First-Degree Criminal and Academic Mischief at Yale

By Lauren Noble

Sunday, May 19, 2024

 

Last month, police arrested a Yale University Ph.D. student named Beshouy Botros for first-degree criminal mischief. Botros is alleged to have taken down the American flag in Yale’s Beinecke Plaza during anti-Israel protests last month, racking up more than $9,000 in estimated repair costs for the university. Observers of the turmoil at elite universities may regard the disruption, hate, and ignorance on full display as alarming indicators of the next generation’s values. Unfortunately, the hatred of America is not an aberration from, but rather an extension of, the worldview often pushed on college campuses these days.

 

Let’s start with the fact that Botros is not simply some random activist “animated by feminist and queer of color critique,” as his bio says on a Yale webpage. He actually co-taught a Yale course this past academic year that covered, among other topics, “toleration and violence” and “settler colonialism.” Botros also serves as a teaching fellow, running “seminar-style sections for a course on histories of medicine and race.” If found guilty of violating both the law and Yale’s policies, will he be suspended or expelled by Yale, or will he be allowed to continue teaching?

 

Even before the scandals of recent months, confidence in American higher education had dropped significantly. Political bias on campus and the wide gap between the Ivory Tower and the American public are significant factors in this declining trust. And the belief that colleges and universities charge parents more than the average American annual income to indoctrinate their kids hasn’t helped. The total estimated cost for the upcoming academic year at Yale, for example, is now a whopping $90,975.

 

A quick glance through Yale’s course catalogue for this past semester provides insight into why students at Ivy League universities harbor ill will toward American values.

 

In Theory and Practice of Early Childhood Education, future teachers of America’s three- to six-year-olds are instructed in “anti-bias education” and taught to “understand how political context contributes to the practice of education.” One wonders whether it’s indeed a good idea to teach three-year-olds — an age where fact and imagined reality blend seamlessly — about the various ways they can be racist against their classmates. At the very least, this gives the lie to claims that critical race theory isn’t being taught to America’s children. America’s top universities are instructing future teachers to do just that.

 

Yale students interested in education outside the classroom can take a class on the “perpetuation of white supremacy, heteronormativity, and ableism” in their local museum. “The Inclusive Museum: Gender, Race, Disability, and the Politics of Display” declares that “BLM and COVID-19 have underscored the imperative for public institutions like art museums to reckon with [that] longstanding dilemma.” Students who, like some of Yale’s faculty, believe that museums are racist can take a full semester on “Black Exhibitions,” with a special focus on the connection between “colonial expansion and racial capitalism” on the one hand, and art displays on the other.

 

And of course, museums aren’t the only place where Yale students can learn about perceived racist boogeymen. Theater students, not generally known for being a regressive group, are invited to spend the semester discussing how “systemic racism and systemic oppression” have suffused their theater-production process.

 

Bringing it all together, enterprising Yalies can take Constructing the Racial State and learn how every bit of concrete poured and every piece of legislation passed are really just efforts to establish “racial hierarchization,” and they can determine “how racialized subjects are managed and controlled.”

 

What used to make the hard sciences and math stand apart from social sciences and the arts was that they were based in fact and weren’t as disrupted by culture or politics. No longer, at least not at Yale. Responsible Conduct in Research for Physical Scientists instructs STEM students on how to ensure that their research meets “diversity, equity, and inclusion” goals.

 

Even psychology is deconstructed and examined through a racial lens at Yale. History of Psychology: Racism and Colonial Power looks at the “mind sciences” and how they are “intertwined” with “white supremacy/racial hierarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, empire, and colonialism.” A brief overview of the source material assures students that the syllabus includes works in “postcolonial studies.”

 

Students interested in a real mind bend of a semester can also take Colonialism and Psychology, which focuses on the psychological approaches to colonialism, race, and gender that the History of Psychology course has convinced them were actually enabled by racist psychologists in the first place.

 

And, of course, there are courses such as No Time for Tears: Friendships between Black Women and White Women. The course ponders whether “relationships between Black women and White women can develop an equal footing” and asks: “Can those relationships be unfettered by the trappings of quid pro quo transactions? Are these relationships even possible?”

 

That’s just the spring semester. The fall semester promises more of the same. In Feminism without Women: Modernist and Postcolonial Textual Experiments, students can look forward to “exploring a theoretical and literary canon that — by questioning the ontological status of the male/female binary — has transformed feminism into a capacious, radically inclusive, revolutionary 21st Century movement.” The description continues: “The texts and the theories that we discuss put pressure on the very category of ‘woman’ as they strive to rethink feminism as a non-identitarian world-making project.”

 

Courses like these understandably erode confidence in America’s higher-education system. Ivy League universities in particular, as the training ground for America’s future leaders, have a special responsibility to prepare their students to lead the country, not find every reason to hate it. When leaders of elite universities abandon that responsibility, it’s easy to grasp why the Ivy League reputation is fading fast. We should not be surprised that if you teach students to hate America, they one day might behave as if they do — by tearing down the American flag.