More Yale Crap



Is it irony, ineptitude, or intent with which this Yale Daily News article omits any mention of Yale’s own investments in Sudanese Oil, a story which YaleInsider (remember YaleInsider?) broke way back in the John Stepp-less summer of 2002. Yale claimed to have divested from Talisman Energy by the beginning of 2003, though there was some doubt expressed as to whether this was, in fact, the case. Levin’s assertion that “we've had a couple of situations at Yale where our policy had mandated divesting ourselves of ethically questionable holdings" indeed may be his oblique way of referring to this controversy, although if this is the case, then the YDN completely fails to notice. What’s certain, however, is that Levin is definitely referring to Yale’s divestment from South Africa in the 1980s, employing the passive voice and the language of abstract necessity to mask the upsurge of student, labor, and community activism against the university’s support for the apartheid regime. Yale’s administration knows all to well that this was no neat mandate but a drawn out and difficult struggle, because Darth – err, Michael Morand, the Associate Vice President of Pure Fucki – err, New Haven and State Affairs, was one of the students who led the campaign. At any rate, Yale’s investments, with their reliance on massive hedge funds, are every bit as “ethically questionable” as Harvard’s, a fact which Rick Levin knows all to well, and which neither linguistic legerdemain nor wistful thinking can erase or fully obscure.