The Stain Yale Can Never Erase

Last month, the President of Yale, Peter Salovey, announced his eleven-year run would end in June 2024, capped by record-setting financial success. During his tenure, the university raised from alumni the staggering sum of $7 billion.  Over roughly the same term the university’s endowment doubled from $21 billion to $41 billion.  Nothing like money.

Amidst the accumulation of billions, President Salovey found time on October 10, three long days after Hamas attacked Israel, to write five paragraphs that will forever stain Yale, its author, the supine Yale Board of Trustees that permitted the letter to be sent, and the more than 5,000 faculty members who have yet to pen a written objection.

The bravest line of the letter is here. “As a member of the Yale community, I am compelled by our shared sense of humanity to condemn the attacks on civilians by Hamas in the strongest possible terms.”  But it turns out, that’s it.   Nothing follows about the specifics of the attack, the point-blank execution of hundreds at the music festival, the burning alive of men, women, and children, the rapes and mutilations, kidnappings, the hour upon hour hunt and extermination of those surviving the initial attack, the murdered babies, the boasting online, the ecstatic celebration of death, in all, horrors so unspeakable that seasoned war correspondents have said it exceeds in cruelty anything they have ever seen.