10 ms·

Abolish Yale

77 points by sharkweek 5y ago

newaccount2021 5y ago
college endowments are where money goes to die or be exploited unproductively in any case, the rise of China will cure the problem of rotted American institutions
joebiden2024 5y ago
I’m glad this was written, because I know for a fact this wouldn’t be discussed at all if it was written by a Virginia Tech or University of Connecticut student
- rvz 5y ago
  Or by any of the conventional media. This student is very brave in highlighting Yale's past, even the founder's name itself has a darker past. Whether if anything will be done about that is extremely unlikely. Goes to show that the university knows it won't do anything serious about it, despite it having all that money and preaching their so-called 'social justice' or 'Diversity' and 'Inclusion' nonsense; whatever all of that means these days.
- codemac 5y ago
  Go Hokies
  - garciasn 5y ago
    My daughter loves sports and she loves broccoli.
    - carabiner 5y ago
      I've always liked broccoli.
jacobmischka 5y ago
I don't have a response to the meat of the article, but I admit that the author is quite brave posting that as a Yale student in the Yale paper with their byline clearly at the bottom.
- krastanov 5y ago
  The student should certainly be commended and I do subscribe to their opinion, but be aware that they would probably find plenty (but not universal) support from professors and colleagues. Universities are not some monolith where the administration governs with an iron fist. The student's opinion is not too far from the mainstream, and even part of the university administration is self-aware and feeling similarly.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- yssrnjm 5y ago
  There's nothing brave in the "This thing wrong, abolish it!" social justice rhetoric. We've been hearing this for the last 20 years and it has become meaningless. If we've raised a generation that thinks that abolishing something will always do good, then we've done a terrible job for the next generations.
spekcular 5y ago
To me, this is the key excerpt: "Nevertheless, Yale continues to commit this elitist view of change-making, closing the doors of the university to anyone who isn’t deemed capable of becoming a world leader. Yale’s acceptance rate keeps ticking downward as the years progress. In last year’s admissions cycle, only 4.6 percent of applicants were offered a place in the incoming class. Though Yale acknowledges that a vast majority of its applicant pool is qualified to attend the University, and though Yale has the money and power to expand its student body, it continues to manufacture scarcity for spots on campus." [There are hyperlinks under "money" and "power" in the original text worth clicking.] Yale isn't interested in improving the world through providing a high-quality education to the largest number of people possible. It's a hedge fund with university attached, where admissions are done with an eye toward creating future donors and political/business/technological leaders, whose fame can be leveraged for prestige and money.
- melony 5y ago
  They need to scale up, not abolish. Abolish would only make the other Ivies even more exclusive.
  - the_optimist 5y ago
    The Ivies are not homogeneous. Yale cannot hide amongst the other institutions to camouflage the uniquely deleterious impact it imposes.
    - computerphage 5y ago
      Why is Yale unique here?
      - the_optimist 5y ago
        Yale has unique historic and ongoing ties to the bureaucratic apparatus of the country. These have been/are exploited for the unique benefit of the institution and its associates. Harvard, (in particular some elements of the law school), are getting in on this game more on the direct "policy" level than ever historically. Take, for example, Harvard's new institutional bias toward "Lawfare."
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
OK let's apply some basic logic. There are two possible cases: a) People can get the same level of education without Yale as with Yale. b) People can not get the same level of education without Yale as with Yale In case a) nothing is gained from abolishing Yale. In case b) clearly Yale should not be abolished. At the very least, people who believe in a) should prove that they can educate people to the same level without Yale, before abolishing Yale. Also what is wrong with giving people the choice to go to Yale? If they believe in a), they don't have to go there.
- ampdepolymerase 5y ago
  Tertiary education at the elite level is rarely about the quality of education. The difference between Georgia Tech and Columbia or Harvard's CS program is not that stark. However, the story is completely different when it comes to alumni network, access to funding, future opportunities. Prestige and network effects compound and an argument can be made for whether we should allow academia to be the gatekeepers of social mobility at the highest level. Certain Ivies favour grade inflation yet their students do not suffer dilution of their degree value, this is not a privilege extended to many other institutions.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    You are not forced to pay attention to a Yale degree, though? If it affects government funding, OK, you can discuss it. Building networks is also not a bad thing. It is good if people know and trust each other and know who to turn to for help. It is a stupid idea of modernism or whatever that there should be no networking.
