Exposing Yale’s Sordid Side: “The Inner Ring” by C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis aptly describes in one published lecture the nature of a very human game, which is really about how soft power, which is often buttressed by institutional position, works in any human organization. To use Nietzsche’s expression (which Lewis would have hardly appreciated), the dynamics of an inner ring is human, all too human, and thus hardly an extractible part of the human condition. Yet it is much more salient, and arguably even dysfunctional, in just some organizations, especially those that have an elite reputation such as Yale, whose essence, we shall investigate here, might be exclusion even within the university community, such that some vulnerable members are told they are not really members (but that their donations are welcome).

The full essay is at "Exposing Yale's Sordid Side."

Yale's Original Sin

I take it as a matter of divine justice that redemption can elude a convenient, belated atonement, especially if the atoning individual or institution does not really grasp the root of the original sin and thus the sin continues under other manifestations even though admittedly they may be less severe. I contend that when Peter Salovey, Yale University’s president, apologized on behalf of the Yale Corporation for having oppressed two Black men nearly two centuries earlier, he was not aware of the university’s underlying exaggerated fixation on the insider/outsider dichotomy that was still salient in 2023. To be sure, Nietzsche wrote that the strong should maintain a pathos of distance from the weak, lest the latter beguile the former into voluntarily renouncing their innate strength. Kant distinguished intimacy from difference as together making up the dialectic of attraction and distance. When a customer with the strength of having money naturally distances oneself from a rude employee of a retail company who is resentful, such distance is hardly artificial. Yet when a university whose administrators and faculty feel the emotional need to distance themselves qua insiders from outsiders to such an extent that even alumni who return to campus to work on academic projects, such as writing a book, are relegated as outsiders—hence not “members of the community”—then the distancing stems from a rather unnatural pathology. I contend that such a pathology still plagued Yale like an invisible blanket in 2023, almost two-hundred years after that university had refused to allow two black auditors to speak in courses at Yale’s theological seminary (divinity school). That original sin, although atoned for, still ran through Yale’s puffed-up veins in 2023, hence intimacy and strength continued quite naturally to elude that university—the redemption of which would require more of a mirror than an apology to two dead Black auditors could provide. Although Yale appeared in 2023 to be self-confident to external stakeholders and the general public, Nietzsche’s advice applied to people considering coming or giving to Yale nonetheless: The strong should not get too close to weak, resentful birds of prey just as a healthy person should not go to a hospital lest such a person becomes sick too.

Yale was founded in 1701. More than 300 years later, in 2023, the university conferred honorary masters degrees on two Black men who could neither matriculate nor graduate when they came to the university’s theological seminary in 1834 and the 1840s, for it was illegal then for Black people from other states to attend college in New Haven. James Pennington and Alexander Crummell could only sit in on classes, but even in that marginal capacity, without being allowed to speak in class and check out library books—even those being discussed in the classes. In an 1851 lecture in Britain, published in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Pennington, an escaped slave, described his two years at Yale as his “visitorship” and catalogued the “oppression” he faced, including that he “could not get a book from the library.” Yale was not without blame, for the local law only forbid Pennington and Crummell from enrolling as students and graduating.

I contend that Yale’s administration was being petty in refusing to allow the non-students to speak in class and check out books from the library. I bet the seminary or university administrators told the two men that as a matter of policy, only students could speak in class and check out books. That Pennington had seen his father savagely whipped when both were slaves and Crummell’s father “was stolen from the neighborhood of Sierra Leone about the year 1780” were not matters that concerned Yale. Policies are policies. Rigidity is rigidity. Callousness is callousness. Arrogancc is arrogance. Library books were the property of Yale, and only paying students could check them out and participate in class. 

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century at Yale. Alumni could audit classes, and the university advertised it as of 2023, but, according to a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School, "faculty here generally don't like people auditing their courses." This sets up an implicit "bait and switch" dynamic, which is utterly unfair to alumni who return to Yale for a term to audit a class or two. Making matters worse, students in the Yale Political Union, of which I had been a member when I was a student, told me that alumni had complained about having been slapped with faculty rudeness when asking for permission to audit. I encountered that as well from several faculty members. A full professor in Yale's divinity school told me before the semester that her class, ironically in Christian Ethics, might be full; she would have to see when the class first met. So I did not go out of respect for her wishes, even though auditors don't count against enrollment caps (she had dismissed my point). When I went to her office the day after the first session, she harshly told me, "I'll have to reevaluate you sitting in because you didn't attend the first class." 

