* Beware the Jabberwock, my son . . . (Many Thanks!)

25 percent turnout expected in alumni Corp. vote

By Nora Caplan-Bricker
Staff Reporter
The Yale Daily News

Published Friday, April 23, 2010


A little over a week after roughly 60 percent of Yale College students turned out to vote for Yale College Council candidates, the University is holding another election, and anticipating a much smaller turnout.On Thursday, alumni received electronic ballots for the annual Alumni Fellow Election, which will decide the newest member of the University’s highest governing body, the Yale Corporation. In past years, an average of 20 to 25 percent of Yale alumni have participated in the election — a figure that past Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee Chair Melanie Ginter ’78 GRD ’81 said...

#1 By Rigged 9:26a.m. on April 23, 2010

I never received a ballot; at least, there's none in my Inbox or Deleted Items for April 23.
I call for a re-vote! Hamid Karzai can oversee the results.
PK
M.Div. '80

#2 By Pasta Keane 12:26p.m. on April 23, 2010

PK,

You have returned at last! O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! I too did not receive a ballot.

Pasta Keane-The Anti Pasta Blog

#3 By Yale 80 3:34p.m. on April 23, 2010

I got my electronic ballot weeks ago.

#4 By King Vidor 3:15a.m. on April 24, 2010

Yeah, mine came weeks ago too. Will be a miracle if I still have it! I'd think a reminder would be useful, a couple of days before the deadline, but who knows, I might have gotten one of those too.

#5 By Y01 7:13a.m. on April 24, 2010

I too got my ballot weeks ago--and voted. Though I can see why so few would bother voting. The choices are pretty grim. Every bio is CEO-this and CEO-that. I want to vote for someone who will push for an open and ethical endowment, and support liberal academia NOT the corporatization of it. It feels pretty useless when you realize that we get to vote for the alumni members only, but the largest part of the Yale Corporation is actually installed by departing members. Now, that old-blue good-old-boys system merits a serious article, PLEASE. Announcing that a ballot is coming is a little thin on substance YDN.
#6 By dsimon 11:18a.m. on April 24, 2010
The problem with voting process is that we alums are given no information that is relevant to the purpose of the election: what the candidates think Yale's policies should be. Here's what I wrote to the administration last year when I declined to participate.__________
The letter from President Levin says "The ten Successor Fellows and six Alumni Fellows who convene five times a year are responsible for setting the policies that guide Yale's future." Yet the materials about the candidates provide absolutely no information on their views regarding the policies they think should guide Yale's future. Given the complete absence of such information, I don't see how any alum can cast a responsible vote for anyone for the position.I am sure each of the nominees is a fine individual with an outstanding record of accomplishment. But a great personal history should not be the reason we are electing someone. No employer would hire a candidate for a job without asking questions specific to the job. I don't see why Yale alumni voting in this election should not have the same rights and responsibilities regarding those questions--if they are to have a meaningful role in the process.I would not be greatly upset if the Corporation simply selected its own Alumni Fellows, since I feel we're not given the relevant information to cast an informed vote. But since I don't believe we have the relevant information, I cannot in good faith participate in what seems to me to be a sham process.I urge the University to either provide materials about the candidates concerning the position to which they are being elected, or change the process to leave alumns out of it. This intermediate position where we get to vote but are not given the information to vote on seems simply untenable to me.

#7 By Poking Around 12:07p.m. on April 24, 2010

Dear Anti-Pasta:
Returned?
I've been poking around, especially the Ying Yang Twins and Immigration posting boards.
PK
PS
I actually "quit" three times,but this blogging is addictive.
After Charlie Rose's "Brain Series" (episode 7 on addiction Thursday night) I realized that every new issue of the On-Line YDN sends a little squirt of dopamine into my striatum which triggers my "posting" compulsion.
Now, if we could market that insight into a Skinner Box Behavior Modification formula we could solve a crisis in addictive behavior which is simmering beneath the surface of our culture just waiting to explode.
Actually, 12-Step Programs ARE that very Skinner Box formula, unacknowledged as such.
My name is PK and I'm a Postaholic.





