Yale's Swan Song - The Pathetic Demise Of Excellence

Harper Fielding's father and all forbears had gone to Yale - the old Yale, that is.  Skull and Bones, Fence Club, the upper crust, Gentlemen's 'C', summers on the Vineyard, winters at Gstaad, a sinecure at Bear Stearns, and a wedding with a Cabot or Lodge on Nantucket. 

Things had not changed much over the years since Great Grandpa went there, interrupting his education to fight the Hun at Ypres and receive a Distinguished Service Cross; or since Granddad spent four years there, shuttling between New Haven, New York, and Smith College in a happy Fitzgerald-esque whirlwind of social affairs; or even since his father, stellar student of Maynard Mack, Harold Bloom, and Vincent Scully, all stars in the academic pantheon, illuminating the likes of Blake, Hamlet, and the great temples at Cnossos. 

 

The erosion of that idyll which had continued since the days of Elihu Yale and John Davenport, had begun when Inslee Clark, new Dean of Students, opened the floodgates to all comers - the best and the brightest were no longer from St. Marks, St. Paul's and Groton, but from Stuyvesant, Thomas Jefferson and Carver High.  If its social viability went down, its academic reputation went up.  Always a place of seriously higher learning, Yale with the matriculation of these smart Jews from Brooklyn, became a magnet for achievers.  Out were the days of a 'well-rounded' education, and in were the days of all-nighters in the laboratory or in the carrels of Harkness. 

Even that halcyon of high academic interest and rigor, however, had its day. When the university opened its gates not to the best and the brightest, but to anyone who had a gripe - victims of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, and economic exploitation - down crashed the ivory tower.  In its place was a hodge-podge of comers from every closet, ghetto, and Appalachian hollow.  It was a jamboree of the 'newly privileged', the leftovers and left-outs who finally were having their day. 

Out too were the classes of Bloom, Mack, and Scully and in were a wide range of offerings dealing with the same oppression, victimization, and alienation experienced by those students recruited and admitted under the university's new DEI policy. 

So, when Harper Fielding stepped up to carry on in the footsteps of his father and his father's family, he was greeted not with the generous welcome he expected - after all the Fieldings had contributed tens of thousands to the university - but with suspicion.  As a white boy from a wealthy, privileged Boston family, he was immediately suspect.  How would this legatee of racism fit in to a university in the process of expunging white privilege from every nook and cranny of the campus? 

The names of residential colleges which had been in place for centuries thanks to the preeminence, historical prominence, leadership, or early American patriotism of its founders, were being changed to those of minor characters as 'diverse' as the student body.  It simply wouldn't do for LaShonda Jackson from Anacostia to have to live in a residential college named for a bigot. 

Just as the overt signs, indicators, and memes of racism were being erased; and just as the academic offerings were reconfigured to reflect the interests and personal backgrounds of students, so did the nature and quality of discourse.  Gone were open inquiry, intellectual debate, logical exegesis, and analytical parsing, and in their place a gooey mix of expected outcomes.  Classes on the evils of slavery were paired with ones on the greatness of African culture.  Sociology courses on the white pathology of oppression were paired with those on the environmentally-attuned consciousness of the African and the higher order of his tribal religions. 

 

Logical inquiry, the very heart and soul of American higher education since the founding of Harvard and Yale centuries ago, was replaced by tautology and received assumptions. Slavery need not be studied as a socio-economic and historical phenomenon, dating back to the first Paleolithic human settlements, because it is, ipso facto, an evil institution.  In an ironic reminder of George Orwell's Animal Farm's meme, 'Four legs good, two legs bad', the University's 'Black is good, white is bad' was chilling but universally endorsed. 

Students of color had to get the lead roles in theatre productions, campus media, sports, and social clubs.  It wasn't just that the university was still trying to redress former wrongs, but to elevate one race over another because of its clear, unequivocal, absolute superiority.  

The same was true of gay men and lesbians.  They were promoted to the top of the heap not because of former insults but because they represented the new reality of fungible sexuality.  Gender was a choice, not a biological or genetic given, and those who chose to defy the patriarchal, homophobic, Bible-thumping ignorance of the past were heroes to be feted, honored, and respected. 

