Dear Media - leave us alone!

By Harlan Cohen

To the Members of the National Media:

For years you have deemed it necessary to turn every petty issue that arises here at Yale into national news. Please stop! Since I applied to Yale four years ago you have brought up issue after issue, from GESO to the Bass and Kramer grants, as part of an attempt to discredit Yale in your magazines, on your television shows, and in your newspapers. I've always found your fixation with my school annoying and, quite frankly, ridiculous. This time, though, it's personal.

In following the story of the "Yale Five" and their current fight with the Administration you have decided not only to bash Yale but to completely misconstrue my life here. Some Orthodox Jewish students currently have a problem with Yale housing rules. That does not mean, as you have portrayed, that Jews can't live at Yale. Of course, you don't want to hear what Jewish life here is really like. Take a typical recent encounter with the media:

Me: Hey, why don't you interview me? I'm an Orthodox Jew.

Media Guy: Really!? (He runs over with his cameraman.) So, what do you think about Yale?

Me: I love it here. I love Yale. I love studying with the greatest historians and thinkers in the world. I love the laid- back atmosphere. I love the Jewish community....

Media Guy: Sorry, we can't use you; not enough strife.

This fixation with "crises" at Yale really started a long time ago. I am sick of coming home from school to hear my family and their friends ask stupid questions like, "How come Yale locks up grad students in little cages and feeds them old chicken bones?" or "Is it true that students have underground bunkers to protect themselves from roving street gangs?"

Why are you making my life so difficult? Why must you make every event at Yale into national news?

If you believe that Yale is a microcosm of America, you're a bunch of morons. Yale is an elitist, northeastern university full of overachieving, intellectually-stimulated young adults. Does that really sound to you like a description of the United States as a whole? It's certainly not the country that I live in.

Maybe it's a conspiracy. Maybe you all went to Harvard. Or maybe you are just Communists, bent on tearing down these ivy-covered walls of bourgeois capitalism.

My best guess is that you are motivated by a combination of jealousy and spite. You wish you went to Yale, and now you are going to convince the world, and yourself, that Yale really is nothing special, that you didn't want to go there anyway. Well, suck it up.

Does the "Yale Five" really belong on World News Tonight? With so many problems in American society today, is Yale really that important? If you want to look at education, look at our troubled urban schools. If you want to look at sexuality and religion in America, look at sexuality and religion in America--not sexuality and religion at Yale.

The news media can act as a powerful tool. You have the ability to educate Americans, to make them aware. Yale can solve its own problems. In contrast, problems in urban education are a plague sweeping through our overcrowded cities. An active and aware citizenry may be the only way to effect real lasting change.

So next time you consider writing about problems at Yale, ask yourselves if that news van might more responsibly be sent somewhere else.

Harlan Cohen is a senior in Calhoun College.

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