Education: March 2006 Archives

Yale University has admitted as a special student Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, who had been a high-ranking official in Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime. John Fund had the story in the Wall Street Journal, writing of his spring 2001 encounter with Rahmatullah:

After a meeting in which he defended the Taliban's treatment of women and said he hadn't seen any evidence that their "guest" Osama bin Laden was a terrorist, I felt I had looked into the face of evil.

I walked Mr. Rahmatullah out. I will never forget how he stopped at a picture window and stared up at the World Trade Center, which terrorists had failed to destroy in 1993. When I finally pried him away, I couldn't help but think, He must have been thinking about the one that got away.

In his latest Townhall.com column, Yale alumnus Clinton W. Taylor relays a creative way for alumni and others to protest Yale's action. In honor of the Afghan women who had fingernails pulled out by the Taliban for the crime of wearing fingernail polish, Taylor calls on us to send press-on nails to the school's president and head fundraiser. Taylor helpfully provides addresses for the recipients of your nail snail mail, and suggestions for more worthy recipients of what you would have given to Yale's alumni fund this year. And he encourages you to mail these tips along with the nail tips:

Feel free to point out the hypocrisy of Yale’s decision to admit Sayeed Rahmatullah Hashemi, who supported a regime that killed homosexuals, stoned women, tortured/killed many, and destroyed Buddhas, even though Yale keeps ROTC off campus and files briefs with the Supreme Court protesting the military’s right to recruit on campus.

I'm sure Yale administrators won't appreciate it, but I appreciate it when alumni like Taylor use what leverage they have to exert pressure on our elite academic institutions counter to the prevailing forces of political correctness and Western cultural suicide.

(* I know, somebody else beat me to this headline, but I thought of it as soon as I read the e-mail alerting me to Taylor's article, before she posted it over there. Really. And if my first idea was identical to that of an award-winning headline writer, there wasn't much point in trying to come up with a better one.)