Another faculty member in Yale's divinity school told me that I could audit, but that I could not participate. That was enough for me to not audit her course. This "bug on the wall" approach to auditors was generally the case among Yale faculty. When I had audited courses elsewhere at other universities where I had studied or been a visiting scholar, the faculty had insisted that I participate to show that I doing the reading. Yale's culture of insisting on silence is thus counter-productive. Not only does it dismiss the perfectly valid expectation that auditors do the readings and contribute and thus add to the class, auditors, even if they are other scholars and could enhance discussion. In other words, the faculty culture is short-sighted. It's don't disturb us (ultimately by not auditing at all) rather than, If you're going to sit in, you'll need to take the course seriously by putting more effort into it than merely showing up. 

I had also written to a professor of ethics in Yale College (undergraduate liberal arts and sciences). In spite of the fact that I had had at least seven years of philosophy, which includes ethics, and had read most of that professor's book from which he would be teaching, he replied, "It would not be fair to the other students because you haven't taken the prerequisite course" for the undergraduate course on his book. Other students? A prerequisite in Intro to Ethics? It seems he was making a category mistake, as it had been 25 years since I had been a student at Yale. 

It is nice that Yale attended so well to its undergraduate students in liberal arts and sciences, as other research universities slight undergraduate education, being focused instead on getting research grants. Yet the insularity within the university and the related exclusion within Yale need not go along with investing in the undergraduate college experience. It is not as if undergraduate students are superior academically to graduate and professional students (though Yale had wanted to keep a closer watch on its divinity school in the late 1990s because of the lax admission standards). 

The residential colleges on Yale's campus (two more had been added since I had been a student) physically evince the inner-insularity, which is Yale's original (and on-going) sin. They host afternoon talks periodically, which are officially open to the Yale community, which includes alumni and students in the professional schools, but the gates of each college were locked even on days when class was in session, so not even graduate students could get in to attend the talks. In 2023, I was going to attend Howard Dean's talk at Branford College, one of the residential colleges of Yale College; I had even mentioned that I would be coming to the Head of that college, but when the time came, the gates were locked and I stood frustrated for twenty minutes before I gave up and walked away, vowing that I would not try to attend any other talk at a residential college, which were known as Master's Teas when I had been a student and were advertised in the Yale Daily News so not just undergraduates would know of the talks. Twenty-five or so years later, a non-academic clerical employee at Berkeley College wrote to me that emails to the Yale College students suffice to get the word out to the right people. In perhaps what might be called juridical justice, undergraduate students complained about not being able to get into the law library at the law school. 

Such inner-insularity has been Yale's ongoing original sin. Of course, the "bait and switch," which is not, by the way, conducive to fundraising (just saying), and the faculty's culture being averse to auditing even by visiting scholars (hence no collegial courtasy, which can go both ways in terms of not using their respective books as sources), is admittedly a mere ripple compared with what Pennington and Crummell had to contend with in not even being permitted to speak in classes and check out books while they audited courses for two years respectively at Yale's theological seminary (since known as a divinity school as if it were primarily academic, and thus fully part of Yale). Nonetheless, both the splash and the ripple come from the same stone: the callous emotional instinctual urge heightened by dis-ease to treat insiders as outsiders. 

When I was an alumni scholar in residence with a Yale (library) ID, I was treated much too often as if I were an outsider. Unfortunately, I felt the blunt of the smacks of conceit and rudeness that is generally assumed societally to be associated with the elite universities in America. For example, even though I had written books on the E.U. and had even been a section instructor of a course on the E.U. at Yale, I still could not attend the Yale College dean's talk with the prime minister of Greece because alumni even with a Yale library ID (district from a mere card) could not attend. That any of the university's non-academic employees,  such as administrative assistants (secretaries) could do so was humiliating. This was good to know, however, in case Yale's development office should ever call me for a donation. "Why not ask employees rather than me; after all, they are more important, " I  might quip.

If alumni who registered at the library to do academic work and audit courses were not “members of the Yale community,” the root of the inner-insularity wherein some insiders are relagated as outsiders may be the presence of a pathology of exaggerating otherness in order to feel the pleasure of power or superiority. Distanciation can become a fixation for people whose sense of insecurity demands that even certain classes of insiders be designated as outsiders. 

