Naked Party at Yale Turns Dangerous

I always thought that the notorious "naked parties" at my alma mater were a stupid idea. I remember students trying to explain to me why such parties were "liberating" and failing miserably. If anything, such events are evidence of an extremely uncomfortable relationship with one's own sexuality. It is not surprising to me in the least that a recent naked party at Yale ended really badly:

A naked party at Yale may have crossed the line from salacious fun and into sexual assault and hazing, according to a report. The Yale Daily News reports the Yale Police Department is looking into the party after several attendees were taken to Yale-New Haven hospital. Yale Police Chief Ronnell A. Higgins notified the campus police received information about a possible sexual assault involving undergraduates attending an off-campus party on Feb. 19. The party in question was reportedly thrown by the Pundits, Yale's private society prank group. Some 50 people attended the invitation-only function, according to the report. While attendees arrived in costume, they were told to disrobe halfway through the party, witnesses told the Yale Daily News. Yale officials are examining whether the party, in which underage students were also reportedly drinking, amounted to a form of hazing. Attendees were reportedly told that the party was part of the ritual to potentially join the Pundits group. After the attendees disrobed, several of them were forced to kiss each other by members of the Pundits, according to the allegations cited in the report. One male attendee reportedly had a penis forcibly pushed against his face.

A Yale Professor Is Proud of Being a Child Abuser and a Racist

In her article titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior", a Yale professor Amy Chua proudly enumerates all the ways in which she abused her miserable daughters:

Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do: attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin.

Chua chirpily defends her right to call her daughters names like "fatty" or "garbage" in public and rants against people who dare not to approve of such behavior. The reason why this monstrous woman has been torturing these poor kids is because she wants them to be "successful." Successful little Mommy pleasers, that is, who are not entitled to a personality or a single desire of their own. Why the social services just sit by and allow this to happen is beyond me. Does anybody really believe that simply beating the girls would do them any less damage?

As any other abuser, Chua strives to come up with a reason why it is acceptable for her to subject her poor kids to these horrors. She blames the abuse on the Chinese culture, insulting billions of people and branding them as abusers in one fell swoop. I always knew that my alma mater attracted all kinds of weirdos, but this is getting really scary. I believe that everybody who after reading this article abstains from ostracizing Chua is a racist and a participant in her child abuse. "Oh, we're just from a different culture, so that's why we are entitled to engage in abuse (genital mutilation, beatings, rapes) of our children" should not be accepted as an excuse. If you do think that this is a valid justification of abuse, you are a racist. If you believe that when a white American male from Oklahoma calls his daughters "fatty" and "garbage" in public he is wrong, but when a Chinese woman does it it's cute, you are not only a racist but also a misogynist.

 

Gosh, I'm traumatized just by reading about this horrible monstrous freak. And when I remember that this power-obsessed, unfulfilled harpy is actually an educator, I get even more terrified of how much damage she can wreak in the course of her miserable existence. That such people would think it OK to celebrate their disgusting actions in the media is the testimony to how far our completely misunderstood idea of "tolerance" can get us. I really hope that Sophia and Louisa still have enough personality left in them by the time they grow up to abandon their toxic mother to a lonely and pathetic old age that she so richly deserves. I also hope that she gets called "a fat, stinking piece of garbage" in public at least a few times, since she believes this appellation is such a great motivational tool.

Action to Defend Higher Education

It's nice to know that my former colleagues at Yale are not giving up on their important struggle to defend higher education. I just received this Solidarity Statement in honor of the March 4 National Day of Action to defend Higher Education, called for by faculty, students and academic workers in the University of California system:

