Yalie-On-Yalie-Action

Jamie Kirchick and Dan Munz are having an argument about something really inconsequential---the appropriateness of President Levin's salary. Since they're both friends of mine, and if I said I care about this I'd be lying, I'm not going to take sides. I just want to point out that Levin not only saved Yale from fiscal insolvency, but restored its endowment to a status competitive with Harvard's. That definitely counts for something.

OTOH, he's presided over the disintegration of its athletics---I think that's something the president can exert influence on---and I can't forgive him for allowing the wrestling program to get axed because of Title IX pressure (wrestling is my family's ancestral sport; my father and grandfather were both bulldog wrestlers). The solution? Compensate him adequately and hire somebody else to overhaul athletics. Fundraising is time-consuming enough as it is, and those who are great at it are seldom very good at anything else (Terry McAullife anybody?).

Oh yeah, one more thing. A sentence that begins with "Henry Ford, great capitalist that he [was]," achieves its telos by ending with "used his fortune to set up book mills posing as publishing houses for the distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda including the Protocols of the Elders of Blah Blah Blah." Not that I'm overly sensitive about Jew-hatred. I'm willing to judge art and literature and philosophy completely apart from whatever anti-Semitic bile its creators had stored up. But Ford was a Know-Nothing who made himself fabulously wealthy by selling crappy ugly cars for low prices. That's not a world-historical achievement. "Time," as Auden wrote, "worships language and forgives all those by whom it lives." But it doesn't forgive the fascist sympathies of a second-rate robber barron. Let's please not transform him into a paradigm for civic responsibility.