To allow people to be visitors, especially if they are alumni, and yet be a bad host is not worthy of the esteem that a prestigious university like Yale enjoys societally and even internationally. Yale had been a very bad host in this respect to Pennington and Crummell.

So even though Yale’s President Salovey solemnly apologized on behalf of the Yale Corporation on September 14, 2023 to the two Black men and gave them honorary masters degrees even though they had long since died, I submit that the convenient atonement did not result in redemption for the university, for its dominant coalition’s mentality still clashed with the counter-intuitive religious saying that many of the first are last and the last may be the first to enter the Kingdom of God. At Yale, many who presumed to be the highest of the insiders were actually farther from what a university of excellence should stand for than were even the alumni on a fixed-term-residency basis whom such vaulted insiders labeled as outsiders. For to voluntarily engage full-time in unpaid and non-degreed study for the sheer love of knowledge should be highly valued at a university of academic excellence rather than excluded from campus events and classes in a pathologically-exclusionary culture of arrogance on stilts.  

Atonement for past misdeeds does not necessarily convey redemption if the root of the sin—a sadistic pleasure in excluding as outsiders even insiders—continues. A Christian at Yale’s theological seminary (aka divinity school), who in resentment or personal insecurity pushes a category of insiders into being outsiders profits nothing from believing in the atoning sacrifice that Jesus makes on the Cross for humanity. For, to paraphrase Paul, faith without love is nugatory. Faith with arrogance and hypocrisy goes into negative territory, otherwise known as hell, even though the sinners are completely oblivious to their own inner depravity and sin. To retort that such things are fixed in human nature denies the fact that people can welcome visitors rather than use them as scapegoats. It is especially rich when a seminary’s administration engages in hypocrisy, and it should be noted that a divinity school’s alumni are not generally so rich that the administrators can afford to offend us when we visit. Two degrees of separation away, and congruent with Jesus’ preachments, generously welcoming alumni can pay real dividends. God’s Gold cannot be very well be gained by means of the inhospitality of exclusivism.

It was convenient for Yale’s trustees to give honorary degrees to two visitors who had long since died; it is much less convenient to come to terms not with the original sin, but with the arrogant and petty distinctions that were very much alive and well almost 200 years later. For during my visit, I had to endure pretentious non-academic employees inflict their opinions on me that alumni even who have registered for library access at Sterling Library are not “members of the Yale community.”

Michelle Buckholz, a non-academic Yale employee, made the exclusion of alumni on doing research at Yale's libraries clear when she told me on the phone that I had to pay $15 for lunch in Commons (a university restaurant), while Yale students, faculty and even non-academic employees only had to pay $11. I could not prepay, and I had to pay tax as I did not have an affiliation that would have entitled me to not having to pay tax. It is odd that non-academic employees didn't have to pay tax, whereas alumni at Yale for academic purposes did. It is also strange, or suspicious, that  tax on $11 was $4 in a state whose tax on food was less than 8 percent (so tax on $11 would make the total $11.76 rather than $15). Bucky wasn't telling me the whole truth. Even if Yale benefitted from people paying in advance, the university could have put $11 plus tax on the cards used for guests who were sponsored by departments (and thus tax-exempt). Bucky wasn't interested in my idea, for she bristly added insult to injury by cutting me off in mid-sentence because a student was there. It was clear to me that non-academic staff at Yale tend to view alumni as non-members of Yale, and thus as legitimately subject to exclusionary power-trips. With a pin-head mentality that focuses exclusively on the Yale ID card, Yale's non-academic employees in "profit-centers" like dining services are not the best when it comes to business, for I did not buy lunch at Commons (the university lunch hall) again. In business terms, the all-to-common rudeness Americam retail business generally translates at Yale's Commons into zero revenue from me after that.

Before Bucky, Pamela Greene, another non-academic Yale employee, had arrogantly and incorrectly informed me after I had written to her to request to be put on the email list for a series of lunchtime talks in social science, that alumni, even if on campus for a term or two, are not “members of the Yale community.” 

