Yale: No Means Yes, Yes Means Anal ??

Yale Elite Series

Yale suspends fraternity for raunchy chants

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/18/connecticut.yale.frat/index.html

18 May 2011

Months after video of its pledges shouting pro-rape chants went viral on YouTube, an elite fraternity chapter at Yale has been suspended. Yale College Dean Mary Miller announced the suspension of the university's Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter on Tuesday in an e-mail to students and faculty. The chapter drew widespread criticism last fall after its pledges chanted slogans that seemed to advocate rape, such as "No Means Yes" and "Yes Means Anal." Video of the frat's antics circulated widely on the internet. Delta Kappa Epsilon has operated at Yale since 1844. The chapter's illustrious roster of former members includes presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

George W. Bush

Poison Ivy League by Elvis Presley

Yale Elite Series

Lyrics

Hail to thee old ivy league
Poison ivy league
The ra-ra boys are sitting round the table tonight
The ra-ra boys have lots of plans in view
They're gonna have panty raids
And make their own lemonade
They'll live it up just like the big boys do

Poison ivy league, boys in that ivy league
Give me an itch, those sons of the rich
That poison ivy league

The ra-ra boys will go to bed so early tonight
Before exams they need a lot of rest
They gotta make good for dad
They gotta make good so bad
They'll even pay someone to take that test

Poison ivy league, boys in that ivy league
How can they flunk, they're so full of bunk
That poison ivy league

The ra-ra boys are being groomed for business some day
For better things to college they were sent
And you can bet they'll be the head of the company
As long as dear old daddy's president

Poison ivy league, boys in that ivy league
So loaded with cash, they give me a rash
That poison ivy league

So let it be told
I won't touch them with a ten foot pole
That poison Ivy league

Yale and Geronimo’s Skull

Yale Elite Series

US tries to stop Geronimo lawsuit

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8112051.stm

21 Jun 2009

US officials have moved to block a legal bid by descendants of Apache leader Geronimo to have his remains reburied. Geronimo's relatives say some body parts were stolen almost 100 years ago by members of a society linked to Yale University to keep in their clubhouse. The society, known as Skull and Bones, is alleged to have stolen some of Geronimo's remains from a burial plot in Oklahoma in 1918. The relatives want to rebury the warrior, who died in 1909, near his birthplace in New Mexico. But the justice department has asked a federal judge to dismiss their lawsuit.

Geronimo’s Heirs Sue Secret Yale Society Over His Skull

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/us/20geronimo.html

19 Feb 2009

Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1909. A longstanding tradition among members of Skull and Bones holds that Prescott S. Bush — father of President George Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush — broke into the grave with some classmates during World War I and made off with the skull, two bones, a bridle and some stirrups, all of which were put on display at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven, known as the Tomb.

The story gained some validity in 2005, when a historian discovered a letter written in 1918 from one Skull and Bones member to another saying the skull had been taken from a grave at Fort Sill along with several pieces of tack for a horse. Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general who is representing Geronimo’s family, acknowledged he had no hard proof that the story was true. Yet he said he hoped the court would clear up the matter.

Yale Skull and Bones - Late 1800s

George W. Bush

Yale and Complicit Bias in the SAT

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

There is strong evidence that the verbal section of the SAT, which Yale has valued above the math section and subject tests, was the most biased part of the SAT. Family background, race, and gender do translate into vocabulary differences. Skewed question selection certainly contributes to the test score disparities between black and whites. [Jay Rosner, “On White Preferences,” Nation, 14 Apr 2003]

Sometimes those biases were there by intentional design, as in the 1930s; other times those biases were there because of unexamined assumptions about vocabulary and logic. The elite private sector has been able to benefit from the disguise of social-class selection by the seemingly neutral device of standardization aptitude tests. At best, elite private colleges have been merely complicit in the misrecognition of social class as academic merit. Selective college admissions throughout the twentieth century appear to have been a case of inequality by design.

