Yale University, over three hundred years old, one of the first institutions of higher learning in the country, founded by John Davenport as a place of religious instruction, philosophy, and logic in 1701, remained a school of impeccable academic credentials, moral probity, manners and social grace until the Sixties when the doors were opened to all comers.
The villain, according to Old Blues, was Inslee Clark, Dean of Yale College, who decided that the university should no longer be pasture for wealthy aristocrats of New England, but fertile ground for the Jews of Brooklyn who had for so long languished at Brooklyn College. With these talented, studious, and ambitious men Yale would regain the academic rigor that it had in the early days of Davenport and his Puritan refugees from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
It would no longer be the holding pen for future investment bankers, but Brooklyn College North - as intellectually challenging as Harvard but with a civility and respect for patrician legacy that Cambridge never had.
All well and good - the university certainly benefited from the contributions of Jews, Italians, Slovaks, and Poles - until the blush came off the bloom of the rose, and it went overboard. Slowly but surely it devolved into a racial and ethnic mishmash - a grab bag of identity. The Administration was convinced that simply by rubbing shoulders with the disadvantaged, the marginalized, the put-upon, and the closeted, white, Anglo-Saxon students would learn a lesson in humility, respect, and generosity.
And so it was that Yale moved off-kilter, tilting far to the edges of society while dismissing the legacy of John Davenport and the centuries of academic excellence and a solidly moral education. If there was ever more of a social hodge-podge, bits and pieces tracked in from God knows where, it was Yale; and the thing of it was, they were proud of it. 'This is not your grandfather's Yale', the publicity went, reaching far and wide from ghetto to North Carolina tarpaper shacks. 'You have a home here', and the university became unrecognizable but happy, said the new guard.
By time of this writing, the university had gone through even more reconfiguring twists and turns. Not only were people of color more than welcome, but those of alternate sexuality. Applicants were encouraged to express their sexual identity in graphically explicit terms. The Admissions Office was not satisfied with 'Other' checked in the M/F box on the application form, but wanted to hear the details of coming out. Videos were encouraged, and to the unexpected visitor, the Office looked like a seedy man cave basement with cunts ‘n’ cum videos playing to Mr Bojangles.
The San Francisco Folsom Street Fair - a sexual free-for-all of chains, whips, harnesses, chariots, and more cock-and-booty that anyone could imagine had nothing on the Yale Admissions Office. They asked for explicitness, and they got more than they reckoned for; but soon the straight staff was replaced in favor of LGBTQ+ officer who were no strangers to such doings and would, therefore, be the most appropriate judges for admission; and in short measure, the campus had more than their share of buddies from random spots on the gender spectrum.
At the same time the university had turned far to the political left, and there was no liberal cause not espoused and embraced by administration, faculty, and student body. It was a lockstep cabal of progressive zealots. Nothing escaped their attention - the black man, the lesbian, the environment, financial hooliganism, and income inequality were all in their sights.
When the two currents met - political activism and sexual liberation - the Yale campus was as colorful and wild as a Barnum & Bailey circus, complete with its own versions of bearded ladies, two-headed babies, cretins, giants, and ape-men.
The pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstration on the Old Campus was a wild and wooly hoopla of outrageous sexuality and anti-Jewish hatred. While there were plenty of keffiyehs, mustaches, and Palestinian flags, there were even more frilly femmes, leathered-up bulls, Bay-to-Breakers gay floats, Mardi Gras sequins and tinsel, and every cross-retro-gendered outfit picked and patched in a second-hand extravaganza.
'Down with the Jew', one brawny, husky, frilly person yelled from the podium to the cheers of the delighted crowd which picked up the lyric and repeated it in waves of chants from one end of the Old Campus to the other. 'Down-With-The-Jew...Down With The Jew...' until the whole place was filled with exuberant, unselfconscious cheers; and when it was over, happy couples, arm-in-arm, war-painted, exhausted, but delighted left for dinner.
Alumni donations had already been declining as older alumni, sickened by what they saw as the ruination of a once superior, proper place, banked their money elsewhere. Yale was not to be encouraged in this unholy dishevelment of tradition and history. Not their Yale any more, not by a long shot.
The university, now in line with every vocational school, cow town junior college, and third rate midwestern university could only rest on its laurels for so long; and after a while this descent into a nightmarish woke madness slowed. The Supreme Court's ruling dismissing affirmative action and the financial demurral of wealthy alumni helped, but the country itself was increasingly fed up with race and gender nonsense.
'Well, Harkness Tower is still standing', said one alumnus at his Fiftieth Reunion. Reunions were held after the school year ended, so there were no signs of the protests, festoons, and sexual antics of a few weeks before. He looked at the bell tower, the Gothic spires of Davenport College where he had lived while at Yale, and smiled. 'There will always be an England', he mused, 'and always a Yale'.
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