Days later, at the university event morbidly conferring degrees on the dead (Pennington and Crummell), I criticized Greene’s arrogance and the accuracy of her statement after introducing myself to Barbara Sabia, Senior Director of Alumni Engagement and Development of Yale’s divinity school. Sabia, another non-academic employee, said, “Well, you’re not a student, faculty, or staff, so you’re really not a member of the Yale community.” She had a strange way of engaging with alumni if she had any notion of how universities can maximize monetary donations from alumni (the school’s development coordinator was quietly seated just behind her, doubtlessly not wanting to interject). I even showed Sabia my Yale library ID, but it made no difference and anyway by then she had decided not to converse with me. Yet another interesting approach to engaging with alumni, given the interest in fundraising that an alumni-engagement director would be expected to have. 

An elite university should be smarter than Yale. You can return to campus to work on academic projects, and you can donate to Yale, but we don’t trust you enough to give you access to the classroom buildings that are locked even on school days, and you’ll have to pay more if you want to check out books and eat in the university lunchroom, and you won’t be able to access the readings online or speak in class if you audit a class. What message does that send besides ineptitude (at least in regard to maximizing alumni donations) and even passive-aggression, pettiness and distrust?

A university that invests in its alumni doubtless recoups financial returns, whereas a university that hems and haws regarding what alumni on campus get and can’t get suffers a want of intimacy and affection in return. A university administration in line with its development office, says to alumni willing to return to work on academic projects:

You’re sacrificing a lot in moving back to New Haven, and you should be lauded cum laud for suspending a lucrative career or a serene retirement, so your alma mater is not going to stand in your way while you’re on campus. You can have access to the stacks in Sterling Library if you register for access, and you can check books out too. You can even audit classes and if you do that, you’ll have access to the online course readings and even the buildings where the classes meet. Because you’ll be doing academic work on a sustained and nonpermanent basis, we won’t charge you. Yale has a huge endowment; there is no excuse for Yale being petty or greedy. Having studied hard as a student and being willing to do so again without the prestige of another Yale degree, you deserve to have unfettered access on campus. Besides, if you make a splash from your additional academic study, Yale benefits too! Finally, please tell us if any of our faculty or non-academic employees are rude or otherwise arrogant with respect to you when are on campus. If any such employees try to nickel and dime you as if you have no affiliation or otherwise imply that you are the general public, please report those employees, for they are the ones who should be returned to the general public for employment purposes. 

Unfortunately, as of 2023, this was not the mentality of Yale. It is a pity that such potential can be squandered by small minds and an irony that such minds can populate even an elite university. It seems that that was the case even at Yale’s seminary in the nineteenth century, for even though Pennington and Crummell were barred by law from matriculating, Yale did not have to mussel the academic visitors and bar them from checking out books. In his book, People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck posits that the defense mechanism of malignant narcissism surrounds a sense of emptiness. This outer shell and inner core can explain the excessive exclusivism within Yale has existed for centuries. Nietzsche contrasts the self-confidence and innate generocity of the strong from the pettiness and cruelty of the weak. Yale could have capitalized on its resources, which included its $39 billion endowment in 2023, to draw on alumni as assets and not just alumni assets. Alumni could contribute so much on campus were we made to feel welcome rather than outsiders. Even in the classroom, young students could benefit from the educated wisdom of alumni who are willing (and encouraged rather than discouraged) from doing the reading and participating in class discussions (with the students doing the bulk of the talking, of course). A university could be utterly transformed were it to capitalize on the people whom it has educated rather than merely seek monetary donations, and these former would reinforce the latter. Only a strong university has the self-confidence, as Nietzsche wrote in Thus Saith Zarathustra, to not be bothered by giving even to "parasites." Alumni and visiting scholars can be so much more than parisites. A university can be utterly transformed. 