Yale Adopts Character Standards – 1970s

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

In 1967, Yale dropped personal evaluation categories and photos. The effort to classify and predict personal qualities and leadership potential had not been abandoned, but its technology was being re-tooled. Yale retired its predicted grade algorithm in 1972. This radical departure for Yale’s tradition of measuring academic ability could be seen as yet another move away from objective measure of brains toward subjective selection based on character. Yale proposed to conduct research on reliable measures of personality.

They immediately set about translating those factors into behavioral types and came up with seven types of successful students and five types of unsuccessful students. The seven were artists, athletes, careerists, grinds, leaders, scholars, and socializers. The five failures were alienated, directionless, disliked, extreme grinds, and unqualified. Yale could cherry-pick from among privileged and prepared youths while reserving room for legacy and racial targets.

A Life in Our Times by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1981, Excerpts

Primary responsibility is exercised, even monopolized, by a small group of well-connected, upper-income Americans selected for the task by family membership and attendance at Groton, Exeter, Andover or St. Paul’s and Princeton, Harvard or Yale. They are attracted to the State department because manner there is as important as knowledge and more easily acquired and because it is the one government department where a true-blue gentleman can work. Among Harvard men, it is not important that an individual be intelligent, but he does have to be superior.

Yale Admits Blacks - 1969

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

The other important change in the composition of the Yale College was the enrollment of Black undergraduates. In 1969, Yale enrolled a total of twenty-six Black undergraduates. Yale was as white as elephant ivory. Racist drawings adorned the inner walls of Payne Whitney Gym. The college named after the radical slave master John C. Calhoun had Confederate flags and bull whips outside its dining room.

By 1975, eighty-six undergraduate Blacks entered ale. The average between 1975 and 1997 was ninety-one per year or 7 percent of each undergraduate class. By 2000, Black faculty representation had inched up to being 3 percent at Yale. Blacks, however, continue to be overrepresented in maintenance positions. In 2002, Blacks were nearly 44 percent of Yale’s blue-collar workers.

Even though Yale is now, without doubt, more diverse in gender, race, and religion than ever before, the preponderance of wealthy, White families has not changed from 1952 to the present.

Yale Goes Coed - 1969

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

Yale College was an all-male institution from its founding to 1969 when the first undergraduate females breeched its defenses. Women had been allowed into Yale’s graduate art school for a bit of cultural polish since the late nineteenth century, but in the undergraduate domain, the only women in New Haven were visiting relatives, girl friends, prostitutes, or strippers. It was an adolescent boy’s world with more than its share of ugly episodes. One the worst was “the gang rape of a prostitute in 1940 that was a running public joke during the Brewster’s undergraduate years.” [Kabaservice, “Kingman Brewster and the Rise and Fall,” 436]. Going coeducational ended the most blatant manifestations of Yale’s masculine culture, both in college and at alumni events.

In the first academic year of coeducation, 1969-19780, there were 1,025 men, and 588 women. The “freshmen” class had 230 women, but 358 transferring women moved into the sophomore, junior, and senior classes to spread women around, helping to set a new tone on campus. The Seven Sisters colleges, close to Yale in social composition and geography, provided more than their share. Of the transferring families, fully 124 were from just three of them: Wellesley, Smith, and Vassar.

In 1994, George W. Bush told an interviewer that Yale “went downhill since they admitted women.”

Yale Corporation – Ivy Group

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

The Yale Corporation, which holds power of final say on anything it cares to rule on, always kept tight control over financial aid. The Corporation legally owns and controls Yale. Yale coordinated its aid program with the rest of the Ivy League, and from 1958, Yale also worked with MIT, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University. Financial officers from all those institutions would meet as the “Ivy Group,” to “compare and negotiate awards to joint scholarship candidates and ensure progress towards the standardization of awards.”