Unlike most state Universities, Yale continues to prosper in the current economic recession. Yale's endowment is at $17 billion--up $5 billion from when I arrived on campus a few years ago?its $2 billion building projects are progressing, including the two new residential colleges, and it still enjoys extensive funds from the federal government and private companies. Yet over the past year, the Yale administration has decided to cut staff across the university, reduce graduate departments, and further shift the teaching to part-time adjuncts. Yale is not in an economic crisis, but its decisions--made by a handful of administrators--has serious consequences for graduate teachers, union members, and the New Haven community.
On March 4, GESO alongside its allies in the Yale unions will call on the administration to stop using the global economic crisis as justification for restructuring work at Yale in a corporate model, and instead to use its wealth and prestige to set an example for the rest of the academy and ensure good jobs for all. We are holding a panel with a diverse group of workers, faculty and students, to be followed by a march to President Levin's office to deliver the following Solidarity Statement:
*******
Across the country, university administrators are responding to the current recession by accelerating the adoption of a corporate model, including the centralization of governance in fewer hands and casualization of secure full-time jobs. Yale has invoked the current global economic crisis to justify multiple rounds of budget cuts, staffing reductions, and restructuring of teaching and graduate education. However, Yale is in a fundamentally different economic position than its public counterparts: it has a robust endowment, an influx of federal funding, and the ability to borrow large sums inexpensively. On this national day of action to defend higher education, we therefore call on the Yale administration to use its wealth and unique position to respond to the current crisis in a way that sets a better model. It should open up its decision-making process, expand the number of good jobs on campus, ensure high-quality education by reversing the casualization of teaching staff, and invest in the surrounding community.

The economic crisis has been a dream come true for administrations of many universities who now have a perfect excuse to cut-down on tenure-track positions and advance the casualization of higher education. This process had been going on long before the crisis, but now it has become even more agressive.
I wish I could be marching together with my colleagues at Yale right now.

Yale's President Levin and the Art of Platitude

Of course, nobody expected Yale's President Levin to come out with anything other than a string of trivialities aimed at placating the public in the wake of a horrible tragedy on the university's campus. His letter to the Yale university community has just appeared at Huffington Post. As one could have predicted, this letter doesn't attempt to provide any kind of analysis of the general atmosphere on our campus. The letter offers nothing but feeble efforts to whitewash Yale as much as possible lest the murder of Annie Le manages to scare away rich parents and alumni.

The title of Levin's piece is "What Happened at Yale and the Dark Side of the Human Soul." This title immediately signals that there will be no analysis of the collective environment where the tragedy has taken place. Presiden Levin prefers to foster the mystique of an isolated incident that "could have happened in any city, in any university, or in any workplace." Of course, it could have but the problem with Yale and New Haven is that bad things happen there all the time. The university abuses the graduatee students, the supporting staff, and the junior faculty. It abuses the surrounding community. Eventually, students and university workers turn against each other in violence. Does anybody see a connection here? Apparently, Levin doesn't.

As one of my readers suggested, the only response Yale is likely to provide to this tragedy is the growing nubmer of surveillance equipment and security on campus. My only contact with the New Haven police made me feel more victimized than I felt by the actual crime I was trying to report to them. The police officer who talked to me made nasty, harrassing remarks and made feel extremely uncomfortable. Having more of such officers crawling all over the campus will make Yale look "more secure" to the outsiders but it is very unlikely to actually change the way things are.

Yale has been going in a very wrong direction and nothing but some very profound changes would help this university.

Unprofessional Journalism: The Case of Yale University

For several years now, journalists have been whining all over the place that their profession has been dying out. Bad, mean and stupid readers started turning away from newspapers, magazines, and television news broadcasts. Now, more and more readers preferred the Internet to be their main source of the news. There has been no analysis, however, of why people don't trust the traditional media to provide them with news. Journalists are in no hurry to look at themselves as the main source of the public's disappointment with the traditional sources of information.

I was born in 1976, so maybe my vision of what news reporting used to be like in the XIX and the first half of the XX century is based on myths I encountered in books and movies. I always thought that the reporter's main job was ... well, to report. I though that a reporter is a person who would go anywhere and do anything for the sake of a good story.

Today, this is absolutely not the case. Journalists do not report, they do not hunt around for shocking facts and interesting discoveries. Why waste your time and energy doing that when you can limit your job description to sitting at home in a comfortable arm-chair and producing pieces filled with "opinions"? Sometimes, to bolster your opinions you can dig out some quasi-scientific study and manipulate it to fit your "opinion" du jour.

The atrocious murder of graduate student Annie Le of Yale University and the way it is being covered in the press has demonstrated once again just how much the traditional news media have degenerated. Reporters have no interest in actually going to Yale, talking to the students and the employees. Doing that could uncover things that the administration might not welcome. Why would journalists want to go against the enormous, rich and powerful Yale corporation? Uncovering corporate scandal is not what today's reporters want to do. It is so much easier to replicate the Yale administration press releases. And I'm sure it pays a lot better.