  - rank0 5y ago
    GT’s CS program is held in higher regard within the industry. The Ivy League has great stem programs but the most prestigious degrees come from other schools like law, business and medicine.
  - overeater 5y ago
    The Ivy League factor plays a smaller role for CS than for other disciplines, due to less gatekeeping. Yale is about University of Minnesota level across multiple computer science ranking measures: https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/ https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/
the_optimist 5y ago
This author has largely nailed it. There are simply no other institutions that celebrate elitist, establishment puppetry of the rest of the population like Yale. Both Harvard and Princeton celebrate academic achievement, growth beyond the walls of the schools. Yale remains an incestuous pool of collusion, circumventing meritocracy by design.
- finolex1 5y ago
  I think the author meant Abolish {elite, exclusive institutions}, where the word Yale can be substituted by Harvard, Princeton and a number of others.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  As a Harvard alum I find your distinction between Harvard and Yale pretty baffling.
- revscat 5y ago
  It seems that Yale is the the epitome of modern neoliberalism: incestuous, deeply capitalist, superficially woke but not in any meaningful way that would affect the balance of economic or political power. All while being dismissive towards anyone not in their circles. Sure, abolish it. Maybe that would help get us out of this political logjam we’ve been in for half a century.
hashimotonomora 5y ago
Why does he have to mention that the servers are black? His article is also extremely unspecific and reads like a springboard just for talking shit about Yale.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
This is something all elite universities will need to address in the near future. It will take a growing amount of cognitive dissonance to, on one hand, have mission statements that talk about broad goals of improving humanity, and on the other hand serve as one of the primary markers and controller of elite status in the US. I say this as an Ivy alum. While I don't necessarily agree with abolishing elite universities, the current admissions system is fundamentally corrupt, and the only reason universities don't abolish it is that doing so would require admitting a degree of luck in admissions, which would kill the facade of a strict meritocracy. My proposal would be to have clear, binary criteria for admission (some combination of grades, test scores, perhaps even something for extra academic success if that could be done objectively), and if that resulted in, say, 20000 people being eligible, then use a random lottery to get down to the number of spots in a class.
- melony 5y ago
  Or they can just scale up with population growth. Funding is hardly scarce at their level. We have more billionaires right now than ever. A few building names and libraries will easily pay for the next decade.
  - joebiden2024 5y ago
    Scaling up would still exclude nearly everyone, including the namesake of my username and the most powerful man in the world.
    - melony 5y ago
      And you just proved my point, look at the distribution of Congress, the SCOTUS, the majority of elite government executive bureaucracy and tell me that they don't overwhelmingly favor certain institutions. Just ask your namesake's old boss.
      - joebiden2024 5y ago
        Yes, this is something that should end.
teluride5 5y ago
In a sense, Yale is an extension of the American political superstructure. I'm not sure if true social justice is, or should be, a political goal. Historically, this niche has been best served by religious organizations such as the Catholic church.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  Which Catholic Church? The powerful one in San Francisco whose sex abuse crimes on children Kamala Harris covered up? https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/victims-question-kamala-harris-record-clergy-abuse-63963167 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/victims-question-k... https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-francisco-catholic-church-child-abuse/ https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-franci...
  - teluride5 5y ago
    Actually, rates of sex abuse are lower in the Catholic church than in US schools. Regardless, organizations such as Catholic Charities do hundreds of millions of dollars of charitable services each year.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cmg 5y ago
