Second Letter to Yale (May 6, 2006)

I’m glad that my letter of April 8 gave you a welcome break from the self-serving accusations you had recently had to endure from “conservatives.” Thanks for your reply, however circumspectly you had to express yourself when it comes to money questions, since fund-raising is, I have to suppose, one of your top priorities. My thanks would have come sooner, but I confess that I thought at first that you had dodged my questions and it took me a while to realize that you had actually answered them, if between the lines.

When you wrote that “there were as many students and alumni who believed strongly that George W. Bush should receive an honorary degree as likely believed that John Kennedy should not receive an honorary degree in 1961,” I think you were saying that the number was negligible. Neither of us really knows how many students and alumni opposed the honorary degree to JFK, but my sense is that there were not very many (even after Mr. Kennedy’s ungracious remark about now having “the best of two worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree”).

And I infer, from that answer, that you were telling me that, of the two alternatives from which I couldn’t pick one to prefer to be untrue—“[1] Yale administrators sold the honor or [2] they actually believed Bush worthy of it”—it’s the second one that isn’t true.

Which leaves me to figure out in what sense you “sold the honor.” I think I’ve got it. You didn’t literally sell it. Here’s how I think it went. Fund-raising was (and always is) crucial to the Yale enterprise. Bush represented big money. Really big money. Even though most of Yale disapproved of this small-minded servant of special interests’ having become President of the United States, he had, in fact and however dishonorably, done so. And, after all, Yale had given an honorary degree to JFK and other Presidents, including Bush’s father. To not give one to the son would not only fail to shake any of his people’s money loose, but would also probably stanch their current trinkle. There was no way as fund-raiser-in-chief that you could not give Bush that degree, no matter how distasteful it was to you intellectually, morally, or politically.

Of course, as far as “how much money changed hands,” you simply don’t know the full amount, for not all donations flowing in would have been identified as coming from Bush backers deeply grateful for Yale’s endorsement of their tax-cut champion.

I realize that your position constrains you from literally saying that I’ve accurately deciphered your diplomatic code. So let’s do what they do in the movies. Don’t blink your eyes if I’ve got it. That is, if I don’t hear back from you, I’ll know that I understood you correctly.