The Ivy League Or Aggieville State? Yale Goes Ghetto, Balaclava And Gender-Queer

It wasn't supposed to be this way, the decline of a once great institution into an intellectual miasma, but there it was losing ground to Aggieville State and other two-bit public schools in the Midwest. Elihu Yale and John Davenport were turning over in their graves at the sight of a once patrician, intellectually elite college founded on solid Christian principles and right behavior becoming a dismal educational sinkhole, its reputation scuttled, its premier status relegated as it opened its doors to all comers. 

 

Dean Inslee Clark was the first to declassify Yale - or in his words to 'democratize' it and let in all those Brooklyn Jews with SATs off the charts and violins to boot, and make some space for them by winnowing out all the legatees, children of the Cabots, Lodges, Hamiltons, and Trowbridges who were as dumb as stones but let in because of breeding and future endowment.  

Yale did not become a Jewish place like some others and certainly graduated far more geniuses than ever before, but lost that special aristocratic veneer that most characterized it - the ethos of noblesse oblige, good manners, Renaissance learning, and a full, rich, and romantic life.  

In other words, they let the grinds in and the swells out.  In a matter of a few decades Yale had become as plebian, unwashed, and as basically untutored institution as Chillicothe A&M. 

New Haven in the old days was a very Italian American city, overwhelmingly so, and Italians from Wooster Square were the janitors, dishwashers, garbagemen, and laundresses of Yale.  Not one was admitted as a student until the aldermen of the New Haven city council demanded that their people should forthwith stop serving strawberries and start eating them.  It was high time for Italian Americans from New Haven to join the Jews from Brooklyn, and they nominated what they thought was an ideal candidate, Lorenzo Puzzi, a young man of talent and promise. 

Yale refused, insisting that Puzzi was a fluke. Unfortunately for Yale, with the arrogance and disdain that characterized Yale Town-Gown relationships up until the mid-Sixties, its politically naive spokesmen were more than candid and public in their pronouncements. "Mr. Puzzi", an Assistant Dean told the Journal-Courier, "may be a champion of his people, but he is certainly not a champion of ours".

The townspeople howled until Yale listened.  To avoid further roasting in the press and increasing political pressure from Connecticut and national politicians, Yale made a generous proposal to New Haven: it would take a minimum of two New Haven residents per year, would make a public apology for the "our people" interview, and would recruit up to five Italian Americans from Connecticut per year if and only if they were the most exceptional candidates. 

The standards Yale set were so high that the Admissions Office was convinced that they would get no suitable candidates. The Connecticut politicians, a bit uneasy about the almost unattainable qualifications, felt at the same time that they could not back down on them - of course the descendants of Galileo, Michelangelo, and Bernini could meet the highest standards.

Puzzi turned out OK, needed a little remedial help but beefed up varsity football line, fit in eventually, and was soon forgotten in the still pedigreed stable of the rich and privileged that was Yale. 

The admissions door, at first ajar, was finally completely open, and what had been a legitimate talent search for the best and the brightest Paolillos, Schwartzes, and Kowalskis, was now a color fest. 'Bring me some black people', said a Yale administrator, and so it was that the university became a public school clone, its patrician, Anglo-Saxon, Martha's Vineyard-Nantucket student body now irreversibly blended, an indistinguishable potpourri. 

Before long this limited racial diversity did not satisfy, and the Admissions Office was charged to recruit the 'other-gendered'. Tentative at first and somewhat squeamish, they recruited a few straight-looking, semi-closeted, careful boys from the Main Line; but then when the DEI juggernaut rolled up to Harkness Tower, they went farther afield and went Agender Flux, Neutrois, and Winkte.  Yale in a short few decades had become a mix of the Castro, Bernal Heights, Folsom Street, Anacostia, East Baltimore, and South St. Louis, a virtual racio-ethno-quoisexual jamboree. 

The one thing these various groups shared was political idealism, that marvelously naive, innocent belief in the possibility of more verdant, peaceful, compassionate, and considerate world despite all historical evidence to the contrary.  Political choice was a matter of conviction, not logic, and classes were skipped and stadium seats left empty as students poured out in support of the climate, black people, transgenders, and the poor; and against capitalism, neo-colonialism, and predatory economics. 

Demonstrations were joyous cavalcades of unity and good will.  Camaraderie, social intimacy, and generational bonding were as least as important as the political grievances aired.  The cabal of administrators, professors, and students was a trifecta - no one opposed the transformation of the campus from a place of intellectual integrity to one of emotional hysteria. 

Along came Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinians, and virulent, violent anti-Semitism.  The Palestinians - a put-upon, marginalized, and discriminated population oppressed by the Jew - could do no wrong. It was a perfect storm - support for a non-white, non-European, non-Christian people was a defiant opposition to Jewish hegemony and an outcry against capitalist, neo-colonialist, imperialism.  

The students amassing on the Old Campus were as pleased as punch to have such a felicitous consortium of hatred at hand.  Together, singing, marching, chanting, this polyglot stew of 'diversity', long ago untethered from the rigorous academic logic of earlier days and encouraged to express their identity and their feelings, 

 

Yale, Columbia, Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League never saw Trump coming.  They had assumed that this blowhard, this imposter, this blatant racist would never again sit in the Oval Office, but there he was on a vengeful tear, uprooting the federal bureaucracy, sending cattle-car loads of illegal aliens back across the border, and putting academia on notice - stop the anti-Semitic bullshit or lose your funding, be subject to legal action, and lose any stature or standing within the university system. 

The Palestinian fanaticism was so loosely wired and so puerile in conception, that students disbanded and universities capitulated.  The fact that campuses became so quiet after one Trump threat showed how transparently ignorant were students, administrators, and faculty - the famous university cabal. 

Chastened, silenced, and finally neutered, Yale organizers returned to first principles, and a campus demonstration for Queerdom was orchestrated soon after the Trump edicts. The old race-gender dyad was alive and well at Yale, and the gathering was a New Orleans Mardi Gras and Folsom Street parade combined - an outrageous, flouncy, all get out show of burlesque queens, ghetto pimps and ho's, all doo-dadded up to beat the band. 

 

'We will be back', shouted LaShonda Williams, an affirmative action baby, putting her arms around a proudly transgender Blaise Underwood after Trump's DOJ shut the university down; but woke had had its day, and whether Yale would  regain any of its former cachet is another story.  Having become a woke caricature with a student body no different than Aggieville State, why go there?

One Old Blue, big alumni donor and Yale to the core, however, was only anxious to hasten the move. 'Fuck 'em', he said, and his millions went back to an offshore Aruban bank account where it would eventually enrich his grandchildren.  As it should be for a Yale graduate.