This column serves up fish caught by casting our hook into the waters of recent correspondence, thus abstaining from our usual practice of blogging on anything whatsoever.Mitt Romney says that he differs with his grandfather about marriage. Mitt believes it should be between one man and one woman. His grandfather believed it should be between one man and several women.
Only fish will be served that we think will be good for you, either for information or for provocation to think about something new, or about something old but from a different perspective.
Wall Street Journal, July 16:
Next year, when Yale University welcomes students to its joint venture with the National University of Singapore, campus political life will likely bear little resemblance to that of its Ivy League model....A Yale Classmate comments:
[The] Singapore campus won't allow political protests, nor will it permit students to form partisan political societies....
Has [Yale University President] Levin forgotten that he’s the keeper of an academy, not a business? Is the corporation totally driven by the "globalization" profit motive?And another, commenting on the comment:
Or does someone have a justification for an academy without freedom of speech and freedom of assembly?
While I agree with the fundamental premise that Yale’s mission does not involve founding colleges throughout the world, we should remember that when Yale was founded it was not exactly a bastion of free speech or free assembly. My puritan ancestors (including John Maynard, who arrived in the Bay Colony in 1638) were for freedom of religion only as applied to themselves. Jews, Quakers, and even Anglicans were not welcome. Accordingly, the fact that a new college in Singapore is going to have to make accommodations with a less than perfect democracy hardly surprises me. The important thing is that those who are there fight for the freedoms that we have but that weren't given to us but won through generations of struggle.Babbling brook
Tired of eating in restaurants, my wife and I shared beans and rice near this spot Wednesday evening. The brook runs through Woodstock, Vermont as its water falls toward the Ottauquechee River, now less than a quarter of a mile away.
To create the video, I hand-held the Nikon Coolpix P300 that I use for digiscoping.
Ken commented in another place that "It seems that Yale has betrayed its historical values and those of the culture it's embedded in. Is there another way to slice it?"
ReplyDeleteHow Yale's action is sliced depends on who's slicing. In 2006, I vehemently objected (in a letter to Yale President Richard Levin) to Yale's granting George W. Bush an honorary degree at its 2001 commencement. While Levin didn't explicitly contradict me, he did (of course?) support Yale's conferring the degree.
That is, I'm sure that Levin and the Yale Corporation would slice (and have already sliced) the fruit for optimal presentation on the plate.
I do suspect, though, that both of my Yale classmates whose comments I shared would slice things the way Ken does, despite the second classmate's seeming to support Yale's action in establishing a university in Singapore.