Here's a letter from Yale to Maen Rashid Areikat, the Palestine Liberation Organization's rep in Washington, responding to Areikat's complaint about that disgraceful conference that a Yale center dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism held last week. all about self-hating Jews, Palestinian identity formation (not good), and criticism of Israel (presumably at the behest of major donors).
President [Richard] Levin has asked me to respond to your letter of August 30th.
I very much appreciate the reference in your letter to the importance of free speech-- a fundamental principal [sic] respected by individuals and institutions around the world. As an institution which holds this principal [ditto] in the highest regard, we cannot prevent speakers at an on campus event from speaking their minds. By the same token, the fact that speakers at a recent conference at Yale expressed various points of view does not in any way imply that the University endorses any of those views. Rather, it reflects Yale's robust policy on freedom of expression.
Thank you for taking your time to express your views on the subject.
Donald L. Filer
Director, Office of International Affairs
Great. So levin and filer would have no objection to a Yale-branded conference on Islamohatred. Powerful thing, that academic freedom concept.
was the response to your letter printed on university stationary?
haw, haw. nothing like a little bad grammar humor. i guess yale ain’t what it used to be. more disturbing however is the lack of substantive content in the response. if this is evidence of the level of effort master don was willing to put into his response, a simple FU would have been more honest. (great now i’m in bad pun mode. and a mastodon is not really a dinosaur anyway, although don seems stuck in an intellectual tar pit of some sort.)
This secretary’s name is Filer? You can’t make that stuff up. But I shouldn’t tease him — he might send me to the principle’s office.
As George W. Bush once quipped while visiting his alma mater, ‘William F. Buckey rote a book at Yale. I red one.’
Don Filer, another legacy admission like Bush, laffed. ‘I red one in high skool, George!’ he guffawed.
Ocscar is right. Someone should invite David Duke or David Irving to campus and see what happens.
Filer is being intellectually dishonest. Imagine if the contributors to “Midnight on the Mari Marvara” — for example — proposed a conference using Yale facilities to expand on the articles in the book? Would Yale stand up for that under the rubric of “academic freedom?”
Heck, I wonder what would happen if they had something legitimate–say, a conference on anti-Arab racism and invited Norman Finkelstein, Ali Abunimeh and Joseph Massad and Noam Chomsky and a few others.
Yale like De Paul ( Chicago) has failed in advancing honest dialogue .Yale by allowing one-sided lies , diatribe, and broadside against Palestine, De Paul by silencing someone who was raising voice against this pattern so rampant in the academy.