The American Spectator

Campus Scenes

Yale vs. Harvard is the oldest and fiercest college rivalry in America. So when Harvard managed to make itself look petty and ridiculous as it very publicly edged out its president over a series of petty grievances, my alma mater was going to have to work very hard to make itself look even more foolish.

Not only did Yale rise to the challenge, it shattered all Ivy League records for freestyle downhill idiocy with the revelation that it had admitted as a special student Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, a former ambassador for Afghanistan's odious Taliban.

Yale's then-Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Richard Shaw (for whom I worked as an undergraduate, and who at that time seemed like a nice man with no indications of incipient lunacy) told the New York Times Magazine that "another foreigner of Rahmatullah's caliber" applied to Yale the year before, but "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again." So that's what happened to Baghdad Bob!

How has Mr. Rahmatullah's presence on campus affected Yale's atmosphere of tolerant liberalism? Maybe they'll finally get around to altering their ridiculous policy on co-ed bathrooms. They wouldn't change it for me or for the group of Orthodox Jews known as the "Yale Five," but then again neither the Yale Five nor I worked for regimes that chop fingers off women for wearing nail polish.

I'm not certain, but some other changes may have occurred since Mr. Rahmatullah arrived. I was flipping through a copy of the Yale Glee Club's newest sheet music the other day, and I think I detected a few changes in the words of the old traditional songs. See whether you can spot the accommodations Yale has made for Mr. Rahmatullah's sensibilities:

p>RAHMATULLAH br> (Formerly "Boola, Boola!") br> em>Rahmatullah, Rahmatullah, br> Mullah Omar's speaking through ya, br> When they blew up br> The Bamyan Buddhas br> Did you holler Boola Boola? /em> /p>