A Yale admissions officer named Hannah Mendlowitz recently penned a blog (an official Yale blog, mind you) that said Yale Admissions would not penalize applicants who took time off from school to participate in anti-gun rallies. Rather, they might be rewarded for it. "We expect students who come to Yale to be versed in issues of social justice," she said.
In other words, if you are active in issues Yale cares about, you'll have a leg up. But what if you take time off from school to march against say, abortion or, God forbid, in favor of 2nd Amendment rights? Good luck winning a ticket to New Haven. High schoolers today are savvy enough to omit such things from their college applications. What a shame.
I encourage you to read every word of Hannah Mendlowitz's piece.
Some Yale friends and I were emailing back and forth about this, and one had a response that I reprint here, with his permission. It addresses how progressives have colonized Yale and just about every other American institution over the last few decades, and it is worthy of a broader distribution than our little email group. He wishes to remain anonymous, lest business colleagues hold it against him (another shame):
I noted the (Yale) story not with surprise, but with the usual dismay. And
in fairness to you, Scott, it is necessary to point out the bare facts
when people have made up their minds to deny the obvious.
After
more than 20 years of Yale Alumni interviewing, I am not surprised that the
Admissions Office is signaling preference for budding social justice
warriors. I would say 90% of the would-be Yalies I interviewed talked up
their Social Justice and associated environmental interests and
activism as prime reasons they were interested in going to Yale and as
evidence that they were deserving. They got that idea somehow, and they
weren’t wrong.
The question is always - so what
are we supposed to do about it? A certain amount of complaining is in
order, and it could lead the administration to do the usual PR juggling
act to hocus inconvenient stories out of sight, only to restore the
provocative policy when no one is looking.
The sad
reality is that our college was colonized long ago by movement
people. Once you have the faculty, the administration, and a compliant board, what else do you need? It is their university, and they
will do with it what they want as long as they don’t need our money, and
they don’t. The Admissions Office is aware that it is a gatekeeper for
entry into an elite, and they want to make sure that those who pass
through the gate are as in-line with the movement’s goals and values as
possible. Put a drink in them, and they will confess to it. They want
what they want; there is no reason to trust them to do anything else.
They could be U Chicago, if they wanted. They don't.
I am
open to suggestions. Certainly, there are opportunities for subversive
political street theatre, though the young dissidents will need to take
their game up a notch. Perhaps supportive alums should take steps to
help dissidents land on their feet with respect to their postgraduate
careers by extending patronage. The Left has been doing that forever,
and it one of their keys to making sure that people stay active and
in-line.
Money talks. Certainly, cutting off
money for administration activists so that they lose their jobs would
change the playing field. That can’t be done at Yale, but perhaps it can
be done over time at public universities. Or perhaps conditioning
Federal student loans in some way would get their attention. Cutting off
(or even reducing) the flow of public money to activists will be seen
as an existential threat, because it would be. If there were no jobs for
SJW’s, there would be a lot fewer of them.
The
bad news news is that the movement is now working hard to colonize private
companies—that’s what the Damore story at Google was all about. The
rent-seeking and will to power are pretty apparent. Big Tech is nearly
gone. Fortune 500 size companies are completely exposed. Advertising,
Entertainment, and Media? ‘Nuff said. Converting big companies into
Social Justice vehicles has been an explicit goal for more than 20
years, and the investment is paying dividends. People better informed
than I can speak to conditions in Big Finance. Movement penetration in law,
government jobs, and the judiciary is obvious enough to everyone. By no
coincidence, this is where Yalies go.