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Saturday, February 03, 2007
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A Flood of Applications UD discerns a relationship between two recent stories out of Yale. First, the campus paper reports, with some concern, a pretty massive drop in applications. The reporter tries to account for this ('Our press exposure over the last 12 months has ranged from bad — the flap surrounding the decision not to hire professor Juan Cole of Michigan, which may have been related to statements made on his blog — to worse — the alumni uproar after the New York Times article about a former Taliban official attending Yale as a nondegree student. Even Sex Week got national sneers; after a disparaging story ran on a radio show in my hometown of Cincinnati, my parents heard comments such as, “I wouldn’t let my daughter go to a school that did that.” Finally, we had the bizarre saga of E. Forbes Smiley III, chronic rare map thief and scourge of the Beinecke Rare Book Library.'), but it may simply be that people are beginning to understand that the annual Race for the Ivies is unnecessary, given the options... There's also this, which suggests that some genius at Yale is already doing damage control: A couple of Yale students have been having, according to an email written by a Yale professor, "the time of their lives" in a shower stall at one of the residential houses. Their "pleasureable [pleasurable is misspelled, which is no big deal, though if you're a professor and, like this guy, sending an email to everyone in a community, you should probably look the word up] and exciting... intimate activity" offends some people, and the professor, who's head of the house where these two routinely flood the shower, asks them to stop. [The professor, by the way, has two kids: "Emerson (named after Ralph Waldo Emerson), who is nearly 5 years old; and ... Ellison (named after Ralph Waldo Ellison), who is nearly 2."] Just in time for the next round of applications, Yale's residential housing facilities are being showcased in the national media as pleasurable, exciting, and intimate... |