> There’s something unsettling about Yale, about the way it operates, about its very existence. I am a New Haven resident, have been for over a decade and spent most of my social time for the 5 years before that in the city. This analysis is quite spot on. I often say that even if you don't go to Yale, Yale comes to you. Yale New Haven Health System is actually the largest employer in the entire state of Connecticut. The University, Health System and Hospital occupy three spots of the top five employers in the city. Yale is not a campus on its own at the outskirts of the city (like Southern CT State University, or to a lesser extent University of New Haven). Students and residents alike walk next to each other on city streets from one building to another. The University buildings are on major roads downtown. Unlike universities in large cities (NYU comes to mind), Yale doesn't suddenly get lost in a forest of other buildings. It is the city in many regards. As a result, the Yale Police Department is deputized by the New Haven PD. They carry guns, have their own lockup, and have the ability to operate in pretty much every area of the city, whether officially "Yale" or not. And the Yale Corporation owns a significant amount of commercial real estate as well, regularly raising rent to drive local businesses out and bring larger chains in. Small restaurants, diners, record and book stores replaced by Barnes & Noble, Urban Outfitters, Tarry Lodge and the like. Yale doesn't pay taxes on the majority of its property. Instead, it makes a voluntary contribution to the city that is significantly less than the tax value of its properties. Meanwhile, it has a $42 billion endowment that the University proudly says had a 40.2% return on investment over the last year. And still as the author writes, people are hungry and homeless on the New Haven Green a block away from Yale's historic buildings and fancy shops. The unions of Yale workers along with community residents have fought admirably for Yale to commit to training and hiring more workers from New Haven itself, but the University has pushed back and lied at every opportunity. The question for many of us isn't about tearing Yale down, though. It is making Yale subservient to the City rather than the other way around. "change has been made by groups instead of individuals" absolutely rings true of every struggle we see here that directly or indirectly involves Yale. It's not about getting Yale to be better on its own - Dunson is absolutely right to suggest that's an impossible task.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > making Yale subservient to the City Oxford has a similar problem. Not so long ago, Oxford University elected its own MP. The University appears to have a stranglehold on the planning committee. During term-time the population of Oxford is dominated by students (the resident population is only about 140,000). I really like this town; but I'd really like it more, if political control were returned to the permanent residents. This isn't going to happen; most of our political leaders and senior civil servants went to Oxford or Cambridge, so those two schools are favoured over their native populations. Incidentally, when I refer to Oxford as a "town", I am referring to the custom that you get to call yourself a city if you have a cathedral and a bishop. Well, the Bishop of Oxford doesn't live in Oxford; the cathedral is in fact the college chapel of Christ Church college; and if you want to visit the cathedral, apparently you need a note from your parish vicar confirming that you are a practising christian. I despise elite Universities. /me graduated at London; colleges like Kings and UCL have elite reputations, but I went to a lesser college, one that no longer exists.
1cvmask 5y ago
How about having an explicit exam only transparent admissions policy with overt extra points for say preferred disadvantaged groups? India has a similar system for entrance to universities with quotas for the lower castes. Or is that much more radical than Abolish Yale because rich white elites can’t get their children in through fencing and rowing teams?
selwynii 5y ago
Even if change is led by groups (and I suspect it's not so clear cut), groups need leaders or you have mobs. I'm getting tired of articles that look to tear something down without offering a replacement.
dsizzle 5y ago
I thought initially "abolish" here is used to mean "reform" in the same way that many people use it in "abolish police". But then: > Since we can’t change Yale, we have to tear it down. Is abolishment really easier than reform?
paulsutter 5y ago
People criticize the Ivy League but I think it’s nice that they make special schools for the people who can’t code
temp8964 5y ago
Of course, simply put, the far left (but not far left enough according to some comments) ideology embraced by the elite universities contradicts the existence of those universities.
- sohdas 5y ago
  I don't see how a union-busting institution which has produced and continues to produce some of the leaders of capitalist society, can be construed as 'embracing far left ideology'. As the author rightly points out, their commitment to 'social justice' is entirely superficial.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    Yes. They are superficial. If they truly believe what they claim to believe, they should already no longer exist. It's like all the leftists living in industry countries. If they truly care about the poor, they would have already all moved to the poorest countries on the planet and help the poors in there already.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Seriously? Far left? Perhaps you mean a bit to the left of you. It seems pretty unhinged to describe these institutions as "far left".
solatic 5y ago
