The only thing lacking is intellectual diversity, as leftism has become the agreed creed, not the Hebrew Bible that’s etched into the original college seal.
Many readers will recall when billionaire-philanthropist Lee Bass in 1990 gave his alma mater $20 million to establish a program studying Western civilization. The problem? Bass wanted the program to portray the West in a postive light. Yale couldn’t abide such a condition and returned the money in 1995, claiming the center wouldn’t be academic enough for the school’s notably leftist faculty.
My story is equally wicked.
I left the board at Yale in 2002, just before a dean was charged with embezzling funds from their accounts to pay for such things as his daughter’s education—at Harvard, of all places—and padding his own pocketbook. The story broke in the New York Times, and all hell broke loose. This deed occurred at Berkeley Divinity School—a school that no longer believed in an omnipotent God who created heaven and earth.
When I received a large multimillion-dollar grant followed by two smaller ones, I urgently needed to find a university at which to place the funds and conduct the research. At our house, Yale was number one—Lux et Veritas. My son, a world-renowned, all-Ivy rower, was a Yalie and into the secret society lore as well as the prestige of wearing the big Y on the blue shirt. He had so many victories in rowing we used the multiple t-shirts from his opponents to wash and dry our cars.
Imagine that! Exiled to the Persian Gulf because you are a conservative at Yale. That’s how the system works nowadays.
There is no intellectual diversity. It is leftism or else. When Yale got $4 billion to open a non-degree granting campus in Singapore, the faculty voted 99 percent to turn the money down because the Asian economic powerhouse had an “authoritarian regime.” But Yale’s then-president, Rick Levin, took the money anyway.
My research at Yale was on (good) virtuous companies. The idea that companies might be “good” upset a lot of people who believed especially all big businesses were basically evil. I only taught two courses at the graduate level with the management crowd and Ph.D. students on “Virtue and Business.” One student who took the classes actually asked, in all seriousness, “what is virtue?” He had never before encountered the term.
Only behind closed doors and certainly not in the classroom could we openly discuss ideas—which used to be the very basis of any university. Today the basis of that purported education is simply and blatantly: indoctrination. Debunk everything, deconstruct reality, make everything about race, rid the students of the diseases of religion and class and, for God’s sake (Oh, there is no God, I forgot), by all means, redistribute the wealth (which, of course, was ill-gotten).
One does not impose personal autonomy, which is the secret of America’s real and lasting power.
What distinguished the United States from England were three crucial things: the lack of a feudal class structure that dominated Great Britain down into the 20th century; an extensive virgin territory for applying it (the Louisiana Purchase); and, most especially, the opportunity for a multitude of dissenting Protestant sects, Catholics, and Jews to engage the new world with a religious fervor largely absent from the feudalistic state churches of Europe. It is important to remember how many of the original settlers were from dissenting protestant sects such as the Puritans, Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers.