More on Yale and the Taliban

The WSJ’s John Fund continues his outstanding reporting and commentary concerning Yale’s decision to admit as a student and welcome to the university Taliban leader Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi:

Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last month Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard; today Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi will speak by video to a conference at Columbia University that his regime is cosponsoring. (Columbia won't answer questions about how much funding it got from Libya or what implied strings were attached.)

Then there's Yale, which for three weeks has refused to make any comment or defense beyond a vague 144-word statement about its decision to admit Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi--a former ambassador-at-large of the murderous Afghan Taliban--as a special student.
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Universities are places where free inquiry, debate and information sharing are supposed to be guiding lights. In reality, the ivory towers too often now resemble dark castles, which raise their drawbridges at the first hint of criticism or scrutiny. Never has the moat separating elite universities from the rest of America been wider than in the case of Yale's Taliban Man.

Back in the early 1990s, when he was dean of Yale College, Yale history professor Don Kagan warned about what he called the university's "mutual massage" between value-neutral professors and soft-minded students.

He is even more critical now: "The range of debate on campus is more narrow than ever today, and the Taliban incident is a wake-up call that moral relativism is totally unexamined here. The ability of students to even think clearly about patriotism and values is being undermined by faculty members who believe that at heart every problem has a U.S. origin."

Mr. Kagan isn't optimistic that Yale will respond to outside pressure. "They have a $15 billion endowment, and I know Yale's governing board is handpicked to lick the boots of the president," he told me. "The only way Yale officials can be embarrassed is if a major donor publicly declares he is no longer giving to them. Otherwise, they simply don't care what the outside world thinks."
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Former Yale president Benno Schmidt says admitting Mr. Hashemi is an exercise in "amorality and cynicism." He told me that "diversity simply cannot be allowed to trump all moral considerations."

It's not as if Yale can't muster moral indignation. Yale is divesting from Sudan, responding to pressure from student activists and labor unions. But when it comes to a former Taliban official, there is a desire to move on. …

Kagan nails it when he says withholding donations is the only thing that will get Yale’s attention.

But few alumni at Yale seem willing to do that.

I’ve never understood why man and women who achieve wealth and prominence working within America’s free enterprise system turn around and give large donations to universities where the people in charge are eager to denigrate America and its free enterprise system. And where a Taliban leader is welcome but the ROTC is not.

Fund's entire piece is here.