The author is free to leave Yale anytime he wishes. No sale? I see. Either stick around long enough that you can rise to the top of the institution, to a position where you can actually make a change, or recognize that there are plenty of ways to make a difference in peoples' lives that don't involve tearing down the Establishment. Tearing down the Establishment doesn't force Establishment money to fund worthy causes, it just causes Establishment money to flow elsewhere. But you can always decide to focus your own energies on projects that are noble and worth your time.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
devwastaken 5y ago
Abolish universities in general. Strip federal grants and funding of all forms. Sell off the land. If education is worth it the private companies benefitting will fund it. Make them pay their fair share if they really have a shortage of workers. Employees of public companies are not incentivized to create efficient business that output expected results. Currently, they're there to collect a paycheck and hand you a piece of paper. The system was at one time great and has slid down the hill. It's time we abolish a system thats stuck in the 50's and stop stealing money from people to fund their jobs and budgets.
solidangle 5y ago
Does anyone know why this post is no longer present on the first page (or the second) despite racking up over 60 points in less than 30 minutes?
- krastanov 5y ago
  Presumably it triggered a flame-war detector. Just see how many comments were posted in the span of five minutes.
Animats 5y ago
Yale is kind of where you go if you're part of the American establishment but not too bright. The lesser Bush went there. The ones who are both well-connected and smart go to Harvard or Stanford, or maybe Princeton.
- obstacle1 5y ago
  "Not too bright" is very relative. Even W Jr. is a genius compared to the average American. Even with legacy considerations Ivys aren't accepting truly incapable people.
sabujp 5y ago
I don't know about Yale as a whole, but their current art dept website needs to be abolished for sure https://art.yale.edu https://art.yale.edu , it appears no amount of funding will fix that.
- itisit 5y ago
  Ha. Brutalist web design is a bit passé already, isn’t it?
- riskneutral 5y ago
  How is this possible?
rank0 5y ago
Why do so many people jump straight to “abolish” rather than reform? Seems like an extreme and impractical reaction. I’d buy the authors argument if he was pushing for reform. It’s hard to take someone serious when they’re advocating for the destruction of some institution which they are actively part of. Either be a part of the school and change from within or leave and preach for abolishment.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
Elite universities serve some combination of the world's smartest and wealthiest individuals. They even ensure that the if the smartest individuals are poor, that they will get a full ride and come for free. But what do we know very well on this site? > If the service is free, you are the product. Because corporations are unable to do interviews, they rely on the university to do selection. If you are an individual who is getting a full ride to an Elite university, you are selling your services to the wealthy individuals who go to that university, so that when these corporations HR do their retrospective on if individuals from that university are worth their salaries they find it to be true. If you are incredibly gifted, I know the prestige is alluring, I know when you run the numbers it makes the most sense, I know it's a Prisoner's dilemma with no ability to iterate with the rest of the other gifted individuals. But it's really the only way we get out of this. Don't pick universities that select based on gifts. Don't select universities that select based on legacy status. But really, you have all the power. It is up to you to change this.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> Because of COVID-19 gathering restrictions, the class of 2024 missed out on our first-year dinner. I saw "2024", and concluded that this was some kind of future fiction. Apparently not; it must be a typo. I wonder which date was intended.
- sohdas 5y ago
  I don't think it's a typo. The author is a sophomore, meaning he was admitted in 2020 and is therefore part of the class of 2024.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    OIC. Thanks.
jleyank 5y ago
No clue about physics, but an undergraduate degree from Yale in chemistry makes one a technician in biotech/pharma. Assuming you have good lab skills. Who you work for in grad school and what you get your PhD in determines how you are perceived. Big name people end up at schools like Yale, but wherever they are they are big name people and their family tree tends towards success.
itisit 5y ago
These “tear it down” diatribes often fail to offer the blueprint for what comes next, but this is to be expected from a young mind.
dandare 5y ago
>... excluding women and people of color This is not
dandare 5y ago
> It started off excluding women and people of color... While true, this is irrelevant - because that was the general condition back then - and only deludes the argument.
satisfice 5y ago
How elite can they be if they didn’t even try to recruit me? This is how I recommend that we all feel. Just ignore Yale and do something useful with your life.

