Selective Sensitivity At Yale

You remember Yale. It’s that school in New Haven whose law school is filled with professors and students who felt their First Amendment rights were abridged by a temporary visit or two every year by military recruiters who were willing to talk to Yale law students (none of whom was forced to sign up for interviews) who might be interested in a job. Somehow, the very presence on campus of a lawyer who worked for an organization, the armed forces, with a policy that was regarded as unfriendly to homosexuals was regarded as a threat — even though the policy in question was a requirement in a law passed by Congress and signed by the (Democratic) president. (Funny, Yale didn’t bar recruiters from Congress or the executive branch.)

Some observers have found it odd that the sensitivities of Yale profs and students were offended by the presence of these recruiters but presumably not by Yale’s seeking out as a student one Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, which murdered homosexuals as a matter of policy. According to the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, in the article linked above,

Almost no one will now defend Mr. Rahmatullah’s presence as a special student, even though a week ago many had no such inhibitions in a splashy New York Times magazine piece, which broke the news that he had been at Yale for eight months. In that piece, Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions before he took the same post at Stanford, explained that Yale had missed out on another foreign student of the same caliber as Mr. Rahmatullah but that “we lost him to Harvard,” and “I didn’t want that to happen again.”

Some Yalies object to Mr. Rahmatullah’s presence, but not all. Fund quotes one:

Amy Aaland, the executive director of the Jewish center where Mr. Rahmatullah frequently eats dinner, has no problems with him. She told the Yale Daily news that she sees his story “as representative of Yale’s rich student diversity.”

Well, yes. I suppose he does provide a bit of diversity. But where are the representatives of other dictatorial regimes such as the North Koreans, et. al., or does Yale think of all murderous regimes as fungible?

Now there is a new furor at Yale. This time the tender sensitivities of many Yalies are offended by the failure to revoke a conference invitation to Mr. Kiwi Camara when it was learned that in his first year at Harvard Law School

Mr. Camara posted notes from his first-year Harvard property law class online, a common practice. The notes referred to blacks in shorthand as “nigs.” Another student complained about the posting, and the notes were taken down….

Mr. Camara said he had “no good explanation” for why he used the derogatory language in his notes. “I’m not going to try to justify it,” he said. “It’s quite right it should be condemned.”

He said he was not a racist and avoids using derogatory statements about black people in public and in private. He also expressed concern about the level of racism among law students and said he hoped the controversy can bring people of different races together.

Mr. Camara apologized for the posting, but the incident has dogged him, he said in a telephone interview on Monday….

(As an aside, it may be worth noting that Mr. Camarra, who was invited to present a paper on an unrelated topic, would presumably also add to the wondrous “diversity” at Yale: he was born in the Phillipines, grew up in Cleveland and Hawaii, and graduated from Harvard Law School at 19 (so he must have been around 16 when he posted the offensive abbreviation online).

There was a good deal of pressure to withdraw his invitation.

Matthew Brewer, a co-chairman of the Black Law Students Association at Yale, wrote in an e-mail message that the organization was disappointed about the decision to invite Mr. Camara to the symposium….

Some say the Harvard incident called into question Mr. Camara’s character. Curtis Mahoney, the editor in chief of the law journal, said Mr. Camara was “under an obligation to show more public contrition” at the time of the incident.

To Mr. Mahoney’s and Yale’s credit, the invitation has not been withdrawn.

Mr. Mahoney, along with other members of the symposium board and top journal editors, decided to continue their plans to publish Mr. Camara’s paper, which is scheduled to be in the law journal next year. They also decided, after conferring with a diverse group of students and professors, not to rescind the invitation for Mr. Camara to speak at the symposium, he said.

Mr. Mahoney called Mr. Camara’s comments “reprehensible,” but said he thought the journal should evaluate articles on the strength of their arguments and not the character of their authors. He said there was no consistent way for the journal to impose a character test.

In this post yesterday I discussed this review of a new book dealing with the history of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which under the direction of Thurgood Marshall succeeded in advancing goal of civil rights. Much of the review (and my post) dealt with the reaction to Marshall’s selecting Jack Greenberg, a white man, to succeed him, rather than Robert Carter, his long time number two man, but I did not quote the following passage:

… Marshall was far too shrewd a political operator to believe that promoting Greenberg would not rankle some observers. It struck many as odd to have a white person leading an organization dedicated to countering ingrained notions about Negro inferiority. Indeed, The New York Times’s headline read “White Man Succeeds Thurgood Marshall.” Upon announcing his designated successor to LDF’s board of directors, Marshall acknowledged that he had at least considered race as a factor when he said, perhaps only half-jokingly, “It would be better if he was a nigger, but nevertheless….”

I wonder if the black and other law students at Yale would have objected to an invitation to Justice Marshall because of whatever that quote reveals about his character. Perhaps, in keeping with the nature of racial preference, there is a different standard for black than for Filipino speech.