Yale: A Private Police-State on Steroids

Academia is its own sort of community, with its own distinctive culture. A university campus is not akin to a small town. To treat a campus as such, and thus to allow universities to have their own police departments rather than security guards, evinces a category mistake and presents issues of political legitimacy. The U.S. Constitution gives police power to the state governments, rather than to private companies and non-profit private organizations. Secuity guards, not police employees, belong to the categories of companies and non-profit organizations, both of which being qualitatively different than governments or states. Hence the matter of legitimacy should be raised when one organization, such as Yale, presumes not only to have its own private police force, but also to use it (and its security guards) to enforce local laws and university regulations off campus. When a university, again referring here to Yale, saturates its campus with police cars with emergency-alert blue-and-red lights blazing on top and headlights constantly and pensively on, and adds security guards on virtually every corner as if according to a military-style command coverage of the entire campus and beyond, the passive aggression and tacit message of deep distrust subtly undercut academic pursuits and the related psychological stamina of students, faculty, and even alumni who are auditing courses or conducting research as scholars "in residence." The saturated presence of pensive guns and distrustful staring eviscerates an anademic atmosphere of peace and tranquilly, and thus subtly eclipses academic learning and teaching. An academic atmosphere is vital to a college and even a large university so students and faculty can feel free to take ideas to their limits without fear of intimidation and being distrusted so. A pathological weaponizing of distrust is harmful even though the victims don't realize that they are being victimized. I contend that the unbiquitous, constant surveillance is unethical, and furthermore that university administrations that unfairly inflict such an aggressive culture of distrust should be held accountable externally by governments and internally through boards of directors and pressure from alumni. Paranoia is at the root of this type of dysfunctional organizational culture, such as existed at Yale as of 2023. The extreme distrust backed up by hostile staring, flashing lights, and even guns ought to be flagged as toxic and unethical. 

Returning to Yale as an alumnus scholar-in-residence in 2023 after 25 years, I was almost immediately taken back by the sheer saturation of the campus by the university’s private police force and security employees; notwithstanding all this, New Haven police cars could be seen patrolling the campus and its periphery. The students were aware of the “over-kill”—“They’re everywhere,” more than one student confided to me in an accurate tone of fatalism. When I was a student, the “Unibomber” struck, and even that did not turn the campus into a fortification. Perhaps the most glaring indication of the pathological lapse in judgment on excessiveness was the constancy of bright red and blue lights on top of the police cars and the searing bright yellow spread of lights on top of the security cars. The lapse involves not grasping that to routinize markers of emergency impairs to a significant degree the academic atmosphere on the campus. Ethically, the harm from subjecting students, faculty and alumni to the continuous lights and surveillance was conveniently ignored by the Yale Corporation. Studying in a (private) police state on steroids is contrary to common sense and academic freedom; the weight of the omnipresent passive aggression was real yet remained far from fully realized by the victims. 

Not even a week into the fall 2023 term, I was immediately struck by the sheer bravado of a security guard who followed me through one of the academic buildings on a day when classes were in session. His lack of respect for, and even antipathy towards Yalies was obvious in his facial expressions as he followed me and even evesdropped in the hallway outside of a small office where I had gone to speak with an administrator, who, by the way, reported the predator to a dean. After I left the office, the guard followed me out of the building. I returned to the office to report this behavior to the administrator, but was surprised to find the guard in that office lying that he had just been trying to keep everyone safe!  Seeing me at the doorway, he shut the door on me. After he left the office, the administrator kindly walked me out of the building; she assured me that she would report the man. By the time we reached the entrance, the guard was on his phone outside. Seeing me leaving, he turned around and watched me, even when I was at a distance.

In September, 2023, that security guard followed me inside the building. Profiling alumni is not the fundraising strategy that I would recommend. 

Turning around after looking at the directory for the room number of a department, I was stunned to find an utterly obsessed predator giving me the evil eye. 

After following me down one hallway and then another, he listened in on my conversation with an administrator in an office. This picture shows him later, as I was walking down a hall to go outside. Seeing me coming, he popped out of a room and stood in the doorway. 

He eyed me as I was leaving, as can be seen here. Then he went to the office where I had been (so he had followed me!) to get info on me. 

He can be seen wearing a white shirt and black pants and holding up a phone as he watches me walk away even at such a distance. 

About a month later, I was again taken back when another security in the same building demanded in an angry tone where I was going. I, like everyone else, was headed to a stairway that obvious led to the screening rooms, where a movie was to be shown. I reported him to the same administrator, who in turn reported that bully to the same dean. Even that was insufficient to restrain the attack dogs, for two months later, I was again subject to yet another security guard menacingly singling me out after I had left the screening for a film. I returned to the same administrator, who again promised to report that resentful, predatory man to the same dean. 

I was not looking at this security employee, who was at a distance yet so preoccupied with me while I was speaking with someone else. I had not even looked at him. His stern facial expression speaks volumes as to the attitude toward alumni. 

