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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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I am largely sympathetic with Sterling Professor of Law Anthony Kronman 's impassioned and beautifully written apologia for Directed Studies as a serious academic approach to the big questions of life’s meaning (Forum, September/October). But he makes it difficult to take his critique of “sham diversity” seriously by listing, among the “enduring texts” that might teach us something about “the best life a human being can live,” only works by dead white European males. The best humanities teaching and scholarship, of course, involves precisely affording critical but “interpretive generosity” to as broad a range of important texts as possible. But gone are the days, I believe, when we can draw a comforting line between the personal and the political, as Professor Kronman asks us to do. The big questions posed by the humanities are no longer about just the meaning of my life, but the meanings we ascribe to our life together on this planet, and their consequences. Professor Kronman rightly deplores the stranglehold of political correctness, and the resulting lack of intellectual diversity, on our campuses. Yet his essay is peppered with encomiums to liberal politics. Professor Kronman knows that most university departments are dominated by liberal faculty members. Is he then asking his fellow liberals to stop expecting others to think as they do? That would be an improvement, yet it seems a tepid response to the problem that provokes him. Instead of asking the faculty to tolerate non-liberal views, shouldn’t Professor Kronman urge something bolder—such as hiring more faculty members who aren’t liberals? They might be more comfortable with genuine diversity of opinion.
Stamp acts Thank you for publishing the interesting and nicely illustrated article by Judith Ann Schiff on selected Yale alumni on U.S. postage stamps (“Yale on Stamps,” September/October). Your readers might be interested in some additional Yale connections. Yale College graduates Robert Taft, Charles Ives, and Abraham Baldwin have also been pictured on U.S. stamps. Baldwin, who graduated the year before Nathan Hale, represented Georgia in the Constitutional Convention and forged the Great Compromise that established the Senate and House of Representatives. There were also some near misses. Frederick Law Olmsted and James Fenimore Cooper have been honored on stamps. Olmsted attended Yale lectures on and off but never officially enrolled, and Cooper was expelled in the early 1800s for various shenanigans. A portrait of John C. Calhoun has not appeared on a United States postage stamp, but he was on a Confederate States of America postage stamp that was printed in London in 1862 but never officially issued. Finally, a portion of the famous Zallinger dinosaur mural in the Peabody Museum graced a 1969 stamp commemorating, of all things, the centenary of the American Museum of Natural History. My father, Hiram Bingham IV ’25, was one of six notable American envoys depicted in the “Distinguished American Diplomats” block of stamps issued on May 30, 2006. The life-saving actions he took as vice-consul in Marseilles in 1940–41—when southern France was a Nazi puppet regime—were only belatedly acknowledged years after his death in 1988. In defiance of restrictive U.S. State Department immigration policies (the United States had not yet entered the war), Bingham wrote innumerable life-saving visas, offering his fellow human beings a chance to live that would otherwise have been denied them. He was a man of whom his country and his college should be proud. The story of Bingham’s heroism and his son’s work to honor his father appeared in the Yale Alumni Magazine in May/June 2006.—Eds.
Indiana Jones and the ID card I greatly enjoyed your piece “Indiana Jones and the Tower of Ivory” (September/October), about Yale’s summer as a Hollywood set. However, I can’t help noting that Yale students long ago beat Steven Spielberg to the punch. I don’t know whether the Yale Symphony Orchestra still films its annual silent movie, shown at midnight on Halloween in Woolsey Hall to orchestra accompaniment, but a decade ago it was the highlight of campus Halloween festivities. One year the movie was a full-scale Indiana Jones-type adventure, in which Jones was hampered in his dramatic chases around campus only by the magnetic-strip ID cards just put into use in the dining halls and at the college gates—at the time, a fancy new technology that seemed to malfunction more often than it worked. No one built a motorcycle tunnel in the library, but another YSO film did feature James Bond riding a horse through the nave right to the Sterling circulation desk. Oh, and did Harrison Ford do the zipline stunt between the Morse and Stiles towers?