Had any of the reporters that keep publishing lies about the "safe" and "crime-free" New Haven actually talked to people who live, study and work in the shadow of Yale corporation, they might have discovered how much crime (both corporate and street crime) takes place on Yale campus. They might have found out that the administration often misleads the students' parents because it needs their money. They might have brought to light the shameful treatment of the Yale grad students, junior faculty, and lectors by the corporation. They might have finally figured out that providing education and doing research comes extremely low (if at all, I sometimes think) in the corporation's list of priorities.

But real reporting is dead. All we have left is a bunch of sycophants who have no interest in looking for the truth and who have the gall to call themselves journalists.

Horrible News from Yale

The brutal murder of Annie Le, a graduate student at my alma stepmother, has been a horrible shock. The way the story is being covered has been very one-sided. I have a strong feeling that many reporters are going out of their way to transmit the message the university administration wants to be spread around: Yale is generally safe, this is an isolated and unfortunate occurrence.

Don't believe that, people. As somebody who went to Yale I can tell you that there is nothing isolated about what happened to Annie Le.

So here are some of the myths the media and the administration are spreading about how secure Yale is:

Myth 1. "Random acts of violence on campus are “pretty rare”. Not true. Maybe it is at other universities, but at Yale it is extremely common for the students to be mugged, assaulted, robbed, beaten up, menaced with all kinds of weapons and harrassed. I hardly know any one who has not been a victim of a crime on campus. 

Myth 2. New Haven is a safe place. "After a stretch of crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, New Haven doesn’t feel dangerous today, said Jean Recapet, the general manager of Atticus Bookstore and Cafe, who has been working in the campus vicinity since 1982. “We feel like we are in a safe environment,” said Recapet." Of course, a business owner in a dangerous area of town has to say that. But anybody who has lived in New Haven (I lived around the corner from Atticus Bookstore and was one of the most regular patrons) knows that it is a very dangerous town and crime rate is extremely high. As a woman, I felt scared every time I had to go outside after dark. I'm surprised I was only assaulted once while living there. I think I have been lucky. If I start listing all of the cases where people I know personally were victims of crime on campus, this will turn into my longest post.

Myth 3. Yale buildings are secure thanks to swipe cards. This is such a joke. I regularly entered buildings without a swipe card. You just stand there for a minute waiting for somebody to use their card and just follow them in.

The reality is that there is a huge racial and class divide between the super rich Yale and the extremely poor town where it is located. There is poverty, anger, resentment, constant conflicts between the administration and the students or the administration and employees. There is this constant atmosphere of strife, of the administration treating the students (especially the graduate students) and the employees like total crap. It is so annoying that even after a terrible tragedy liike the murder of Annie Le Yale administration can't find the courage to recognize that our campus is VERY dangerous and something needs to be done right now to change things.

What's Good about Yale?

It's a very unpleasant feeling when you have to be constantly ashamed of your own school. As I have mentioned before, I didn't even attend my doctoral graduation because I felt no emotional attachment to the school or the diploma it gave me. I hope Yale changes, of course, and then I will be able to feel proud of having gone there. It seems, however, that is not going to happen for a while. Recent news from Yale are very discouraging.

Yale University Press has deemed it necessary to censor a scholarly volume analyzing the cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper and sparkled a huge controversy: "After consulting what it says were two dozen experts, the publishing house decided that not only would the offending cartoons not appear in the book, but all renditions of Mohammad -- including a classic sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Dore -- would be banned." It's hard to imagine the book titled The Cartoons That Shook the World without the actual cartoons. What next, a book on Cervantes without a single quote? A book on Goya with no reproductions of his paintings? The whole purpose that the book's author, Prof. Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University, was attempting to achieve with her analysis is undermined. And for what? An unfounded fear that somebody, somewhere might get upset? Controversy? But isn't the whole point of publishing research to provoke debate?

Yale UP based its cowardly and idiotic decision on the opinions of some unidentified experts whose names it made every effort to conceal not only from the public but also from the author herself: "Adding insult to injury, the Yale Press's director, John Donatich, only allowed Klausen to read a summary of the experts' recommendations if she signed a gag order that barred her from discussing them." The only reason for this secrecy must be that the "experts" in question realize how unreasonable and undemocratic their "expert opinions" are. What's scary, though, is that a university press should limit its own authors out of a deference to a bunch of insane religious fanatics. Research cannot exist without the freedom of thought and the freedom of expression. Academics need to be able to conduct their work and publish their findings without the limitations of some badly digested idea of political correctness.