Clearly, Yale’s security employees were not members of the Yale community; in fact, they were hostile to it (or they feel entitled not to hide their feelings); rather than being oriented to protecting us, they must have viewed themselves as police and we were all potential suspects. I do suspect that word had gotten around that I had complained about having been hounded and the employees in Yale’s security department felt they could get away with harassing me. They may have been right because at least one dean had failed to bring accountability to Yale’s security department regarding how its employees treat Yalies (or at least alumni scholars in residence). Having not said a word to any of the predators I encountered, I naturally felt apprehensive on account of their irrational psychology. 

Yalies are under constant surveillance. Being watched goes beyond being protected. Were we really so untrustworthy as the administrators assume? Or was the untruthworthiness being projected? 

An occupied Yale police car in the upper right of the picture (left) did not stop the New Haven police employee in the car in the foreground from slamming to a stop as soon as he saw me waiting for a ride. Why the aggressive driving without there being an emergency. With so many lights on the two Yale police cars pictured (right), students would naturally think there is an emergency. 

These police cars are parked, and the emergency lights are perpetually on, which essentially routinizes a sense of emergency. 

This manned Yale police car was stationed on a walkway. Notice the emergency lights are on. Of course students would be concerned, even anxious, which evicerates an academic atmosphere. 

Routine: three armed police employees with a dog that employees even allowed to sniff students.

A Yale security employee inspecting students entering a classroom building. 

"They are on every corner, even during the day," more than one student has said.

I took this video of the Yale police car passing by, as so many do there. Then I looked to my right and saw a local police car. Then I looked back and saw a Yale security guard where the car had just passed. Triple coverage is a common sight for Yalies; hence the sense of that security is over-done. 

Seeing THREE Yale-Police cars stationary in one location (and then a fourth drving by) with red and blue emergency lights on even though the cops of two of the three parked cars were at resaurants, While I documented the visuals with my camera, one of the Yale police employees decided to intimidate me by stopping in his tracks and quickly turning around to watch me, which he continued to do even at a distance even though I was doing nothing illegal (or suspicious). Rather, by perpetuating its police-state even off-campus, Yale was allowing its police employees to erect an excessive police presence and presume that it is the default, such that recording it is conveniently deemed suspicious even off-campus and thus warrents the passive-aggression of intimidation.

A local police car patrolling on campus. This means that two police departments, plus Yale's security guards, are on the campus. "They're everywhere," one student told me with a tone of defeatism.

In this very academic area of campus, do the car's alert lights really need to be on?  The visual here attests to how a police-state on campus evicerates the academic atmosphere, and yet the employees don't mind. Hence they are not members of the Yale community. 

In this last photo, THREE Yale police cars, all with their overhead lights on, were parked in a row even though there was not an incident. "Tone-deaf" comes to mind. Clearly, Yale's police employees didn't mind leaving Yalies with the misimpression that an emergency situation was in progress. This is one reason why Yale's police (and security) employees are at odds with, rather than member of, Yale's academic community. 

The first two pictures above show Yale police with their patrol lights on when the university was closed for Christmas. The bottom two pictures show a local police car was also "flashing" on the campus. A lot of alert-lights for an empty campus. This is yet another indication of "over-kill" (i.e., paranoia). 

At the beginning of the fall, 2023 semester, members of the university's police union handed out fliers to freshmen as they were moving in so to intimidate and frighten them. Yale police employees, whose union was in a dispute with the university, handed out fliers that were clearly intended to intimidate and scare 18 year-olds as a passive-aggressive way to get back at the university for the latest contract proposal. The leader of the police union lied, or was pathological, that the flier merely "informed" students for their own safety. 

The flier uses hyperbole in claiming to be a SURVIVAL guide. Hardly objective (not to mention professional), the first sentence reads, "The incidence of crime and violence in New Haven is shockingly high, and its getting worse." That was not true of New Haven near the campus. The flier then cites some statistics that are overly pessimistic. "Nevertheless, some Yalies do manage to survive New Haven and even retain their personal property." Some Yalies manage to survive? At this point in reading the flier, I became concerned that its authors were being allowed to carry guns, given the emotional state and immaturity that leaps off the page. I would not be surprised in the least if the security guard who obsessionally watched and followed me without any rational rationale had the sort of pathology that was responsible for such an immature and erroneous flier of passive-aggression. 

