Yale Alumni Quotes

Americká armáda má pro podobný jev pojmenování Autobus do Abilene . „Kterýkoliv armádní důstojník vám řekne, co to znamená,“ sdělil pro časopis absolventů Yale, Yale Alumni Magazine, v roce 2008 plukovník v záloze Stephen J. Gerras, profesor behaviorálních věd na U.S. Army War College. „Představte si, jak za horkého letního dne sedí na verandě v Texasu rodinka a někdo říká: ,Nudím se. Co kdybychom jeli do Abilene?‘ Když přijedou do Abilene, někdo řekne: ,Víte, já jsem vlastně ani jet nechtěl.‘ A někdo jiný řekne: ,Já jsem nechtěl jet – a myslel jsem, že ty jet chceš,‘ a tak dále. Když se octnete ve skupině vojáků a někdo řekne: ,Myslím, že všichni jedeme autobusem do Abilene,‘ každý hned zbystří. Dá se tím zarazit konverzace. Je to velmi silný výtvor naší kultury.

Of Yale alumni who had reached their forties by 2000, only 56 percent of the women remained in the workforce, compared with 90 percent of the men.13 This exodus of highly educated women is a major contributor to the leadership gap.

It took Valentine a year and a half to raise $5 million for his first fund.[18] But in the end he succeeded by tapping pools of capital that enjoyed charitable status: the universities and endowments that escaped not only regulation but also capital-gains tax. The Ford Foundation came in first, later to be joined by Yale, Vanderbilt, and eventually Harvard; ironically, the Ivy League investment bosses showed a greater open-mindedness about a gruff Fordham graduate than many alumni could muster. In so doing, the endowments set in motion one of the great virtuous cycles of the American system. Venture capitalists backed knowledge-intensive startups, and some of the profits flowed to research institutions that generated more knowledge.[19

2011, writing in the Yale Alumni Magazine, Ron Howell, Murphy’s classmate, noted that forty-one years after their graduation, nine of thirty-two Black men who entered Yale in 1966 were dead, a death rate three times higher than that of the class as a whole. Williams offered a sliver of hope and a broad set of suggestions to attack the problem. Even as he spoke of that sliver, I couldn’t shake the thought

Toward the end Buckley becomes both a trifle paranoid and contradictory. He is so worried that the collectivist policies recommended by the faculty will be widely embraced that they will end up bankrupting the wealthy alumni of the college, resulting in "the impoverishment of every imaginable financial supporter of Yale, except the government" (G 171). The last time I checked-fifty years after Buckley's screed, and when many of the abhorred "collectivist" policies had been embraced as a matter of routine economic policy by the American government-Yale was still financially well endowed.

I’ve been told again and again, at school after school, that career service offices have little or nothing to say to students who are interested in something other than the big four of law, medicine, finance, and consulting. At the recruitment fairs, the last two dominate the field. And some schools go even further. Stanford offers companies special access to its students for a fee of ten thousand dollars—and it is hard to believe that Stanford is the only one. Selling your students to the highest bidder: it doesn’t get more cynical than that. But though the process isn’t often that direct, that’s basically the way the system works. As a friend of mine, a third-generation Yalie, once remarked, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. David Foster Wallace (Amherst ’85), has a character put it like this: The college itself turned out to have a lot of moral hypocrisy about it, e.g., congratulating itself on its diversity and the leftist piety of its politics while in reality going about the business of preparing elite kids to enter elite professions and make a great deal of money, thus increasing the pool of prosperous alumni donors.

Clark cast Yale’s new admissions standards as “a statement, really, about what leadership was going to be in the country and where leaders were going to come from.” The old elite understood this and tried to fight back. Yale’s admissions officers received frosty receptions at prep schools that had once embraced them. Alumni grumbled—as in William F. Buckley’s complaint that the new standards would prefer “a Mexican-American from El Paso High . . . [over] . . . Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.” A rump of Yale’s corporation resisted: when Clark made a presentation to the corporation about constructing a new American elite based on merit rather than birth, one member interjected, “You’re talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table. These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.

So what happens when an entire generation stands to benefit from the economic spoils of their parents’ work? Enter millennials—the children of baby boomers. For example, many of my peers at Harvard and at Yale grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, attended Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and then matriculated at Ivy League colleges, often advantaged by their parents’ alumni status. These were the kids who needed at once to benefit from their parentally endowed privileges while also being morally superior to their parents for recognizing those privileges. Becoming woke to genetically inherited attributes like “whiteness” fit the bill perfectly, since it allowed an entire generation to blame their forefathers for the sin they had inherited at birth. It wasn’t quite their fault; it was someone else’s sin that they were merely burdened with.