#8 By Coming galumphing back 1:27p.m. on April 24, 2010

PS to Anti-Pasta:
Actually, I 'returned' ("galumphing") from watching Mr. Shaffer's "vorpal blade go snicker snack" as "one, two, one, two and through and through" it cut the hypocrisy surrounding the Ying/Yang Twins' invitation to shreds.

#9 By Re: Galumphing Back 5:13p.m. on April 24, 2010

I hear you may appoint Mr. Shaffer your successor. If that is the case, it has been an honor posting with you. May the wind be always at your back.

#10 By Successor or Guest Columnist? 9:29p.m. on April 24, 2010

Successor when I'm dead. Right now I'm still alive.

I would gladly post any guest column he wished to put on The Anti-Yale, especially if his keyboard is still on fire.

But for me, the pictures are half the fun. That would have to be co-ordinated between guest and host.

PS:

I don't know if your final sentence was serious or tongue-in-cheek, but I've had a lot of fun and intellectual stimulation posting with the YDN posters this year.

Many thanks to all.

# 11By Thanks for the Irish Blessing 12:59 a.m. on April 25, 2010
# 9

Thank you for the Irish blessing. And good luck to you in your endeavors.

PK
The Anti-Yale



PK
The Anti-Yale

#12 By No tongue in Cheek at all 1:06p.m. on April 25, 2010

Merely a celebration of a worthy conversationalist.

* 70 years at Yale

Dr. Bainton with my Mother in the background on my graduation day from YDS, 1980.
Dr. Bainton's last note to me (above), on a homemade Christmas card, which he was famous for creating by hand. It gently reminds me, by saying the opposite, that I should pay him a visit now that he was suddenly housebound at 89.






















Hirst: Learning to be free
By Adam Lior Hirst
Commentary
The Yale Daily News
Published Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Over the past year, I have used this space to argue, esoterically and exoterically, for America to take an active role in promoting the spread of liberalism and freedom abroad. I explicated the strategy and the tactics and argued it was keeping with our best traditions, national interest and moral obligation as prudent revolutionaries. I’ve written as if there are no limits to freedom.
But there are limits. There are times when freedom is not appropriate, when checks — structure — must be in place. I learned this over the course of four years at Yale, which may be the freest place on...


#1 By 70 years at Yale 4:28a.m. on April 21, 2010

I knew Dr. Bainton well: he was my adopted grandfather.

He may have said "Yale was conservative before she was born", but he was probably referring to religious matters, since both Yale and Harvard began as schools to instruct young men in the way of the dominant religion of the time. You can guess which one that was.

He was at Yale for 70 years, dying at 89, professor emeritus of religious history, maintaining a coveted office in the fifth floor of Sterling by publishing a book every year after his retirement.

Total output 39 books. His Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther is Abingdon Press's all time best seller.

Here is another Bainton quote to ponder (from his own mouth to my ears): "The question is not 'What is the future of Christianity' but 'Will Christianity survive' "?

Hardly a conservative thought.

Dr. Bainton was a Quaker and a pacifist and a speak-truth-to-power intellectual.

He was also fearless, and once told a former student who confessed having been sent to spy on him by the paranoid government communist-head hunters of the 1950's and 60's, to go back to Washington with this message for his boss and his agency:

"Tell them to go to hell."

Paul Keane
M.Div'80

PS

I wouldn't go for a run down Whalley Avenue at 3 A.M. or any other New Haven street for that matter.


#2 By Remembrance of Dr. Bainton 4:38a.m. on April 21, 2010

PS:
A remembrance of Roland Bainton can be read at http://doctorbainton.blogspot.com/

* Elephant 101 at Yale (Not Published by YDN)

YDN has NOT printed this letter

Letter to the Editor
Yale Daily News

Dear Editor:

April 19th 's article "Rethinking a Yale Education" contains this sentence:“Yale has been training leaders for centuries, Levin said, but for a Yale education to have value in a globalized world, it must include foreign perspectives and address international problems.”

