Tuesday, September 22, 2009

* What Glorifies Yale Glorifies Harvard . . .

















Letter to the Editor
The Crimson

Dear Editor:

Why do all things Yale have to do with all things Harvard too? These two Ivies are like right and left arms to New England --- indeed to the Academy itself--- and have been so since July 15, 1838, nearly 200 years ago, when Ralph Waldo Emerson grafted them (as the sites of equally prestigious Divinity Schools) to the same intellectual discussion forever in his divine heresy The Address to the Divinity Students at Harvard College.


That address challenged the very nature of orthodoxy itself , positing Transcendentalism in its place, a belief which has become progenitor of the self-help and self-esteem movements ubiquitous in our time.

Like Harvard, Yale is too important to society, and the Academy, not to be critiqued. It is in that spirit that I invite you and your readers therefore to view my blog The Anti-Yale at
http://theantiyale.blogspot.com/ which includes my letter to Yale’s President Giamatti in 1980 about the racial profiling incident I witnessed at Yale on my graduation night, outlined in a letter to The Crimson published last week.

The Anti-Yale blog is dedicated to Yale's most famous critic (In memory of Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. who alerted me that Man is God at Yale) and is inspired by one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's favorite Proverbs( "Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful" Proverbs 27: 6).

It is comprised of letters, many published, both chiding and encouraging various parts of the University since my graduation in 1980, including the tragic murder at Yale two weeks ago.
In that vein it contains a link to an article on the unsolved disappearance in 1984 of Yale Divinity School student Sam Todd http://yaledisappearance.blogspot.com/
first published in the now defunct Connecticut Magazine in 1985.



What glorifies Yale may glorify Harvard; What afflicts Yale may afflict Harvard too. In that spirit, I invite The Crimson editors and their readers to visit Sincerely,

Paul D. Keane

M. Div. ‘80
Yale Divinity School

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