The combined endowment of the Ivy Leagues totaled $135 billion at the end 2018, a figure that will be considerably higher in 2019.  Hence the sharp observation that they are hedge funds masquerading as universities.  If only they were so benign. 

As these institutions never tire of reminding us or themselves, they educate the leaders of tomorrow; are led by renowned professors; make use of research, grants, and publications to shape the contours of modern debate; and spread their influence through vast alumni networks.

I write with particular interest in my alma mater, Yale, where I graduated many years ago summa cum laude from Yale College, Yale School of Management, and Yale Law School. 

I take this opportunity to renounce myself as an alumnus in good standing.  And I encourage as many alumni as possible to join in the movement to Cancel Yale, or your respective educational institution. 

Why?

The final straw for me is a random one: the decision to eliminate the introductory History of Art class as too white, too male, and too Western, in favor of art history courses that explore race, sex, and class, with special attention to climate change!

Is most of Yale's campus architecture too white, too male, and too Western?

The decision epitomizes all that woke Yale has striven to become.  Lost in this particular decision is the immersion in masterpieces, the only art course many would take, taught in my era by the resplendent Vincent Scully, who later became a neighbor and friend. 

The decision is one with Yale's programmatic march in the service of identity politics with an unabashedly progressive cast. 

In a 2017 survey, Yale students put conservative teachers at 1%, roughly the same answer from Yale computer science professor and Unabomber victim David Gelernter, who in 2019 said it more closely approximates 0%.  The Federalist Society invited a Christian speaker representing the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was denounced by law students as a "homophobic, transphobic hate group."

As it turns out, the canary in the coal mine happened a quarter-century ago, with the then unheard-of return by Yale of $20 million to the Bass Family after four years of fruitless negotiations.  The gift was intended to expand the curriculum on Western civilization.  Today, the gift would not even be accepted. 

Relentless identity politics in the classroom, no meaningful political diversity, isolation of students with non-conforming views, empowerment of the most aggrieved student demands.  The totalitarian spirit is alive and well at Yale. 

Virtue-signaling is too kind an expression for Yale's direction under President Peter Salovey.  The watchword of climate change is "sustainability," a concept grounded in the notion of inheritance.  Yale, too, is an inheritance, one of excellence, that in recent years has been brazenly despoiled of its core resource: the dedicated, impartial search for truth.  Truth is not 90% giving to the Democratic party.  Truth is not growth in diversity for all things except intellectual.  Truth is not the injection of race and sex as the dominant lens for all discussion, from the humanities, to the social sciences, the arts, to law, medicine, and increasingly even the sciences. 

So what is the platform of Cancel Yale (or your favorite institution)?

1. Crowdsource support on social media.  In numbers there is strength. 

2. Forswear all charitable giving until such time as meaningful change is implemented.  Your charitable giving is needed elsewhere. 

3. Use strength to elect sympathetic Board members.

4. Require the meaningful hire of conservative and right-of-center professors, until an approximate 50/50 ideological balance is achieved.

5. Require a sharp university shift in resources, with administrative spending cut a minimum of 25%, spent dollar for dollar on teaching by intellectually diverse professors. 

6. Advocate for reduced government funding.  Productive research funding is fine and desirable.  Woke funding to an elite institution with a $30-billion endowment is a massive fraud on the U.S. taxpayer. 

Clearly, this program is unimaginable in the current environment.  So be it.  Then the university should feel the consequences.  The tools are at hand if alumni unite and use social media to create a sustained opposition. 

It also is inevitable, on the current trajectory, that Yale and the rest of the Ivy League will forfeit their dominance.  Most obviously, employers will move to skill-based testing.  Break the spell, and employment and advancement, and ultimately societal prestige, will be as they should be, based on merit, not membership in an increasingly distorted coterie, as Roger Kimball put it, of fragility and angry intolerance. 

As with the New York Times' discredited 1619 Project, the irony of progressive elite institutions is that they advocate for the end of elite institutions.  Let them have their wish. 

Cancel Yale now.  Cancel the Ivy League now. 

Photo credit: Needpix.