How can Yale address international problems when it maintains satellite courses in a country which censors entire events in history like Tianamen Sqaure; or denies the efficacy of condoms in preventing AIDS (both a country and a religion); or (again, both countries and religions) insists that women be denied access to power (ordination; education) ?

Theocracy vs. Democracy; Tyranny vs. Democracy; Autocracy vs. Democracy are the elephants in this academic room.



There’s a bit of globalized wishful thinking going on here.

Paul Keane

M.Div. ‘80
M.A., M.Ed.

* Hell and Heaven

Petrillo: Philosophy’s afterlife
By Justin Petrillo
Guest Columnist
The Yale Daily News

Published Tuesday, April 20, 2010

When we live in a society together, it is our duty to not shy away from others and the structures that keep us together, but to imagine and build a better society, to create the world that defines who we are and that lives on after us. This attitude and engagement is politics. When Aristotle said we were political animals, he meant that we find ourselves with others and that it is our telos to create a world with them from which we can have meaning love, identity, history, imagination and destiny. And if we don’t, he says, we will be very lonely creatures.
Once man discovered that...

#1 By Let's Talk: The Other is hell (or heaven) at 10:01 a.m. April 20, 2010


Let's talk.

This thought-provoking piece ignores 30 years of my life: the existentialists.

In "The Other" Jean-Paul Sartre asserts that "People are hell." This is far from the spirit of cooperative necessity you seem to believe undergirds us all and yet it acknowledges "the agency of each individual."

I believe Sartre would change the Self and thereby change the world (since the Self creates the world!).

So too would Socrates, except I think he believed the world pre-exists the Self.

"Relationships" are decidedly the idolatry of the post-therapeutic generation.

They have become almost beatified by those who believe exactly the OPPOSITE of Sartre (People are Heaven), hence our catastrophic divorce rate, when people jolt alert from the sleep-walking of childhood and realize they have married the wrong person, pursued the wrong career, etc.(Sometimes this takes decades.)


Your article states, "But while poetry can help us understand experience more than systematic phenomenology, it is a private activity we do, hiding away from or preparing us for the common world that awaits us."

Nix.

Even Emily Dickinson (The Queen Mother of Hermits like Salinger and Pynchon) WANTED AN AUDIENCE: She just never succeeded in getting one and thumbed her nose at the world.

All poetry is didactic and REQUIRES a learner. Whether that learning takes place in the head or the heart is another discusssion.

I take it from your article that the heart as the seat of emotion is a decidedly 19th Century notion which went the way of the wind?

Anyway (to use Holden Caulfield's second-favorite word, used 5000 times in "Catcher"), thanks for the useful thoughts.

PK

PS: My recollection is that Sartre refused the Nobel Prize in Literature for fear it "would limit the impact of his writing" and then prompty had himself photographed in a black tuxedo standing adrift on an icepan in an ocean of white (holding a martini glass).




#2 By boring 11:36a.m. on April 20, 2010

Wow. Did you even read Aristotle? This is one of the worst op-es the YDN has ever printed. Was there really nothing else to print?

#3 By que 11:50p.m. on April 20, 2010

Petrillo is president.

Let's talk-- 30 years on Sartre and you still don't realize that he was superseded by Heidegger within 10 years of Being and Nothingness? But Sartre could rock that black tuxedo, word.

Boring-- get off the sparknotes

#4 By No Exit (Stage left) 1:42a.m. on April 21, 2010

Que:
Didn't spend 30 years ON Sartre---that's how long he dominated the discussion.
Not so sure Heidegger superseded Sartre. Maybe as a philosopher, but not as an artist.
Besides, Sartre had Simone de Beavoir as an intellectual companion and counterpart. A lot more interesting conversation going on there than Heidegger's dusty theological chatter.

PK

#5 By i like philosophy 1:56a.m. on April 21, 2010

but this is really long, boring, and poorly written

#6 By i love philosophy 11:08a.m. on April 21, 2010

spot on!

