins:

“c.) Many conservative or moderate parents send their kids to Yale because the quality of the school is more important than sheltering their kids from political viewpoints they don’t agree with.”

Sheltering your child from political viewpoints has nothing to do with it. If the academy is as leftist as seems plausible, the quality of the school is not good and there is no multiplicity of viewpoints to benefit from.

Oct 3, 2009 - 5:21 am 43. Jack Olson:

If you care to see how far the intellectual standards of contemporary universities have sunk, use the link on the Instapundit website to visit the website of “Inside Higher Education.” The last time (I expect it really will be the last time) I looked at it, they were comparing the late Irving Kristol’s neoconservative political views to the criminal career of a gangster. I am not kidding and I’m fairly sure they aren’t either.

Oct 3, 2009 - 6:04 am 44. HoosierHawk:

Obviously parents can send their children to whatever college they choose, for whatever reason(s) they have. It’s nobody else’s business.

My concern is what type of college our Presidents attended. The last President without ivy league connections was Reagan. It’s been downhill since then. An ivy league education apparently is very poor preparation for that role. Next time, out let’s elect a non-ivy leaguer.

University of Idaho comes to mind.

Oct 3, 2009 - 6:30 am 45. HalifaxCB:

29. Pink Pig:

I’d have to disagree re. the GI Bill; from what I saw during my early college days returning GI’s, particularly combat vets, were generally the most motivated students on campus. They were the ones who went for a reason, and had generally earned the right to be there. My own take was that the worst decision was giving draft deferments to college students during Vietnam; combined with the baby boom it created a university structure in which Leftish students went on to become Leftish professors who would then pack the universities (and their own pockets) with new Leftish students, who would (quite naturally, for 17 and 18 yr olds) be attracted by the fact they could stay out of the military while enjoying all the “hardships” of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. The professoriat competed for students and their money by lowering standards, which in turn meant that those grad students who went on to become teachers tended to be just really poorly versed in their fields. Finally, once you get people running a discipline who don’t have the skills necessary to make objective judgements, they can only resort to subjective values for determining quality – whether it’s in a student’s performance, or a grant application, or a peer reviewed paper.

This obviously happened first in the liberal arts since they’ve always had a large subjective component anyway (in the most extreme example, consider the fine arts schools, many of which haven’t been able to produce grads who can actually draw since the early 70’s), but it extends right over to the most objective (in theory, at least) of the sciences where chronic abuses of statistics and over-reliance on computing and ’scientific authority’ rather than self-directed thinking are a way of life (e.g., all the feeders for the global warming crowd.). The biggest example of the dangers of this are in the ‘rocket scientists’ who created the algorithms that sank Wall St; many of those bright sparks were PhDs in physics from elite schools who lacked a fundamental understanding of the tools they were using and promoting.

If there’s a ray of hope here it’s in the community colleges and the pure tech schools, where results still count. Many of the big private liberal arts are facing a horrendous future because they are burdened with the pensions allocated by the Boomer professoriat to themselves back when it looked like the scam could go on forever. The market collapse (which spells doom to many endowments) and declining enrollment (because their natural base avoided the responsibilities of parenthood) don’t make for a bright future.

My big worry at the moment is that governments will divert educational resources from where they can do the most good (K-12, and the above mentionned community colleges) in favour of artificial life support for those that really should have been able to look out for themselves.

Oct 3, 2009 - 6:41 am 46. David:

Ivy League schools may be worth the cost in fields with little or no objective measures of success, but they are a complete waste of money for engineering or the hard sciences. It’s not that they aren’t good in technical fields – they’re great but a lot of public universities are as good or better if you want an education.

For example, the DoE Solar Decathlon next week challenges students to design the most efficient house. With $100K prize, it gets hundreds of entries from universities around the world. So did the Ivy League schools take all the spots, like in the Supreme Court? Hardly. Here are the US finalists: Arizona, Cornell, Illinois, Iowa State, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio State, Penn State, Puerto Rico, Rice, Tufts, Santa Clara U., Missouri, Virginia Tech, WI-Milwaukee. Last year a German team won, followed by U. of Maryland.

Mother Nature is not impressed by your alma mater.

Oct 3, 2009 - 7:32 am 47. PJ:

And these Yale students know nothing about history either (because the professors won’t or can’t tell them?).

The imam who took the cartoons overseas to foment rioting was only repeating an identical incident that occurred in the 1920s when cartoonist David Low included a portrait of Mohammed in one of his political cartoons.

Of course, back then, the Brits still believed in their civilization and ended the whole protest by refusing to apologize.