Yale and the Underprivileged Upwardly Mobile

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

As Yale admissions dean during the 1960s, Howe repeatedly explained to alumni that Yale was an upper-class liberal-arts college for the education of future leaders. Admission decisions at Yale had to take its social composition and special mission into account. Yale was looked to by families in the upper-class for social reproduction. In an alumni convocation speech Howe explained:

“To those who have enjoyed the privileges of cultural opportunities, wealth, and social standing, there is no stronger desire than to preserve the same for their children, and admission to Yale is one of the best ways to do it. To those less privileged, identification with a prestige-laden institution is probably the most effective vehicle for upward mobility. But those who are experiencing such mobility should, we are constantly reminded, have unusual reserves of intelligence and stamina to overcome the frequently painful, disturbing aspects of the process. Most of us have a natural, genuine sympathy for the underdog, and yet it is when sympathy rules reason that we make our worst admission errors. There is a very thin line indeed, between creating opportunity and causing injury.”

The upwardly mobile were suitable for vocational subjects at state universities, after which they could be technicians or accountants, but America’s future leaders should be culturally prepped in privileged families if they were to properly benefit from the stock of wisdom available in a liberal-arts residential college.

Howe feared that the upwardly mobile, at a place like Yale, would fall in with a fast, hard-drinking set, to the detriment of their studies and meager bank account.  Ivy colleges as a tool of upward mobility were like a sharp hook that harms as it hoists the underprivileged; youths from lower social classes would not be well matched to the college culture.

Artist: Eric Drooker

Yale and the Select Colleges

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

In 1968, research conducted by Harvard estimated there were approximately sixty-nine select colleges in the land. Yale’s Office of Institutional Research [OIR] circulated a confidential report on each of the sixty-nine colleges ranked by entering SAT scores. Institutions were rated “A” to “F” with fifty points separating each letter on the scale. Neither Harvard nor Yale was in the “A” group.

A: Cal Tech, Carnegie-Melon, MIT, Stanford, Swarthmore, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD. Most of the “A” list were in California, not New England.

B: Amherst, Harvard, and Yale. 

C: Brandeis, Bryan Maw, Harvey Mudd, New College, Pomona, Reed, and Wesleyan.

D: Barnard, Brown, Cornell, Haverford, Middlebury, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, St. John’s in Maryland, Trinity in Connecticut, and Williams.

E & F: The rest of the sixty-nine, including the two remaining Ivy League members, Colombia University and Dartmouth.

These four state universities - UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison – have the most “super students” in the entire United States because unlike the Ivies they do admissions at the top end of the ability pool based on academic, not personal, qualities.

Elite public institutions tend to draw from a broader social stratum than private ones do. Being dependent on the public purse, rather than on affluent families’ personal savings, public elite universities can truly admit students without any regard to ability to pay. They tend to be more middle class, and have a larger representation from the working class that America’s private elite colleges. Public elite universities also have a different sense of mission than private ones do. Being upper class, and more dependent on the taxpayer’s favor, public elite universities tend to focus less on old traditional humanities subjects, and more on modern natural science and technology.

Yale and the Posture Photographs

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

Yale willingly participated in eugenic schemes to measure personal character, in particular the infamous practice that lasted until 1968 of taking nude “posture” photographs to study the relation of body type to personal abilities. Cohort after cohort of Yale men would walk from their freshman dorms on old campus over to Payne-Whitney Gymnasium, stand in line on the fourth floor, and enter one at a time into a room without windows. Inside, two technicians would instruct youth to disrobe before they would place metal pins against his spine that would both measure and hold each youth in position while three photographs were taken. One need not imagine the experience generated more, or less, anxiety than an army induction physical, and the unpleasant registration procedure may have played some ritualistic role for the youth demarcating, like a military haircut, the transition from secondary school to Ivy League status. The practice, begun at a few elite colleges in the 1930s, was required at all of the Ivy League colleges [Brown, Colombia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale] and the Seven Sisters [Barnard, Bryn, Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley] from the 1940s to the 1960s. 