Admissions fracas As a boarding-school college counselor in the 1960s and '70s, a Yale development officer in the 1980s and '90s, and, most recently, administrator in the university relations office at Wesleyan, I offer these thoughts on the subject of the need-blind admission of international students which was addressed by two members of the Class of 1945 (Letters, September/October). Because the credentials that a typical international student submits are so different from those submitted by a typical American applicant, it cannot be said that a particular foreign applicant is being accepted instead of a more qualified American applicant. We are not comparing apples to apples when we weigh the admissions folder of an applicant from Somalia against that of an applicant from an American suburban high school. Neither is inherently better than the other; they are simply different. What is true, however, is that every foreign applicant admitted means one less American. The institution has to decide in broad terms what percentage of any incoming class should consist of international students. This percentage is certainly open to debate. In addition to the usual arguments that the presence of foreign students enriches the college experience of American students and that institutions like Yale have a certain moral obligation to share their educational opportunities and wealth with the rest of the world, there exists, I submit, the powerful argument that those international students who come to places like Yale represent the future leaders of their respective countries, “the best and the brightest,” and that the Yale experience will equip them with an appreciation for democracy and a positive feeling about this country. Would, for example, Africa be in such chaos today if we had continued to bring thousands of students here to receive top educations? To my mind, the bottom line on this issue is to what extent, given the cost to Yale of bringing an international student to campus, doing so should be a university priority deserving of university resources. I was disappointed in the reply from your admissions office in the domestic/foreign admissions dust-up. It matters not what fraction of each pool is granted admission if we don’t know the fraction of qualified applicants in each pool or the relative qualifications of the applicants in each pool. I don’t see why your readers should take it for granted that the pools are similar enough in composition for the admissions office reply to settle the point of contention. This seems yet another sloppy use of statistics. The Yale Alumni Magazine asked Jeff Brenzel '75, dean of undergraduate admissions, to comment. He replied as follows:
Immigrants and the law Your story, “Law School aids immigrants caught in New Haven raid” (Light & Verity, September/October), reports that Yale law clinic attorneys are working “around the clock” to reverse the detention by federal agents of 28 allegedly illegal immigrants. Yale clinical law professor Michael Wishnie promises to “litigate their cases fiercely, and for many years if necessary." If any of the detained aliens is in fact a lawful resident, a robust legal challenge is warranted. As for the rest, under what premise does the law clinic mobilize its resources for a “fierce” multiyear defense against application of the law? We may agree that some laws, of the “Jim Crow” variety, are so offensive to morality that their enforcement should be resisted with every tool available to the lawyer, until common decency shames us into repealing them. Can that be said of our immigration laws? Pursuant to clear constitutional authority, democratically elected Congresses have subjected the entry and departure of aliens to rules of law that limit the number who may take up residence here and compete with American workers for those jobs that their employers have not yet seen fit to outsource. That the Yale Law School might foster contempt among its students for a rule of law that happens to be out of liberal fashion is only mildly ironic. The greater irony is the enthusiastic participation of Yale law clinicians in a grotesque system of third world labor exploitation of which they ought better to be ashamed. Overwhelmingly, illegal aliens come here to secure employment. New Haven’s ID card for illegal aliens, the Yale law clinic’s gumming up of immigration law enforcement, and like measures by other “sanctuary” cities and “civil rights” lawyers underpin and provide a sheen of political correctness to the systemic inducement of impoverished workers from neighboring countries to abandon their dignity and risk their lives scaling border fences, evading armed patrols, paying off ruthless “coyotes,” and crossing the desert in suffocating trailers, all in order to keep down the cost of landscaping and household servants for the sort of people who graduate from Yale. Shame on all of us. As I understand the most recent interpretation of the nation's immigration laws, an alien who has entered the nation without having papers that authorize his entry, or an alien whose entry papers have expired, is eligible for immediate deportation without any proof being required except the fact that the alien is here without valid documentation. How do Yale Law School faculty members go about determining which of the nation’s laws should be enforced; and which should not be enforced? Do they support my right to violate laws which I do not like, as they support the non-enforcement of the immigration laws they do not like? The Yale Alumni Magazine asked Professor Wishnie '87, '93JD, to comment. He replied:
I applaud Professor Michael Wishnie for his commitment to protecting immigrant rights. I was impressed to read that professors and fellows in the Law School are involved with a growing demographic group that other schools at Yale largely ignore. During my two years at the School of Public Health, little, if any, attention was paid to immigrant health, Latino health, and methodological issues related to epidemiological studies among hard-to-reach and non-English-speaking populations. I distinctly remember the shock I felt as one professor suggested that a student group researching domestic violence among Southeast Asian women merge with another group researching HIV/AIDS testing among Latino immigrants, because both were about immigrant populations! I hope the school soon recognizes that the training of public health workers in twenty-first-century U.S. society requires attention to immigrant populations and their health needs.