Oct 3, 2009 - 8:00 am 48. arthur williams:

Word has it that Yale Press just named OBL editor in chief.

Oct 3, 2009 - 8:30 am 49. Pink Pig:

HalifaxCB:

Thanks for taking the trouble to read my long-winded message and respond to it.

Anyway, I think I’ll stick to my guns for now. It’s true that the returning GIs were well-motivated, but the real problem started after they were gone, but the GI Bill didn’t go away. Keep in mind that the baby boomers were still children during the 60s, and please don’t assume that everyone who had a draft deferment was a leftist. I had one myself for the entire Vietnam War period, including several years after I had left school. It wasn’t actually until after I had graduated that the draft heated up — I don’t remember that anyone actually needed a deferment while I was in school; nevertheless, the mindset that I commented on had already become firmly entrenched.

BTW, before the draft lottery (1965, IIRC), deferments were automatic for college students. Possibly even later, but I wouldn’t have been aware of it. There was nothing really new about giving deferments to college students — what was new was that draft avoidance via college became very popular in the late 60s.

Oct 3, 2009 - 11:57 am 50. Yale '83:

Pains me to read this. I have been very disappointed in Yale during this controversy and others in years past. I was a history major but you had great professors (e.g. Kagan, etc.) to balance the more liberal ones. Although my son is applying, I’m not convinced it’s worth the money. Most of the humanities are saturated in multiculturalism and do not value the Western traditions of scholarship & intellectual inquiry any more.

Oct 3, 2009 - 4:34 pm 51. Cristina:

7. Yale ‘80:

“I would be careful to condemn a vibrant and multi-faceted community and institution numbering in the thousands and thousands soley because a number of hotheads, idiots or whatever among a group of only 65 demonstrated the way they did. Yale is not perfect but it is more diverse than you give it credit it for.”

Thank God and the Rabbi and Roger for not being “careful.” That “vibrant” and “multi-faceted community” (three obnoxious cliches of PC lingo in one sentence! Wow! It just goes to show how multifaceted your “community” really is; it doesn’t seem to involve creative, original language and argument) never bothered to prove its “diversity” and “multi-facetedness” at the meeting with Hasengaard. It wasn’t worth your time. You were being “careful,”, mindful of your position in the academia, that’s all. Spare me the diversity plea.
You only manage to prove Rabbi’s and Roger’s points.
Did you show up at the meetim

Oct 4, 2009 - 1:24 pm 52. Cristina:

Sorry for the lost part of my post at # 51.

Did you show up at Westergaard’s lecture to prove Yale was “diverse,” not in line with a number of “hotheads” and “idiots”?
Your University Press aligned itself with the “idiots,” didn’t it? That makes Yale University Press and every alumnus sponsoring censorship of the Mo cartoons idiots of the highest order, doesn’t it?
On the scale of idiocy–1 to 10–where do you place the at-large Yale community, including yourself?

Oct 4, 2009 - 1:49 pm 53. Isabel Archer:

Not a Yalie, though I am a recent alum (’04) of one of its rivals, and I was taken aback by Rabbi Hausman’s statement that he would never send his child there. From everything that I’ve been able to discern about Yale in particular, there’s a thriving conservative and libertarian intellectual subculture. Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason magazine is a fairly recent Yale grad; Helen Rittelmeyer of the Cigarette Smoking blog and Nicola Karras have gotten link love from high places; and Dara Lind is a recent Yale grad whose stuff I’ve seen at the highbrow blog American Scene. See also this piece profiling four hotshot young Bush speechwriters —
http://americasfuture.org/doublethink/2008/02/dcs-kid-speechwriters/ — three of whom are Yale grads.

I’m not denying that Yale and schools like it lean left far more than right. I’m also not denying that more intellectual and ideological balance would be good for these places. The point is that there are plenty of talented conservatives and libertarians who make it through the ideological hazing and come out stronger and more interesting because of it. I’d encourage Rabbi Hausman’s children, and applicants like them, not to flee these institutions so quickly.

Oct 5, 2009 - 5:01 pm 54. Lee:

Relativist notions of truth are the left’s response to intolerable realities that they could not refute.

When presented with unpleasant truths, they responded by denying the existence of truth itself.

Those who do this are truly lost.

Oct 5, 2009 - 5:04 pm 55. Steynian 387 « Free Canuckistan!:

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Oct 6, 2009 - 10:59 am 56. Christmas Craft » Roger’s Rules » “in the Final Analysis, I Believe That the …:

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Nov 10, 2009 - 1:55 pm

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