It gets worse. On the day that Harper was to visit Yale, the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic protests were in full swing in Beinecke Plaza. It was another Orwellian nightmare, with logic, precedent, and history inverted.  The Israelis were the genocidal murderers, not Hamas who for decades had preached nothing but anti-Jew hatred and called for the elimination of Israel and the extermination of the Jews.  

 

The Israelis were overlords, maniacal occupiers of sovereign territory, not self-defensive, legitimately protective national sovereigns who had to occupy, extend settlements, and create defensive perimeters. 

Despite thousands of years of the existence of the Jewish homeland, Jews had no claim to residence there because a few Arab goatherders were scattered in the Sinai.  Despite Israeli calls for peace and prosperity with only one proviso - that Hamas admit Israel's right to exist - the Palestinians have used every dollar of foreign aid, every Iranian rial to build an aggressive military infrastructure. 

A wild, feral mob. This was Yale? 

Indeed it was.  A cabal of students, teachers, and administrators had successfully promoted a woke culture on campus - a culture that determined admissions, courses, and school policy - and once in place, adopted, and endorsed, there was no turning back.  Nothing but the dismantling of the system would set things aright. From Board of Directors to students, a reversal of policy and nothing less would stop the ridiculousness, inanity, and downright destructiveness of the current situation. 

Harper's father was initially disappointed that the unbroken legacy of Yale attendance would now end; but he was no Old Blue codger.  He saw what was happening to this once storied institution, withdrew his substantial financial support, and cheered his son's matriculation at a far more sensible place. 

Pro-Palestinian Hysteria - Anti-Semitism And Feel-Good Victimhood In An Intellectual Void

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had'

Bob Muzelle's father, a minister and a good man read these lines from The Great Gatsby to his young son, hoping that he would follow suit.  The Muzelles were not wealthy, nor even well-to-do, but they were descended well.  A Muzelle had been one of John Davenport's associates in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and later in New Haven where he founded the New Haven Plantations as a more doctrinally pure settlement far from the growing apostasy of Boston.  A Palmer on Bob's mother's side had come with the second English ship to sail to Jamestown.

Neither side of the family had ever lost a sense of duty and responsibility instilled in them for over three hundred years.  They had a moral compass, unerringly pointed along the path of service, honor, and respect.  The elder Muzelle had gone ashore at Normandy, and his father, Bob's grandfather had fought at the Marne.

 

All of which is to say that any errancy on the part of Bob would never have been expected; but as a young man, first at Yale and then in Washington, he became isolated and indignantly righteous.  The causes he was fighting for - civil rights, peace, and the environment - were simply too important to give ground.  There was, he found, such a thing as absolute right; and once in one's grasp should never be let go. 

Of course most people have never believed in such absolutes.  The world has always been one of moral, self-justifying ups and downs. The Crusades, often condemned for their Christian imperialism and geopolitical intolerance, have turned out to be, at least for the time being, right.  Muhammed unleashed a virulent, obsessive, implacable expansionist force on the world and he should have been stopped in his tracks in Palestine just as his armies were at Roncesvalles. Would have saved the world a whole lot of trouble.

Views on everything from favorite colors to abortion have their indicators, justifications, and history. There is no absolute, indelible, ineradicable right to abortion, and the very conception of life will soon change as the human genome will be engineered to offer infinite possibilities for the human design of creation. 

So why was it that Bob, child of centered, morally certain, Christian parents could have fallen so far off the rails?  How was it that no analysis of antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction history could persuade him that the whole affair was not just about slavery but about the nature and value of labor and, the unique indivisibility of capital and labor in the system.

Nothing could change his mind that despite the tribal, primitive nature of the African slave and the economic vetting system which valued reproductivity and physicality over any other trait, the black man should be at the very pinnacle of human society. 

 

The answer comes from the idea of victimhood, the conviction that anyone who has been a victim of racism, misogyny, homophobia or any one of a hundred other common prejudices, has a right not only to be heard, but to be raised to prominence.  The black man simply because he was the victim of slavery is ipso facto superior to the white man who enslaved him. 

Conditionality - the millennia-old history of slavery, the burgeoning inter-tribal African slave trade, the cultural dominance of Western civilization, the trial and error of economic systems (viz Communism, slavery, socialism, Utopianism et. al.) - must be discounted in a universe of absolute right and wrong. 