77 points by sharkweek 5y ago

newaccount2021 5y ago

college endowments are where money goes to die or be exploited unproductively in any case, the rise of China will cure the problem of rotted American institutions

joebiden2024 5y ago

I’m glad this was written, because I know for a fact this wouldn’t be discussed at all if it was written by a Virginia Tech or University of Connecticut student

rvz 5y ago
Or by any of the conventional media. This student is very brave in highlighting Yale's past, even the founder's name itself has a darker past. Whether if anything will be done about that is extremely unlikely. Goes to show that the university knows it won't do anything serious about it, despite it having all that money and preaching their so-called 'social justice' or 'Diversity' and 'Inclusion' nonsense; whatever all of that means these days.
codemac 5y ago
Go Hokies
- garciasn 5y ago
  My daughter loves sports and she loves broccoli.
  - carabiner 5y ago
    I've always liked broccoli.

jacobmischka 5y ago

I don't have a response to the meat of the article, but I admit that the author is quite brave posting that as a Yale student in the Yale paper with their byline clearly at the bottom.

krastanov 5y ago
The student should certainly be commended and I do subscribe to their opinion, but be aware that they would probably find plenty (but not universal) support from professors and colleagues. Universities are not some monolith where the administration governs with an iron fist. The student's opinion is not too far from the mainstream, and even part of the university administration is self-aware and feeling similarly.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yssrnjm 5y ago
There's nothing brave in the "This thing wrong, abolish it!" social justice rhetoric. We've been hearing this for the last 20 years and it has become meaningless. If we've raised a generation that thinks that abolishing something will always do good, then we've done a terrible job for the next generations.

spekcular 5y ago

To me, this is the key excerpt: "Nevertheless, Yale continues to commit this elitist view of change-making, closing the doors of the university to anyone who isn’t deemed capable of becoming a world leader. Yale’s acceptance rate keeps ticking downward as the years progress. In last year’s admissions cycle, only 4.6 percent of applicants were offered a place in the incoming class. Though Yale acknowledges that a vast majority of its applicant pool is qualified to attend the University, and though Yale has the money and power to expand its student body, it continues to manufacture scarcity for spots on campus." [There are hyperlinks under "money" and "power" in the original text worth clicking.] Yale isn't interested in improving the world through providing a high-quality education to the largest number of people possible. It's a hedge fund with university attached, where admissions are done with an eye toward creating future donors and political/business/technological leaders, whose fame can be leveraged for prestige and money.

melony 5y ago
They need to scale up, not abolish. Abolish would only make the other Ivies even more exclusive.
- the_optimist 5y ago
  The Ivies are not homogeneous. Yale cannot hide amongst the other institutions to camouflage the uniquely deleterious impact it imposes.
  - computerphage 5y ago
    Why is Yale unique here?
    - the_optimist 5y ago
      Yale has unique historic and ongoing ties to the bureaucratic apparatus of the country. These have been/are exploited for the unique benefit of the institution and its associates. Harvard, (in particular some elements of the law school), are getting in on this game more on the direct "policy" level than ever historically. Take, for example, Harvard's new institutional bias toward "Lawfare."

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

OK let's apply some basic logic. There are two possible cases: a) People can get the same level of education without Yale as with Yale. b) People can not get the same level of education without Yale as with Yale In case a) nothing is gained from abolishing Yale. In case b) clearly Yale should not be abolished. At the very least, people who believe in a) should prove that they can educate people to the same level without Yale, before abolishing Yale. Also what is wrong with giving people the choice to go to Yale? If they believe in a), they don't have to go there.

