Yale's worst nightmare (not your father's "John Fundraiser")

John Fund continues to beat up on the Polically Unconscious, as opposed to Politically Correct, administrators at Yale in the Wall Street Journal. Today he tells us the story of Yale alum Grant “Ace” Bailey, who went down on 9/11, and his noble sister, Margaret Pothier, who is upset by the university’s then admitting a former Taliban official (Rahmatullah Hashemi). Yale continues, basically, to stonewall on this issue and, as we all know, repeat after me, it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.

This is not to say that Yale’s admission of Hashemi was a crime. I used the term Politically Unconscious quite deliberately, because it strikes me I have stumbled most accidentally, typing rapidly, on an apt phrase. Lost in the most traditional (that is completely unexamined) aspects of liberalism, the Yale admissions people simply did what they always do – reach out to what is to them the most diverse and most “disadvantaged” applicants to form a student body whose image most flatters the faculty and administration. It’s not about that student or even about diversity, really. It’s about them – that faculty and administration – their self-image. It’s a pure Politics of Self-Regard taking over the admission’s office, as in “We have a Malaysian this year.” That’s not a person. That’s an ornament. What greater ornament than a card-carrying member of the Taliban. Epater le bourgeoisie times four. How… well… bourgeois. (But that’s another discussion.)