Yale's disgrace

Maybe you've kept up with the news in recent weeks, and you're as aghast as I am at some of the ideas liberal academics have been promoting. There's the teacher in Denver who compared Bush to Hitler, the professor in Boulder, Colorado who said the WTC victims were little Eichmanns and, my all time favorite, David Graber, who hopes for "the right virus" to wipe out humanity and reclaim the planet for forest creatures.

As you may have gathered from my previous columns, I am very liberal, yet even I am disgusted at the ridiculous ideas the elitist universities in this country are promoting. Sometimes their desire to be politically correct and promote diversity just seems to get muddled in their strange and esoteric behavior.

This month, it became widely publicized that Yale University admitted a member of the Taliban regime to earn an undergraduate degree. The new student, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, joined the Taliban in 1994 and became a diplomatic envoy in 1998. If you've seen Fahrenheit 9/11, you might remember Rahmatullah. In one scene, a woman lifts a burka and accuses the Taliban of mistreating women, to which he responds, "I'm really sorry to your husband. He might have a very difficult time with you." Yes, it's true: This fiend now attends Yale.

How could Yale possibly admit a member of the Taliban, especially the man who defended their heinous policies? For example, he defended the destruction of timeless art treasures-the Buddhas of Bamiyan-on the basis that they were repugnant to Islam. He also defended a policy of exterminating the Hazaras, an ethnic group residing in central Afghanistan, 15,000 of whom were once killed in a single day.

Yale currently excludes military recruiters from campus, arguing that they discriminate against homosexuals. Nonetheless, Rahmatullah, who was part of a government that smashed gays under brick walls, was welcomed to New Haven. Nor did Yale's liberal monopoly object to the fact that he has defended torture and flagrant abuse of women, even though they constantly attack the Bush administration for alleged human rights violations and helped pressure Harvard's president to resign after making sexist comments.

After being released from Bagram Air Base, even Rahmatullah expressed his surprise at not ending up at Guantanamo Bay. Besides defending the most evil regime since the Nazis, he has a fourth-grade education and never took the SATs. His admittance denied another deserving student the chance to get a quality education and study in America, and he doesn't even have to finance his own education, contrary to Yale's own policy for special degree students. Moreover, Yale, and the State Department, violated the 2005 REAL ID Act, which prohibits representatives of known terrorist regimes from coming to America.

In their defense, Yale administrators claim he will help raise awareness of the difficult issues facing the world, and that they didn't want to lose him to Harvard. To me and most Americans, it seems like they are inviting a known enemy, while rejecting our loyal defenders. In response to Yale's decision, I urge you and your friends not to apply to Yale-I sure won't. Should you apply and be rejected, chock it up to the fact that you've never abetted the subjugation of millions of people.

We must recognize how different our universities have become from the rest of this country. More and more, most Americans look at schools like Harvard and Yale not with admiration, but disdain. Our universities should not be isolated hotbeds of extremist theory or elitist playgrounds. Instead, our universities should exist to serve the greater good of all Americans. They cannot complete this task when they persistently isolate themselves with their absurd thinking, which is growing increasingly less balanced.