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.