At Harvard, the posture photographs were part of a formal medical discourse on “character.” Every new Harvard undergraduate would be photographed naked and then, on a separate occasion, subjected to a medical exam by a member of the department of hygiene. The doctor would observe and engage the freshman in a conversation about feelings, attitudes, and activities. The doctor was supposed to use a diagnostic tool that presumed to evaluate individuals against a normative standard of what constituted a healthy masculine male. Harvard’s medical exam, regardless of intent, was a technology that validated particular masculine cultural stereotypes, while stigmatizing others as deviant.

Student’s had to arrive for the doctor’s examination with a five-page questionnaire filled in, which included thinly disguised ethnic inquiries, requesting that one list one’s religious denomination, as well as one’s father’s and mother’s birthplace. Just as at Yale, answers to those questions helped Harvard track its Jews. And there were a number of questions on social class. One had to list the occupation of every family member, and report incomes.

New York Times Article 15 Jan 1995

It was Naomi Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," who opened the Pandora's box of posture-photo controversy. In that book and in a 1992 Op-Ed piece in The Times, Wolf (Yale '84) bitterly attacked Dick Cavett (Yale '55) for a joke he'd made at Wolf's graduation ceremonies. According to Wolf, who'd never had a posture photo taken (the practice was discontinued at Yale in 1968), Cavett took the microphone and told the following anecdote:

“When I was an undergraduate, there were no women at Yale. The women went to Vassar. At Vassar they had nude photographs taken of women in gym class to check their posture. One year the photos were stolen and turned up for sale in New Haven's red-light district." His punchline: "The photos found no buyers."

Yale and Eugenics

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

In the 1880s, Sumner was one of Yale’s most popular professors. His survival-of-the-fittest social doctrines, called eugenics, was to be a science of genetic selection to ensure the upward evolution of the race. The socially unfit, congregated in “inferior” ethnic groups, were to be restricted and discouraged from reproduction, by sterilization if necessary, and the superior race, frequently referred to in America as the “Nordic race,” were to be given the laws and schools that would allow them to flourish.

In the United States, the eugenic message the well received by many members of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant [WASP] establishment. It harmonized with their sense of social and cultural superiority and fit so perfectly with anti-Black and anti-immigrant prejudice that prominent American scientists and politicians took up the cause with religious-like fervor.

Eugenicists scored some important victories in the 1920s. The 1924 immigration bill that excluded Jews and Japanese, and cut to a trickle the flow Mediterranean and Eastern European families, passed in the House by a vote of 326-71 and in the Senate by 62-6: it was signed into law by President Coolidge with the words, ‘America must be kept American.” In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of compulsory sterilization for the unfit.

Yale and the Leadership Class

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

Yale is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in America. Its role in our society, from colonial times to the present, has been extraordinary. Founded in 1701 by Puritans who thought Harvard, established in 1636, had gotten lax. Yale’s original purpose was the same as its rival, to provide a supply of educated clergy to Calvanist Congregationalists in New England. By the time of the American Revolution, however, Yale was already producing more lawyers than ministers, and careers in industry, trade, and banking took off after the Civil War. Throughout our history, Yale has provided prominent lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and politicians, for the latter Yale is best known today. When George W. Bush, a fifth-generation Yalie, completes his second term in 2009, a Yale man will have been sitting at the president’s desk for twenty years. [Note: both Hillary/Bill Clinton are Yale Law, Obama is Harvard Law].

Determining who had the personal ability to play a leading role in society was what the admissions game was all about. Yale was there to nurture the leadership class in America and that social role provided the criteria enabling it to select from among its many academically qualified applicants. The admissions challenge was how to identify who had the most personal promise at the age of seventeen to become a leader.

Yale Alumni Magazine May/June 2004: “Yale is the extraordinary power of privilege: the intense web of connections knitting together America’s upper classes through family ties, business relationships, philanthropic and civic activities, social and recreational life, and of course, education.”

Church of Yale Law