Yale headlines: All the fits are news to print

Edward Norton, ES '91, looked erudite just watching
his "Best Supporting Actor" clip during Monday's
Academy Awards. Other actors looked embarrassed at the sight of their shamelessly theatrical work, but not Norton. No, viewing that segment from Primal Fear, he conducted himself like a well-educated thespian, like an intellecual stoic, like a self-assured, self-proclaimed winner. Like, if you will, a true, blue Yalie.

Yet Norton's proud academic heritage had to be repressed in his other recent starring role, as Woody Harrelson's brilliant lawyer in The People Vs. Larry Flynt. In fact, the writers of that film chose to have Norton proclaim himself a Harvard man. Director Milos Forman and his crew are not alone in believing the Yale name these days carries with it a negative stigma to be avoided at all costs: look at The Simpsons' damnable Mr. Burns, or Harrison Ford's heartless corporate giant in last year's Sabrina remake.

In fact, pop culture is just now catching on to a new wave of anti-Bulldog sentiment that has permeated the national print media over the past 10 years. Last year's extensive coverage of Yale's labor conflicts was only the latest in a series of recent media portrayals of Yale as "a bastion of WASP privilege," as Time put it in 1991.

While Yale has always enjoyed a prominent place in the nation's journals, that prominence was not always so tainted. Oliver Jensen, DC '36, recalled in a 1991 American Heritage piece that the Yale of his day was part of a proud national mentality. "The Harvard-Yale events...made the front pages. Even the dean's list, regularly and in toto, was printed in the New York Times." But the 1990s have brought a long series of controversies and outrages concerning Yale to the headlines of our national press. Whether attacking our links to tradition and the "old boys' network" or mocking our vocal liberal leanings, writers have loved attacking what they've perceived as the new Yale ideology.

The "Gay School": October 1989

From the pages of the New Haven Advocate into the national magazine The Progressive (which would many years later pay special note to Yale's union disputes), writer Paul Bass, JE '82, brought the University's gay and lesbian student organizations to the country's attention when he reported that 200 participants at a gay and lesbian scholars' conference stormed the New Haven police department following an alleged gay-bashing by the cops. According to the February 1990 Progressive, a Yale law professor discovered conference posters of "a woman masturbating, another showed two women embracing, a third showed two naked men's pelvises." The professor was outraged--and so were the police, who allegedly assaulted nine gay men who resisted the confiscation of the posters. Though Bass's portrayal of the incident sympathized with the gay men, the rest of the media did not take so kindly to the sudden appearance of a large and vocal gay group at Yale. In fact, the story fueled suspicions about Yale that culminated in The Wall Street Journal's 1993 declaration that the University had become "a gay school." Basing its statistics on high attendence at the LGB co-op's dances, the Journal created a stereotype that clings even today; "one in four, maybe more" is a common taunt hurled at Elis by students at other, "straighter" Ivies.

"Yellow people wouldn't have done that": Fall 1990

Yale's black students found themselves portrayed in the media not as the victims of prejudice, but the irresponsible instigators in Jeff Rosen's "Hate Mail," appearing in a February, 1991 New Republic which detailed how the previous fall, 10 black Law School students recieved an anonymous letter asking, "Now do you know why we call you NIGGERS?"

In Rosen's view, Yalies showed themselves to be bumbling, unorganized radicals in their response to the letter. A group of striking students attended "race-sensitivity workshops" to which Law School Dean Guido Calabresi gave $5,000--even though the organizers of the workshop, Project Reach, would have come for "as little as $100," according to Rosen. Choice phrases from the workshop were printed to make Yale look ridiculous; lines like "I'd give my left ball to end racism" and "White people need encouragement too." A boycott of Naples Pizzeria five days later was also lampooned: the student organizers claimed that a black freshman "had been falsely accused of being drunk" and that the Naples staff had used racial slurs when forcing her to leave, but Rosen called this ridiculous. What the protestors insisted was the slur "Yellow people wouldn't have done that," Rosen (and then-freshman Richard Cho, SM'94, writing in the YDN) claimed was actually "Yale people wouldn't have done that," in a traditional Naples accent. The strike was called off "wihout explanation or apology." This, said Rosen, was "the lesson of the sensitivity workshops."

The "commemorative accusation": 1991-2

Once the '90s hit, however, and an egalitarian America strived to make everything PC and thereby OK, journalists stopped mocking Yale's liberals and began attacking its conservatives. The furor that erupted over Skull and Bones' April 1991 decision to admit women hit every major U.S. publication--and had reporters begging President Bush, DC '48, to comment. After 15 seniors tapped seven women for the secret society, the first in the organization's 160-year history, Bones alumni changed the locks on the tomb to protest the inclusion of the females. The media hounded illustrious alums like Bush and Senator John Kerry, JE '66, for their opinions; Bush remained loyal to the Bones and kept silent.

The papers had a field day lambasting Yale for being "dominated by white men" and demonstrating how "the problems of an elitest secret society are... a microcosm of the inequality throughout education" according to an editorial in The Nation. An April Newsweek mocked the University's secret societies as "bastions of male privilege... [that] aren't worth storming in the first place" in an article by Jerry Adler, calling the Skull and Bones tomb "a clubhouse" where students discuss "How I made out at Vassar last weekend." The Nation joined other papers in asking Bush to "condemn" Skull and Bones, or "at least resign as the Education President."

If Skull and Bones brought Yale women into the spotlight, however, Maya Lin's Women's Table kept them there. Its 1992 unveiling, according to Diana West in the May American Spectator, did not so much celebrate women's achievements at Yale so much as indict the University's incomprehensible exclusion of women from 1701 to 1969. It is "not a tribute to Yale's history of women on campus but... a reproach to Yale's history of educating men," West wrote. She pointed to the zeros on the monument that appear every year no women were admitted, and asked "who can imagine Vassar celebrating its addition of male students by reducing the years men were excluded to a legacy of zeros?" Even trying to mend its ways, Yale fails, according to The Spectator. "The [monument] has come to emphasize the historic exclusion of women, not any current achievements," West concluded.

Can't Yale do anything right by women? In 1993 it would get the chance: women's magazines nationwide went boffo over the possibility of a woman becoming University President. In an article titled "Making it in the Ultimate Men's Club" by Maggie Mahar in the March Working Woman, Provost Judith Rodin was presented as the conqueror of male domination at Yale, who could only be snubbed for the position because "she's a divorced single mother. People wonder about the social life of an attractive single woman."

Of course, Rodin didn't get the job.

"The Death of Yale": Summer 1992-Spring 1995

President Benno Schmidt's resignation in June 1992 provided the University with its next vilification in the national press. In the National Review, for example, Yale College Dean Donald Kagan blamed the "imperial faculty" for stopping Schmidt's efforts to curb Yale's ballooning deficit before both he and Schmidt resigned their posts. Kagan continued teaching while Schmidt started his own business: for-profit schools across America. The fiasco was one of former Cantab John Sedgewick's main gloating points in his 1994 story for GQ, boldy heralding "The Death of Yale" on the April cover. One year later, William F. Buckley, Jr., plucked Yalie Joshua Hochschild's, JE '94, article from the pages of the Yale Free Press and plastered it onthe pages of the National Review. The article called the university "a corpse [that] deserves the name `Yale' only analogically," and proclaimed that "the majority of women and men in the College today are basically unfit for the institution of marriage." The new charges were not that Yale was too conservative, as it had been portrayed during the Skull and Bones fiasco. America had just voted in Newt and the Contract With America, and now Yale was attacked for Back to A & E...