yale-university

"On 25 July 1861, Yale became the first university in America to award the PhD degree. The first three PhDs were in physics, philosophy and psychology, and classics. The recipient of the classics PhD, Morris Whiton, took his final examinations in four subjects, including Sanskrit. Between 1859 and 1861, Whiton had 'concentrated his course work in one subject under one instructor, spending two hours weekly studying Sanskrit with the famous specialist William D. Whitney.' That one of the first three PhDs in America was awarded to a Sanskritist reiterates the importance of Sanskrit in the new academic curriculum introduced at Yale and reflects the prominent role of Sanskrit in the development of American higher education."

"The students at Yale came from all different backgrounds and all parts of the country. Within months, I knew many of them."

"Transforming hereditary privilege into ‘merit,’ the existing system of educational selection, with the Big Three Harvard, Princeton, and Yale] as its capstone, provides the appearance if not the substance of equality of opportunity. In so doing, it legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability over the prerogatives of birth. The problem with a ‘meritocracy,’ then, is not only that its ideals are routinely violated (though that is true), but also that it veils the power relations beneath it. For the definition of ‘merit,’ including the one that now prevails in America’s leading universities, always bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society. Those who are able to define ‘merit’ will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious."

"Ninety-one percent of Egyptian women have had their clitorises removed; 98% of Somalian women have. Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in Somalia and was one of them. She was scheduled to speak at Yale last week but the school's atheist organization, my people, complained that she "did no represent a totality of the ex-Muslim experience." Meaning what? That women like mutilation? You're atheists. You should be attacking religion, not siding with people who hold women down and violate them."

"Here I must inject a personal note—I never shed blood upon the field of Sidwell Friends, nor did I fight the battles of Yale Law. I am a miner's son, and my father was a self-made man who unmade himself during my youth. Education was not a family legacy, and my kin belonged to the United Mine Workers of America, not to Skull and Bones. My forebears fought this country's wars from the bottom ranks, and I began my own military career as a private. I have felt the full arrogance of those to whom much was given, and personally, wish that I might come to bury the elite, not to praise them. Yet, those who would rise need examples to emulate. It grates on me to write it, but our military needs a return of the nation's elite to the officer corps, to the extent that a traditional elite, with its spotty but essential ideals of service, still exists."

"Antisemitic incidents have soared since the war began. There has been a surge in Islamophobic violence and harassment. These new expressions of some of humanity’s oldest forms of prejudice shake our shared conscience—and command us to call hatred by its name so that we can confront it."