The Yale police employees who drew up and passed out the flier were upset at Yale's latest offer to the employees' union, so maybe the employees were taking out their anger on innocent young students or sending a Yale a message, like a horse's head in a bed in The Godfather. Similarly, the predator who stalked me may have been acting on his union's ploy to send the Yale corporation a message by harassing alumni. Of course, the stalker could simply have had emotional problems and was abusing the authority vested in him. Or maybe he was a police flunky working security at a university. That such a human being and Yale's police employees who devised and passed out the bizarre flier were working for a private corporation ought to raise red flags among people who know that under the U.S. Constitution, the police power resides with the state governments, rather than private companies and organizations, and that the latter can easily exploit an institutional conflict of interest in the pleasure that comes with having police power.  

Therefore, Yale having its own police power is itself problematic, as is its hiring process; that the university presumes the right to use its passive-aggressive police department locally, well off the university's campus, raises an especially red flag. In December, 2023, Yale announced in a news release that its police could enforce university regulations off campus. In the midst of Israel's military attacks in Gaza, a Palestine flag was draped on a menorah off Yale’s campus, literally on a public square, Yale’s administration felt the need to become involved, even notifying the New Haven police as if the mayor’s office could not handle that task. Yale also indicated that its own police department might investigate the incident. The university even stated that its “regulations reach conduct occurring on or off campus that imperils the integrity and values of the Yale community.”[1] This is an open door, for values is a vague term that can mean practically anything, for a university to assume the power of a city government. That Yale contacted the New Haven police department is ironic because Yale’s private police cars regularly patrolled beyond the university’s property, even regularly arresting local residents for offensives unrelated to the university. One local resident who worked at a local hospital told me that Yale’s private police force regularly arrests local residents coming out of bars. That they might be drunk and hit Yale students is not a sufficient (contingent, indirect) connection to justify giving the Yale Corporation police power in a city. 

A series of photos showing Yale's private police department patrolling off campus, even being duplicated by Yale security guards (off-campus). The last two photos follow a Yale police car going around a city block that is not contiguous with the campus. As the photo of a Yale police car driving next to a New Haven police car,  Yale's patrols off its property duplicate the jurisdiction of the New Haven police, hence subjecting residents to two police forces.

In addition, Yale's security guards also patrol, even with yellow lights on, off campus. The security guards, which should be oriented to protecting a company's property, aren't even police! 

These photos and video were taken on Christmas Eve day of two Yale police employees who thrice circled a city block, which is at least 5 blocks from Yale's campus. The university was closed. 

I submit that the overreach both regarding Yale's presumed reach of its regulations and its hyperextended coverage of its police are in need of a court challenge on constitutional grounds, as the U.S. Constitution gives police powers to the state governments rather than to private companies and private non-profit organizations. Astonishingly, even Yale’s security guards felt entitled to patrol local streets not bordering campus as if an organization’s security guards were police. 

Besides capitulating to over-protective parents of the young students in Yale College, the extent of the ubiquitous police and security (two departments!) on campus points back to a psychological paranoia, which warps judgment. Attending a university event that was open to the public during the fall, 2023 semester, I was not the only attendee who was stunned by the police presence. 

Yale's president at the event apologizing for Yale's meanness in the 1800s after I had informed him on the way to the event of the hostile security employee and rude dispatcher of the Yale shuttles. He told me he had no idea that things had gotten so bad, and yet his police-state was fully visible around the event itself and the reception. 

Both in entering the event then immediately afterward at the reception, the presence of security employees and Yale police dominated, even within the reception hall in spite of the formidable presence just outside the hall. There were even undercover Yale police wearing suites. Uniformed police were even helping themselves to food! The university's administration was present, and yet they were utterly purblind as to how oppressive the presence of weapons and uniforms were to the guests. The administrators' warped perception and judgment stem, I submit, from a psychological paranoia. 

Police State 101: A Yale Primer

Even after almost everyone had left the reception and no dignitaries had even been there, 

security had the building encased on both sides. 

This undercover police employee was hostile when I, not knowing his real identity, spoke with him. Was it really necessary, given the lack of celebrities at the reception, for undercover police to be in the reception hall, considering that the hall was "surrounded"? 

1. “Yale Statement on Desecration of a Menorah,” YaleNews, December 10, 2023.