Now That's Diversity
It is old news that colleges and universities greatly lower the bar for members of certain favored groups. But Yale University allowing someone with no formal education beyond the fourth grade? That almost makes it seem as though Yale admitted the student for political reasons instead of educational ones. Well, but let's be charitable; surely Yale had its reasons.
For example, as a high-ranking official in the Taliban, perhaps this Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi was homeschooled. One wonders exactly what his homeschooling may have consisted in, however. ( Among the things the Taliban did while Rahmatullah was an official: torturing children for things the Taliban accused their parents of doing, shooting dead eight boys for laughing out of turn, jailing children as young as ten years old, beating a boy to death for not chanting"Death to America" with quite enough gusto, raping wives after their husbands were taken away, etc., etc.--you know, just your average good ol' red-blooded fun in the middle-eastern sun.)
In any case, I am glad that Yale is taking the venerable high road of not saying anything. One of its administrators did, however, send an anonymous, unsigned e-mail to two recent Yale graduates who have gotten upset about this enough to pledge not to give money to Yale until it reverses its decision and have invited others to join them. The administrator's five-sentence erudite e-mail called these graduates"retarded" and"disgusting" (it's all documented in Fund's article). For those of you keeping score, that's Protesting Yale Graduates, 1; Assistant Director of Giving at Yale Law School (Who Thought They Couldn't Figure Out Who He Was) Alexis Surovov, 0.
Unfortunately for Surovov, those Yale graduates are sharp; they traced his anonymous e-mail right back to the computer on his desk in his office. Bummer. What's a guy supposed to do now when he wants to cast aspersions on others under a cloak of anonymity?
Anyway, I guess Yale is assuming, perhaps correctly, that if they just keep mum long enough, everyone will lose interest and this issue will go away. Or perhaps they're figuring that with an endowment of over $15 billion--which, if you figure a modest 4%, generates about $600,000,000 in annual income--they don't really need to care what their recent graduates think. By the time recent graduates have paid off the $164,000 they paid for four years' tuition, room, and board and are in a position to start giving money to the school, they will have forgotten all about the objections they once had and will only remember the rosy things Yale's development office tells them in those pretty, glossy brochures about the Yale experience.
[Cross-posted at Proportional Belief.]