How victimhood came about is not a tough puzzle to solve.  The sedate, stable, primly conservative Fifties - pinafores, cocktail dresses, church, and Sunday dinners - and the demographic bulge of privileged post-war babies with few concerns about well-being, caused a restiveness, an unsettled sense of ill-defined purpose.  So, borne out of social history, demographics, and boredom came the Sixties.  Victims were its heroes - the little men in black pajamas and a bowl of cold rice bombed by Nixon's B-52s; the black man beaten, clubbed, and bitten by Bull Connor, George Wallace, and their thugs; women, suffering under the persistent legacy of patriarchy and male prejudice. 

By time the Sixties were over and done with, the ethos of victimhood was now in place, and everything was to be observed through its lens. 

Bob swallowed all this hook, line, and sinker. Victimhood was the only way to look at human crises.  Jesus Christ himself dedicated his ministry to the poor, after all.  Compassion for the downtrodden was ordained, not invented. 

Of course, Jesus aside, the world since the amoeba has been ruled by tooth and claw, competition, territorialism and every other hardwired, innate trait of human nature.  A human history of victors and vanquished, winners and losers, never oppressors and victims.  

'Bullshit', said Bob in a moment of pique and frustration.  For years he had perfected a calm, professorial demeanor, one meant to hide the screeching, howling anger seething inside him.  Reason, he said, was the way to compromise.  Of course he meant nothing of the sort.  Reason would lead his adversaries to the truth, his truth.  He was just a big, pompous windbag. 

After decades in the trenches fighting for peace, civil rights, and the restoration of the black man to his rightful place atop the human pyramid, Bob was now an older man; but the fire of righteous anger still burned brightly.  Yet there were no real causes he could sink his teeth into.  No Freedom Rides, no Pettis Bridge, no Selma, Hanoi, or the Castro.  

He was at loose ends until Hamas struck Israel and Israel responded in a once and for all, never again assault to rid the region of a genocidal, anti-Semitic hateful regime.  Victimhood now had a name, a place, and a cause. 

Bob was the first at the barricades, first in solidarity with Yale, Columbia, and Harvard students spewing long pent-up hatred for the Jews.  Now, they could be as violently anti-Semitic as they pleased because they were condemning the State of Israel, not Jews themselves; although anyone on campus could see the seething rage at any Jewish student in their way. 

The Palestinians for no other reason than their supposed victimhood were heroes to be championed, defended, and honored.  It mattered not that Hamas and its mentor Iran have called for the elimination of Israel and the eradication of the Jews; or that Muslim states have called for the destruction of Israel since its founding; or that the billions of international foreign assistance has been spent on tunnels and armaments to attack Israel; or that Islam itself has within its code, an implacable righteousness and Jewish mistrust. 

Bob was ecstatic, blissful, as happy as he had ever been.  Entering surely the last decades of his life, he had found his real calling. 'Death to Israel' was his mantra and he shouted it at the top of his lungs with the throngs of young people around him.  Victimhood had never been more satisfying, the self-purifying, self-actualizing hatred of the Jewish oppressor epiphanic. 'Death to Israel', he shouted over and over again. 

Anything less would have meant a chaise lounge on a Florida beach, but this....this! was more than Bob could have ever hoped for.  He was young again, vital and vibrant again.  He was whole. 

Goin' Cracker - Yale Just Ain't Worth It

Jonas Philby had all it takes to get into Yale - top of his class, student athlete, artist, and bon vivant of the modern, justice-first generation.  St. Albans, an elite private school for Washington's elite had always been a feeder for the Ivy League and had groomed generations of young men for a life of privilege, wealth, and importance. 

 

Jonas' father and grandfather had gone to Yale, both members of Fence Club, captains of the baseball team, and Merit Scholars.  They had spent weekends at the Plaza, summers on the Vineyard, and winters in Gstaad.  It was indeed an Old Boys' Club, one of special breeding, taste, and gentrified living, and no one of either generation had any interest in living beyond its walls. 

When Inslee Clark came to Yale and became the Dean of Studies and got it into his head to dip into an 'alternate' gene pool for a newly qualified 'best and brightest', the Old Yale disappeared like a wisp of smoke.  It was never the same place and gone was the oak and mahogany, Revere silver, Townsend chairs, and solid, unflinching Calvinism. Yale quickly and inexorably had become a redoubt of the unwashed. 