ampdepolymerase 5y ago
Tertiary education at the elite level is rarely about the quality of education. The difference between Georgia Tech and Columbia or Harvard's CS program is not that stark. However, the story is completely different when it comes to alumni network, access to funding, future opportunities. Prestige and network effects compound and an argument can be made for whether we should allow academia to be the gatekeepers of social mobility at the highest level. Certain Ivies favour grade inflation yet their students do not suffer dilution of their degree value, this is not a privilege extended to many other institutions.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  You are not forced to pay attention to a Yale degree, though? If it affects government funding, OK, you can discuss it. Building networks is also not a bad thing. It is good if people know and trust each other and know who to turn to for help. It is a stupid idea of modernism or whatever that there should be no networking.
- rank0 5y ago
  GT’s CS program is held in higher regard within the industry. The Ivy League has great stem programs but the most prestigious degrees come from other schools like law, business and medicine.
- overeater 5y ago
  The Ivy League factor plays a smaller role for CS than for other disciplines, due to less gatekeeping. Yale is about University of Minnesota level across multiple computer science ranking measures: https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/ https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/

the_optimist 5y ago

This author has largely nailed it. There are simply no other institutions that celebrate elitist, establishment puppetry of the rest of the population like Yale. Both Harvard and Princeton celebrate academic achievement, growth beyond the walls of the schools. Yale remains an incestuous pool of collusion, circumventing meritocracy by design.

finolex1 5y ago
I think the author meant Abolish {elite, exclusive institutions}, where the word Yale can be substituted by Harvard, Princeton and a number of others.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
As a Harvard alum I find your distinction between Harvard and Yale pretty baffling.
revscat 5y ago
It seems that Yale is the the epitome of modern neoliberalism: incestuous, deeply capitalist, superficially woke but not in any meaningful way that would affect the balance of economic or political power. All while being dismissive towards anyone not in their circles. Sure, abolish it. Maybe that would help get us out of this political logjam we’ve been in for half a century.

hashimotonomora 5y ago

Why does he have to mention that the servers are black? His article is also extremely unspecific and reads like a springboard just for talking shit about Yale.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

This is something all elite universities will need to address in the near future. It will take a growing amount of cognitive dissonance to, on one hand, have mission statements that talk about broad goals of improving humanity, and on the other hand serve as one of the primary markers and controller of elite status in the US. I say this as an Ivy alum. While I don't necessarily agree with abolishing elite universities, the current admissions system is fundamentally corrupt, and the only reason universities don't abolish it is that doing so would require admitting a degree of luck in admissions, which would kill the facade of a strict meritocracy. My proposal would be to have clear, binary criteria for admission (some combination of grades, test scores, perhaps even something for extra academic success if that could be done objectively), and if that resulted in, say, 20000 people being eligible, then use a random lottery to get down to the number of spots in a class.

melony 5y ago
Or they can just scale up with population growth. Funding is hardly scarce at their level. We have more billionaires right now than ever. A few building names and libraries will easily pay for the next decade.
- joebiden2024 5y ago
  Scaling up would still exclude nearly everyone, including the namesake of my username and the most powerful man in the world.
  - melony 5y ago
    And you just proved my point, look at the distribution of Congress, the SCOTUS, the majority of elite government executive bureaucracy and tell me that they don't overwhelmingly favor certain institutions. Just ask your namesake's old boss.
    - joebiden2024 5y ago
      Yes, this is something that should end.

teluride5 5y ago

In a sense, Yale is an extension of the American political superstructure. I'm not sure if true social justice is, or should be, a political goal. Historically, this niche has been best served by religious organizations such as the Catholic church.

1cvmask 5y ago
Which Catholic Church? The powerful one in San Francisco whose sex abuse crimes on children Kamala Harris covered up? https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/victims-question-kamala-harris-record-clergy-abuse-63963167 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/victims-question-k... https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-francisco-catholic-church-child-abuse/ https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-franci...
- teluride5 5y ago
  Actually, rates of sex abuse are lower in the Catholic church than in US schools. Regardless, organizations such as Catholic Charities do hundreds of millions of dollars of charitable services each year.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cmg 5y ago

