Picking on the elites

Baseball long reigned as our national pastime. I don't think any one activity meets the definition of national pastime anymore, but making fun of ivy league schools doing stupid stuff would merit consideration. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal has been looking at Yale's admission of a Taliban ambassador. Today he continues his look at ivy league lunacy.

Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last month Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard; today Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi will speak by video to a conference at Columbia University that his regime is cosponsoring. (Columbia won't answer questions about how much funding it got from Libya or what implied strings were attached.) Then there's Yale, which for three weeks has refused to make any comment or defense beyond a vague 144-word statement about its decision to admit Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi--a former ambassador-at-large of the murderous Afghan Taliban--as a special student. . . . .
There is a line beyond which tolerance and political correctness become willful blindness. Eli Muller, a reporter for the Yale Daily News, was stunned back in 2000 when the lies of another Taliban spokesman who visited Yale "went nearly unchallenged." He concluded that the "moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil." Today, you can say that about more than just some naïve students. You can add the administrators who abdicated their moral responsibility and admitted Mr. Hashemi.

Decades ago it was the pinnacle of success to send your children to an ivy league school. Today I wouldn't consider letting my kids attend one of those cesspools of indoctrination.