* Vase

Shaffer: Poetry: Philosophy’s daddy

By Matthew Shaffer
The Yale Daily News

On Truth and Lies

Published Friday, April 16, 2010

I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort studying and debating philosophy at Yale. But these endeavors have left me only with a belief in the inadequacy of philosophy and its subordination to poetry. Four years here have been a lived confirmation of Paul de Man’s claim that “Philosophy turns out to be an endless reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature.” My education has ended in its own critique.
Philosophy is ultimately motivated by a will to domination. It is an attempt to subdue the world with a strong grip, to stop experience and reality from wiggling away....

#1 By tim ellison '10 2:54p.m. on April 16, 2010

So, Matt, does that mean that because I wrote my senior essay on poetry, I win?

"Do not all charms fly/
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?"
Keats - Lamia

In all seriousness, there are some things philosophy can do that poetry can't. Try looking for 'reality' and in 'truth' in Wordsworth, Keats, Shakespeare or Stevens and all you get is Wordsworth's truth, Keats's truth, Shakespeare's truth, and Stevens's truth. This may be perspectivism, but can't philosophers discover aspects of reality that escape subjectivity?

(I love being able to write sentences like that!)

#2 By MC '13 3:33p.m. on April 16, 2010

As much as I hate to admit it, here is a Shaffer column I agree with entirely. Thank you for articulating perfectly a position I've been desperately trying to take for years.

#3 By KM 8:38p.m. on April 16, 2010

I love what you wrote, and that you are willing to immerse yourself in such abstract worlds, worlds which can never be understood by others, but only by the self. But here lies the flaw, the problem with what you have said. Poetry is Philosophy. There is no separation of the two. Further, Philosophy is Poetry. The article strikes two key elements of humanity; Art, and Philosophy. However, there exists a third, religion. All three of these elements hold that key trait mentioned earlier, not a single one can be expected to transfer to others, but only can be manifested in the self. All three elements are the same thing.
"Reality is chaos, inaccessible to a mind and language so far removed from it. Thought never reflects and words never express the essence of the world because minds and words are spheres too far from any reality that might lurk behind experience." -Is this not art? It is, if not to you then to I alone. Is this not philosophy? Clearly, it is, and if you deny, it does not matter to me. And, finally, this is religion. All three elements are the same, never can they be separated. Only when we lose sight and confuse these, drawing lines in between each element which cannot be crossed, do we run into the issues you raised. But, these lines, the barriers, the distinction you assumed existed as you wrote this essay, do not exist.
A true artist will tell you that there is art in every facet of life. A philosopher, that philosophy is everywhere. A follower of a religion, that their belief system is in everything. A true artist will tell you that there is philosophy everywhere. A follower of a religion, that art can be seen everywhere. And so on.
Two true artist can look at the same work, and see something different. Two philosophers can think of the same issue, and abstract it in different ways, find different meaning. Two followers of the same religion will never believe the same thing. And so on.
All three elements are inseparable, unquantifiable, and nontransferable. All three elements are the same thing, they are all inherently a human thing.
A true human will say that there is that human touch in every aspect of life.
The illusion of difference is adolescence. The realization of unity; that is where wisdom lies.

#4 By hmmmm 11:47p.m. on April 16, 2010

muddle-headed nonsense...

#5 By literature grad student 3:53p.m. on April 18, 2010

I defy Mr. Shaffer to spend more than three months in a literature graduate program and not come to the conclusion that literary studies comprises a collection of narcissistic observations and semantic quibbling in dire, dire need of a philosophical kick in the butt.


#6 By PK 12:42a.m. on April 19, 2010

Literature is a flower. Philosophy is its genetic code. Which would you rather have in a vase?
PK

* Here I Sit

Letter: Religion on the Supreme Court
Published Friday, April 16, 2010

The Yale Daily News

In his April 13 column, “Replacing Justice Stephens,” Ilan Ben-Meir ’12 suggests that Protestantism be a primary criterion for the next Supreme Court justice. Protestants may be rare on the court these days, but the logic behind making a nominee’s religion paramount is not sound. In fact, this position recalls both the historical distrust of Catholic, Jewish and other non-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant groups which typified 19th-century nativism and the creeping fear of some today that the social fabric with which they are accustomed is being threatened by the changing demographics of...