> There’s something unsettling about Yale, about the way it operates, about its very existence. I am a New Haven resident, have been for over a decade and spent most of my social time for the 5 years before that in the city. This analysis is quite spot on. I often say that even if you don't go to Yale, Yale comes to you. Yale New Haven Health System is actually the largest employer in the entire state of Connecticut. The University, Health System and Hospital occupy three spots of the top five employers in the city. Yale is not a campus on its own at the outskirts of the city (like Southern CT State University, or to a lesser extent University of New Haven). Students and residents alike walk next to each other on city streets from one building to another. The University buildings are on major roads downtown. Unlike universities in large cities (NYU comes to mind), Yale doesn't suddenly get lost in a forest of other buildings. It is the city in many regards. As a result, the Yale Police Department is deputized by the New Haven PD. They carry guns, have their own lockup, and have the ability to operate in pretty much every area of the city, whether officially "Yale" or not. And the Yale Corporation owns a significant amount of commercial real estate as well, regularly raising rent to drive local businesses out and bring larger chains in. Small restaurants, diners, record and book stores replaced by Barnes & Noble, Urban Outfitters, Tarry Lodge and the like. Yale doesn't pay taxes on the majority of its property. Instead, it makes a voluntary contribution to the city that is significantly less than the tax value of its properties. Meanwhile, it has a $42 billion endowment that the University proudly says had a 40.2% return on investment over the last year. And still as the author writes, people are hungry and homeless on the New Haven Green a block away from Yale's historic buildings and fancy shops. The unions of Yale workers along with community residents have fought admirably for Yale to commit to training and hiring more workers from New Haven itself, but the University has pushed back and lied at every opportunity. The question for many of us isn't about tearing Yale down, though. It is making Yale subservient to the City rather than the other way around. "change has been made by groups instead of individuals" absolutely rings true of every struggle we see here that directly or indirectly involves Yale. It's not about getting Yale to be better on its own - Dunson is absolutely right to suggest that's an impossible task.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> making Yale subservient to the City Oxford has a similar problem. Not so long ago, Oxford University elected its own MP. The University appears to have a stranglehold on the planning committee. During term-time the population of Oxford is dominated by students (the resident population is only about 140,000). I really like this town; but I'd really like it more, if political control were returned to the permanent residents. This isn't going to happen; most of our political leaders and senior civil servants went to Oxford or Cambridge, so those two schools are favoured over their native populations. Incidentally, when I refer to Oxford as a "town", I am referring to the custom that you get to call yourself a city if you have a cathedral and a bishop. Well, the Bishop of Oxford doesn't live in Oxford; the cathedral is in fact the college chapel of Christ Church college; and if you want to visit the cathedral, apparently you need a note from your parish vicar confirming that you are a practising christian. I despise elite Universities. /me graduated at London; colleges like Kings and UCL have elite reputations, but I went to a lesser college, one that no longer exists.

1cvmask 5y ago

How about having an explicit exam only transparent admissions policy with overt extra points for say preferred disadvantaged groups? India has a similar system for entrance to universities with quotas for the lower castes. Or is that much more radical than Abolish Yale because rich white elites can’t get their children in through fencing and rowing teams?

selwynii 5y ago

Even if change is led by groups (and I suspect it's not so clear cut), groups need leaders or you have mobs. I'm getting tired of articles that look to tear something down without offering a replacement.

dsizzle 5y ago

I thought initially "abolish" here is used to mean "reform" in the same way that many people use it in "abolish police". But then: > Since we can’t change Yale, we have to tear it down. Is abolishment really easier than reform?

paulsutter 5y ago

People criticize the Ivy League but I think it’s nice that they make special schools for the people who can’t code

temp8964 5y ago

Of course, simply put, the far left (but not far left enough according to some comments) ideology embraced by the elite universities contradicts the existence of those universities.

sohdas 5y ago
I don't see how a union-busting institution which has produced and continues to produce some of the leaders of capitalist society, can be construed as 'embracing far left ideology'. As the author rightly points out, their commitment to 'social justice' is entirely superficial.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Yes. They are superficial. If they truly believe what they claim to believe, they should already no longer exist. It's like all the leftists living in industry countries. If they truly care about the poor, they would have already all moved to the poorest countries on the planet and help the poors in there already.
denton-scratch 5y ago
Seriously? Far left? Perhaps you mean a bit to the left of you. It seems pretty unhinged to describe these institutions as "far left".

