The Yale Curriculum
By Dan Gelernter
In 1995 Yale had to take the unprecedented and exceptionally embarrassing step of returning a $20 million donation. Lee Bass, who graduated in 1979, had made the gift in 1991 with the stipulation that the money be used to create a Western Civilization program. The “Western Civilization” part was the problem.
Yale has tried to obscure the reason it eventually rejected the gift and to blame Bass himself by claiming that he wanted veto power over the professors who would be hired for this program. The claim is false.
The idea for a Western Civilization program came from a 1990 speech by Donald Kagan, then dean of Yale College. Bass was inspired by the speech and approached then President Benno Schmidt with an offer to provide the money. Schmidt appointed Kagan to head a panel to work out the details. The money was presented to Yale in 1991, and the program was supposed to be in place by ’93. But Yale’s leftists and multiculturalists hated the idea of a “Western Civilization” program. When Richard Levin became president in 1993 the program was waylaid. In 1994, according to Light and Truth, the Yale publication that helped break the story and covered the scandal, Levin “effectively killed the program...by dismissing the original committee that had designed the integrated program in detail and appointing a new committee which allocated the Bass endowment money among separate departments in the area of Western civilization, thereby thwarting the principal idea of an integrated program...Lee Bass first learned of the misapplication of his gift by reading the Wall Street Journal (11/25/94) fourteen months after the agreed program was originally supposed to be in place.” The next year, with no Western Civilization program in sight, Bass asked for and got his money back.
In 1996, Yale had trustees Judge José Cabranes and Henry Schacht prepare a report to determine the cause of the lost donation. Levin read the report, then had it suppressed: “Even Yale trustees had to return their copies.”
Yale has long had a Western Civilization program, known as Directed Studies, which offers three yearlong freshmen courses in history, literature, and philosophy. This program goes back much farther than Kagan’s speech, however, so it is obvious that Kagan and Bass had a much more extensive program in mind. If Yale has failed to create such a program, it is not for want of activity. This is what Yale has been working on recently:
In September 2006, the administration appointed Maria Trumpler as “special advisor to the administration on all matters relating to the life of LGBTQ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer] students and staff at Yale.” Trumpler will also be director of undergraduate studies in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department as of this coming term; her last position was “coordinator of bisexual, lesbian, gay and transgender advisers” at Harvard.
In October ‘06, Yale announced another new deanship in its never-ending battle to pander to minorities: assistant dean and director of Native American affairs. (Yale means “American Indian” -- of course “Native American” means anyone who was born here.) Yale already had an assistant dean taking care of American Indian students, but that dean also had responsibility for Latino students; apparently the load was too great for one man to handle.
You may wonder what Yale offers to “balance” its curriculum and placate the left. My curiosity was excited by Seth Simmon’s January 3 post on our Quad blog. Mr. Simmons wrote about the Young America Foundation’s list of the dozen most leftist courses at today’s universities. Yale may not offer “Cyberfeminism” or “Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism,” but we certainly come close, with courses ranging from silly to nauseating.
For example: History 441, “Race and Medicine in America,” taught by Susan Lederer and described as “an examination of the history of race and medicine in the United States, primarily but not exclusively focused on African Americans’ encounters with the health care system. Topics include slavery and health...the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the use of minorities as research subjects,” etc.
There are plenty of silly courses in the African Studies Department, like AFAM 441, “The Fiction of Imaginary or Imminent Futures,” taught by Hazel Carby, which is about “the relation between early science fiction and the political project of colonization.”
Or AFAM 282, “Poverty Under Postindustrial Capitalism.” Since this course is listed in the African American Studies Department but not in American Studies, apparently we should conclude that poverty only affects blacks.
But no one can beat the feminist department, known as “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,” for pure infantile stupidity. Consider such courses as, “Making Modern Sexual and Gender Difference,” “Liberalism, Gender, and Multiculturalism,” (that must be a humdinger), “Black Women’s Film and Video,” and “Gendering Musical Performance.” There is also a course called “Fairy Tales,” which might serve better as a title for the whole department.
I won’t be holding my breath awaiting a course on “White Men’s Film and Video”.
If all these fail to interest you, you consider History 462, “Shops and Shopping,” which claims to be an “historical overview of the spaces and practices of shopping. “
Yale has plenty of serious courses too, but you need to know which departments to stay away from. One reason I chose music as my major is that music is one of the least politicized departments. Nevertheless, I was required to take “Topics in World Music,” which covers the history of music from Africa, India, Indonesia, etc. We covered, in other words, all the countries whose music was left out of the three-course series on music history, which was thought to be complete until last year when an administrator suddenly noticed that music history only included Europe and America.
It has been just over a decade since Lee Bass had his $20 million returned to him, and Yale still doesn’t have the Western Civilization program that Kagan envisioned. The main difference is that now we can ask ourselves, will a donor ever try again? Not likely.
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Reader Comments (2)
Anyways, I would presume that learning about Western Civilization is, you know, important to the inheritors of... Western Civilization. But I'm not exactly sure.