August 23, 2006

Yale’s Expedience

By R.K. Joyad
FrontPageMagazine.com


Molly Worthen, The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005)

Laura Kalman, Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006)

I believe it to be an indisputable fact that most colleges and universities, and certainly Yale, the protests and pretensions of their educators and theorists notwithstanding, do not practice, cannot practice, and cannot even believe what they say about education and academic freedom. I am not saying that they do not utilize the rationale of academic to obtain license when and where they desire it. This they most certainly do, for their policy is one of expedience.These words were written over 50 years ago, by William F. Buckley, in God and Man at Yale. They could have been written yesterday, so accurately do they describe the current climate.


This conclusion pains me, because it involves criticism of an American institution which, along with the place I work, is one of two institutions to which I acknowledge real emotional fealty. Each of my institutions has its problems, because they seem to occupy two extremes of a continuum. The dichotomy puts people like me - and there not many of us - squarely in the middle, and causes us dissonance. It is a cross we bear every day.

It works like this: we believe in the value of liberal education, and in the marketplace of ideas. This is something we learned at Yale. It is a concept we teach our children, and aspire for a world they will inherit. Unfortunately, this ethos is in short supply in the national security apparatus where we spend our professional lives. Partly out of expediency, partly the result of the self-selection process and the type of person drawn to our type of work, fine gradations are not always appreciated. Our colleagues and clients do not always revel in novel ideas. They also tend to be more comfortable with violence than our former classmates and professors.

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