solatic 5y ago

The author is free to leave Yale anytime he wishes. No sale? I see. Either stick around long enough that you can rise to the top of the institution, to a position where you can actually make a change, or recognize that there are plenty of ways to make a difference in peoples' lives that don't involve tearing down the Establishment. Tearing down the Establishment doesn't force Establishment money to fund worthy causes, it just causes Establishment money to flow elsewhere. But you can always decide to focus your own energies on projects that are noble and worth your time.

deleted 5y ago

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devwastaken 5y ago

Abolish universities in general. Strip federal grants and funding of all forms. Sell off the land. If education is worth it the private companies benefitting will fund it. Make them pay their fair share if they really have a shortage of workers. Employees of public companies are not incentivized to create efficient business that output expected results. Currently, they're there to collect a paycheck and hand you a piece of paper. The system was at one time great and has slid down the hill. It's time we abolish a system thats stuck in the 50's and stop stealing money from people to fund their jobs and budgets.

solidangle 5y ago

Does anyone know why this post is no longer present on the first page (or the second) despite racking up over 60 points in less than 30 minutes?

krastanov 5y ago
Presumably it triggered a flame-war detector. Just see how many comments were posted in the span of five minutes.

Animats 5y ago

Yale is kind of where you go if you're part of the American establishment but not too bright. The lesser Bush went there. The ones who are both well-connected and smart go to Harvard or Stanford, or maybe Princeton.

obstacle1 5y ago
"Not too bright" is very relative. Even W Jr. is a genius compared to the average American. Even with legacy considerations Ivys aren't accepting truly incapable people.

sabujp 5y ago

I don't know about Yale as a whole, but their current art dept website needs to be abolished for sure https://art.yale.edu https://art.yale.edu , it appears no amount of funding will fix that.

itisit 5y ago
Ha. Brutalist web design is a bit passé already, isn’t it?
riskneutral 5y ago
How is this possible?

rank0 5y ago

Why do so many people jump straight to “abolish” rather than reform? Seems like an extreme and impractical reaction. I’d buy the authors argument if he was pushing for reform. It’s hard to take someone serious when they’re advocating for the destruction of some institution which they are actively part of. Either be a part of the school and change from within or leave and preach for abolishment.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

Elite universities serve some combination of the world's smartest and wealthiest individuals. They even ensure that the if the smartest individuals are poor, that they will get a full ride and come for free. But what do we know very well on this site? > If the service is free, you are the product. Because corporations are unable to do interviews, they rely on the university to do selection. If you are an individual who is getting a full ride to an Elite university, you are selling your services to the wealthy individuals who go to that university, so that when these corporations HR do their retrospective on if individuals from that university are worth their salaries they find it to be true. If you are incredibly gifted, I know the prestige is alluring, I know when you run the numbers it makes the most sense, I know it's a Prisoner's dilemma with no ability to iterate with the rest of the other gifted individuals. But it's really the only way we get out of this. Don't pick universities that select based on gifts. Don't select universities that select based on legacy status. But really, you have all the power. It is up to you to change this.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> Because of COVID-19 gathering restrictions, the class of 2024 missed out on our first-year dinner. I saw "2024", and concluded that this was some kind of future fiction. Apparently not; it must be a typo. I wonder which date was intended.

sohdas 5y ago
I don't think it's a typo. The author is a sophomore, meaning he was admitted in 2020 and is therefore part of the class of 2024.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  OIC. Thanks.

jleyank 5y ago

No clue about physics, but an undergraduate degree from Yale in chemistry makes one a technician in biotech/pharma. Assuming you have good lab skills. Who you work for in grad school and what you get your PhD in determines how you are perceived. Big name people end up at schools like Yale, but wherever they are they are big name people and their family tree tends towards success.

itisit 5y ago

These “tear it down” diatribes often fail to offer the blueprint for what comes next, but this is to be expected from a young mind.

dandare 5y ago

>... excluding women and people of color This is not

dandare 5y ago

> It started off excluding women and people of color... While true, this is irrelevant - because that was the general condition back then - and only deludes the argument.

satisfice 5y ago

How elite can they be if they didn’t even try to recruit me? This is how I recommend that we all feel. Just ignore Yale and do something useful with your life.