Last month, the President of Yale, Peter Salovey, announced his eleven-year run would end in June 2024, capped by record-setting financial success. During his tenure, the university raised from alumni the staggering sum of $7 billion.  Over roughly the same term the university’s endowment doubled from $21 billion to $41 billion.  Nothing like money.

Amidst the accumulation of billions, President Salovey found time on October 10, three long days after Hamas attacked Israel, to write five paragraphs that will forever stain Yale, its author, the supine Yale Board of Trustees that permitted the letter to be sent, and the more than 5,000 faculty members who have yet to pen a written objection. 

The bravest line of the letter is here. “As a member of the Yale community, I am compelled by our shared sense of humanity to condemn the attacks on civilians by Hamas in the strongest possible terms.”  But it turns out, that’s it.   Nothing follows about the specifics of the attack, the point-blank execution of hundreds at the music festival, the burning alive of men, women, and children, the rapes and mutilations, kidnappings, the hour upon hour hunt and extermination of those surviving the initial attack, the murdered babies, the boasting online, the ecstatic celebration of death, in all, horrors so unspeakable that seasoned war correspondents have said it exceeds in cruelty anything they have ever seen.

Worse yet, the entire point of the letter undercuts the condemnation, draining it of meaning. “The world has watched in horror as over 1,700 individuals in the region have been killed in the resulting violence.”  As of October 10, the reported murdered Israelis numbered 700, though that number now exceeds 1,300.  So Salovey explicitly mourns the death of Hamas jihadists as the moral equivalent to the innocents they have slaughtered.  This from the holder of an endowed Yale chair of Psychology, knowing that the blood of October 7 had barely dried. Name another massacre in history in which the victims are grouped with the perpetrators as objects of collective sorrow.

Lest anyone miss the true theme of collective woe, Salovey hammers it home.  “The death toll in Israel continues to climb.  Non-militant Palestinians have been killed or displaced.”  Full stop, no explanation needed.  The moral equivalence espoused in these sentences is matched only by its arrogance.  But Salovey fears his audience is slow, so repetition never hurts, “I am shocked and anguished by the loss of life and the pain and suffering of so many.”  Whoever you may be. 

At the exact moment when it mattered most, here lies the synthesized apex of Yale’s mission and by extension the academic elite who Americans have been taught to trust and follow. How fitting, and infinitely sad, for a university that sanctimoniously prides itself as the training ground of world leaders, present and future, cultivating in its elites the wisdom, training, and ethics to lead us to a better place. 

But Salovey is not done, for what would Yale be if it did not look forward?  “At Yale, we stand for peace -- and support steadfastly those working toward it in the region.”  One would think it beneath his and Yale’s rhetorical training to frame the university against the nonexistent set of those who stand for war.  But that is not his point.  It is to cast Yale’s support in the days ahead only to those “working toward” peace in the region.  And who might that be?  Certainly not Israel, that at his writing had declared war on Hamas.  No need to mention Hamas’ charter to eradicate all Israelis, and Jews everywhere, from the face of the earth, with October 7 as a down payment.  Perhaps he means the U.N. Or China’s immediate call for a cessation of hostilities.  Or Iran’s demand that Israel cease retaliation to face ever more certain destruction in the future.  Impertinence were anyone to question Salovey’s moral high ground, and the utter inanity to claim Yale stands for peace, when it means quite the opposite.

Perhaps it could be said in Yale’s defense that it is institutionally bound from speaking clearly on matters beyond its cloistered walls.  Absolutely not.  In response to George Floyd’s murder, Salovey on behalf of Yale in 2020 sent to the entire Yale community a detailed, personal, passionately empathetic letter, unequivocal in content, placing events in historical context, explicating its broader meaning and implications, ending in a clarion call to action.  In other words, everything that the October 10, 2023 letter is not.  

If that were all, it would be tragic for Yale, yet at one with the broader failures seen among America’s leading universities.  But it is the way of evil to metastasize, in tragedy and farce.  For the latter, the Yale Daily News, those brave harbingers of future leadership, report on Salovey’s letter as a forceful condemnation of Hamas. Veering closer to tragedy, the Slifka Jewish center at Yale could not even muster the independence to write on these tragic events, preferring instead to affirm by email the “beautifully articulated” message delivered by Salovey.  How sad for Jews everywhere.

The law faculty at Northwestern point the way to what should have been said by Yale.

In a powerful message, the signatory faculty specifically recount the horrors inflicted on Israelis, ending with a message that condemns Yale’s statement far better than pure explication.  “As faculty members dedicated to the rule of law, we choose to make clear that we unequivocally condemn Hamas’s wanton acts of terrorism, which have made the establishment of a just peace, recognizing the rights of every community, all the more difficult to achieve.”  Just peace, not John Lennon’s anodyne peace, or worse yet Salovey’s peace that means no peace for Israel, ever.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln gives the enduring explication of war that leads to just peace, “[O}ne of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.  And the war came.”

The Northwestern letter ends by denouncing the equivalence that lies at the heart of Salovey’s carefully curated message, “Some have claimed that the Hamas atrocities must be blamed on Israel.  What Hamas perpetrated was unspeakably evil.  It is dehumanizing to blame the murders on the victims.  We absolutely reject such acceptance, and near-endorsement, of terror.”  Salovey is careful to stop short of this final treachery, yet his message stands in the same garden, one which cannot, and will not, distinguish between Hamas’ slaughter and eliminationist ideology and Israel’s right to exist.

Among the billions raised by Salovey from alumni is money for study in the humanities.  Yale is in dire need of a refresher.  For much of its history, Yale refused to enroll Jews in numbers, “the alien and unwashed.”  Prior to Pearl Harbor, Yale was a staunch bastion of isolationism and anti-Semitism, famously inviting Charles Lindbergh to speak to the assembled masses.  During the war, Yale refused to accept displaced Jewish scholars.  Postwar Yale returned to its quota system, now applied with a vengeance to Asians.  Fast forward to the present, Jewish enrollment is plummeting back to the once ordained 10% ceiling, sinking to an estimated 12% for the class of 2022.  And now this.

The stain of Yale ‘s October 10 letter should and must endure.

Image: Ted Eytan