 

Jonas' father had attended Yale on the cusp of the Clark revolution - an interregnum with a few Jews and random Italians - but he could see the end of one of America's last bastions of white privilege.  He and his classmates wondered exactly what exactly these Himmelfarbs, Bernsteins, and Palumbos were doing at Yale, but were courteous and respectful to them.  It was one thing to take Bloom's Romantic Poetry course with them, another thing altogether to spend time with them on Nantucket. 

Once the floodgates were opened Yale became no different from any hodge-podge public university of the Midwest - a plebian East, first come first serve campground for anyone with high SATs and an application essay which highlighted their personal courage. 

The university changed colors within a few years.  Bladderball, weekends at Smith and Vassar, tailgate parties, and courses taught by by Scully, Bloom, and Marshall were gone in a flash.  The Sixties began the descent into academic populism, the Seventies accelerated the fall, and the last recent decades completed it.  The Yale of today resembles nada of the past. 

Jonas had of course applied to Yale and gotten early acceptance.  The university was always glad to have legacy students even though under the current rubric inheritance mattered less in the selection process.  After all, the Philbys had donated thousands to Yale, and no administrator would want to shut off that particular spigot. 

Jonas arrived for a look one May Saturday, accompanied by one of the soon-to-graduate senior class volunteers who took him around; but the Harkness and Beinecke libraries were idle distractions to what the guide wanted to explain to the new recruit. 'Yale is not your grandfather's university', he said. 'Gone is the old boy, privileged elitism of the past.  The university has become a diverse, activist, engaged place of excellence'. 

 

The Old Campus was chock-a-block with tents and temporary shelters for student protestors who demanded disinvestment from child-killing, Jewish genocidal occupying Israelis.  Drag queens, Folsom Street Fair-ready transvestites, tough chick Bernal Heights dykes, and butch bikers were at the ready, waiting to tear down the palaces of privilege unless the university capitulated to their demands. 

Where were Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and Coleridge in all this, Jonas wondered, remembering his father's stories of Harold Bloom, only thirty-five but intriguing and engaging to his crop of ingenue Yalies in his fabric of mythic Romanticism?  Where was Vince Scully and his thrusting, potent, masculine peaks of Crete?  The lambent, metaphorical verses of Shakespeare? 

The Old Campus was as littered and outhouse-smelling as the streets of San Francisco, a disgusting mélange of castoffs, academic derelicts, and Goodnight Moon idealists.

This, said Jonas' guide, was the new Yale; and so it was that Jonas Philby went South and unapologetically applied to the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama. 

'What on earth are you doing?', asked his father. 'I know that Yale has changed, and it is not the same place I and your grandfather went to, but it is still Yale after all'.  Mory's, Fence Club, Skull and Bones were still extant and viable, the old man said, so don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

Yet Jonas had his mind made up. South it was, and not just to any Southern university, but the motherlode of all cheerleading, girly-girl, white fraternity party land  - Tuscaloosa. 

'We don't get many Yankees down here' observed the blonde, blue-eyed co-ed in his welcoming committee; but that was the whole purpose of his fugue from New Haven. He wanted to be in a white place, an old-fashioned comfortable place. No woke bullshit. Just cunt, bass boats, and football weekends.  

'Heretic, apostate', shouted the elder Philby when he heard of his grandson's decision; but there was a certain epiphanic delight in not only reversing the course of family history but in saying fuck you to the bottom-feeding woke nonsense of Yale and the Old Campus. 

Jonas loved 'Bama, never looked back, had the time of his life, graduated with honors and was engaged to a prom queen. 

He couldn't help checking in on the news to see how Yale kept disassembling, becoming a caricature of its former self - trannies on the Yale Fence, Upper West Side Jews  and Brooklyn Italians elbowing aside patrician Lowells and Lodges, and shaming the legacy of John Davenport who centuries before came to found the New Haven plantations and to form a new, more God-fearing Puritan colony. 

'Disgusting, revolting', he said to his wife. 

'What's wrong, Daddy?' his two young children asked. 

'Nothing, my dears', Jonas replied from the verandah of Bridges, his 1840 antebellum, fully restored, plantation home at Chretien Point.  The live oaks needed trimming and the magnolia cut back, but life was good as a modern Southern grandee. Yale? What was that?