* 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