Potter Stewart at the Casbah? In your review of Potter Stewart’s famous “I know it when I see it” description of pornography (You Can Quote Them, September/October), you didn’t mention Justice Byron “Whizzer” White’s remarks when introducing his colleague as keynote speaker at the opening Law School dinner in the fall of 1969. I paraphrase: “In World War II, Potter served in the Navy, where he was assigned at one time to the City of Algiers, which is famous for its Casbah. Perhaps that is where Potter developed his celebrated ability to know pornography when he sees it.” Justice Stewart, who despite his Jacobellis concurrence was notoriously prudish, blushed vermilion at that unanticipated “roast.” I was working the coat-check room that evening as an impecunious member of what became the YLS Class of '72.
Asleep on their feet I applaud Robert J. Alpern, dean of the School of Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in implementing regulations limiting residents to 80 hours a week (School Notes, September/October). Clearly, this has to reduce “medication mishaps.” How could any medical school ever justify allowing residents to work far beyond their ability to think straight in making medical decisions regarding patient care? In conversations with medical personnel, I have discovered that they almost seem proud of the fact that they often work 36 hours without a significant break. Knowing that my doctors or nurses had been on the job for 36 hours or more, I would not want one making medical decisions about me towards the end of his or her working “day.” Would you?
My country, my ummah I was very disappointed to see the article “Faith and Fashion” (Light & Verity, July/August). In the photo caption, members of the Muslim Students Association “show their Yale spirit with a new twist on an old motto: the first line on the back of the MSA T-shirt reads, ‘For Allah, for Ummah, and for Yale.’” Former MSA president Altaf Saadi ’08, who created the shirts when she was a freshman, is quoted as saying that “‘ummah’ translates broadly to ‘community.’” I am a strong supporter of increasing diversity at Yale, in regard to both American and foreign students. And I have been pleased to see Yale grow in inclusiveness and tolerance over the years to embrace members of every faith and ethnic group and not just the old elites. But the values embodied by “For God, for Country, and for Yale” are timeless and in no way conflict with making Yale a more open and diverse institution. It is troubling that Muslim students should want to replace “country” with “ummah,” which is usually translated not just as community but as “Muslim community.” It is even more disturbing that they should want to advertise their rejection of the patriotic values that Yale has embodied for three centuries. This not only hurts the cause of promoting tolerance and diversity, it has the potential to actively set it back.
Act globally The work that Yale nurses have done in Nicaragua, and the relationships that they have built there, are a model of global civic engagement and public service for the entire university (“The Children of el Mercado Oriental," September/October). In recent years the university has made commendable efforts to expand its international programs and to increase financial support in the form of fellowships for students to volunteer in the developing world. Still, Yale can and must do more. As an undergraduate I found few opportunities to learn about international development and efforts to address global poverty in a systematic, interdisciplinary way. Volunteer opportunities in the developing world were and to a great extent remain available only to relatively few Yale students. Yale has no undergraduate major in development studies, and few Yale undergraduates are exposed to the subject. The MacMillan Center’s graduate certificate program in development studies is a welcome addition to Yale. Such programs, when adequately funded and prioritized by the university, demonstrate the sincerity of Yale’s commitment to public service and genuine global engagement that affects and improves the lives of others across boundaries of nation and culture.
Another fictional Yalie I loved your article on fictitious Yalies (“ … But I Play One on TV,” March/April), although I sure flunked the quiz. But I looked in vain for mention of F. W. Bronson’s 1949 novel The Bulldog Has the Key. It’s a great murder/political intrigue story set in Yale and the Elm City. The hero, a member of the Class of 1922, is a State Department agent who is celebrating his 25th reunion in 1947 when he gets involved in rescuing a Yale professor and finding a million dollars' worth of smuggled diamonds. I grew up in Hamden, went to Hillhouse and Hamden high schools, and got a master’s degree at Yale in 1943, so I can vouch that Bronson describes the New Haven and Yale I knew way back then. Bronson, himself a member of the Class of 1922, knew something about reunions: he edited this magazine from 1937 to 1966.—Eds.
Corrections In “Yale on Stamps” (September/October), we misspelled the name of the co-founder of Time magazine, Briton Hadden '20. In our article about the documentary film King Corn (September/October), we neglected to note that Jeff Miller, the film’s editor and co-writer, is a member of the Class of 2003. A book review in the September/October issue referred in passing to Arthur Galston, biology professor emeritus, but mistakenly said he had died. Professor Galston is very much alive, well, and active, and he possesses a fine sense of humor. We apologize for the error.—Eds.
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