#1 By The Contrarian 12:06p.m. on April 16, 2010

Perhaps. But one could imagine the wailing if the single Jew on the Court were to be replaced by a non-Jew -- and what would happen if the nominee were a Muslim?

#2 By Egalitarian 12:29p.m. on April 16, 2010

Excellent letter! If only our politicians were so enlightened.


#3 By Here I Stand (or Sit) 12:52a.m. on April 19, 2010

Protestantism itself is anti stare decisis: it rejects the "precedent" of papal infallibility. Protestatism itself elevates the individual above the institution: the priesthood of all believers.

It would be interesting to see if the Protestant Justices in the Supreme Court's history were influenced by these two tendencies in the Protestant ethic.

PK

* The Noose Around Yale's Gothic Neck

Walsh: Remembering to live well
By Dylan Walsh
Guest Columnist
The Yale Daily News
Published Friday, April 16, 2010

“He took the test for about 45 minutes … then, right in the middle, he jumps out of his seat, dramatically rips up his test and said, ‘I can’t take it anymore!’”
The freshman year prank of Cameron Dabaghi ’11 was recounted last week in the News, a few days after his death. Two years after his wry display during the Directed Studies exam he was pretending to take, we are dealing with the overwhelmingly tragic repercussions of Dabaghi’s suicide. One of Cameron’s classmates, also quoted in this publication, hoped that, “the Yale community will … refrain from thinking of Dabaghi’s death...

#1 By Yale '10 12:23p.m. on April 16, 2010

Thank you for writing this column. The message is simple, but so profound in its simplicity....and I worry that a lot of the student population will go back to living their lives exactly as they did instead of doing what you prescribe - remembering to live well.

#2 By Yale Mom 6:09p.m. on April 16, 2010

I appreciate the heartfelt clarity of your article as well--I hope students will read it and pause to take measure of how they are living at Yale---what are priorities---what choices and behaviors make for healthy coping. "The growing tension between educational pressures and quality of life"---this should be a seminar or talk that masters have w/students in their residential colleges: How to Live the examined life while being a student at Yale.

#3 By Let them eat grass. 9:54p.m. on April 16, 2010

The headline "Remembering to live well" is absurd. You CANNOT "remember" what you have never known.

Our society and Yale are POISONED by competetion, envy, and greed. Does no one learn the lesson of Death of a Salesman?

Living well, while eleven males are murdered within five miles of your Gothic arches, sounds a bit like Monseigneur in A Tale of Two Cities: "Let them eat grass !"(and Dickens didn't mean maryjane)

In fact defining "living well" might require considering an idea heretical to the capitalist imperative: SHARING.

How many folks at Yale have even considered such a idea on either a personal or an institutional level?

Wake up Yale.

You are the largest employer in an area in which violence is ever tightening its noose around the
architectural splendor of your Gothic neck.

Use some of that 18 billion (that's BILLION not MILLION, by the way) endowment to create hope for the uneducated and impoverished in the poor neighborhoods upon which your campus rests like a skin graft on a charred body.

Set aside ONE BILLION of your endowment to create an apprenticeship program for poor folks.

Teach them computer skills and draw them into the employment line at Yale.

Abolish Yale's snobbish, elitist arrogant Personnel Department, grotesquely mislabelled "Human Resources" (Inhumane Resources would be a better name.)

It's highhanded treatment of applicants POISONS the town/gown atmosphere in New Haven.

Reach out before it is too late.

"Let them eat soup kitchens and free concerts" won't cut it any more.

The days of placating New Haveners with token bones thrown to the riffraff are fast coming to an end.

Read the handwriting on the wall, Yale:

It is written in the blood of eleven black males.

Paul Keane
M.Div. '80