Yale’s Covid Hazing

W hen confronted with the astonishing news that, henceforth, students at Yale “may not visit New Haven businesses or eat at local restaurants (even outdoors),” one might naturally wonder what sort of person would pay $60,000 to be locked down and told what to do.

But the question answers itself: Everyone would. That, after all, is what Yale is for.

I do not mean this as a criticism of Yale’s academic offerings. It is, I am sure, a terrific school. But in a system such as ours — a system that prizes university-granted credentials above all else — it is rational for those who have a chance to put “Yale” on their C.V.s to suffer almost any indignity in pursuit of that aim. Whether deserved or not, a Yale degree tends to open doors, shorten lines, and, eventually, lead to an above-average salary — not to mention a host of introductions to other well-connected and well-credentialed figures. Having made it across no man’s land and been accepted into Yale, only a fool would nitpick his way to the exit because he is told he can’t go to Pepe’s for dinner.

So, yes, of course Yale’s students will comply. And, worse still, their doing so will not represent some egregious departure from the norm, but the latest exercise in the sort of obedient box-ticking that helped them get into Yale in the first place. If Yale asks them to go outside and stand like flamingos in the quadrangle, they will do it. If Yale asks them to take all their classes hanging one-handed from the battlements, they will do it. If Yale bars them from campus for the entirety of their enrollment, they will do it. And, given the benefits that will accrue to them, they will be right to do so. There is no incentive for Yale to be prudent here, because there is no incentive for its students to demand it be prudent. They’re not there to be respected; they’re there to get stamped.

Those who suspect that I am exaggerating must consider what they themselves will go through in order to obtain official documents that they either need or desperately want. Americans who are in immediate need of a driver’s license will willingly sleep on the floor of the DMV to get it. Americans who are obliged to speak with the IRS will readily wait on the telephone for hours, and then speak to office after office after office to resolve their issue. Americans who need to bring their business into compliance with whatever regulatory scheme has been dreamed up this week will freely dance naked on the Jumbotron if that’s what it takes. Certificates are powerful things, and in our college-obsessed culture, there is no certificate as powerful as a diploma. Why has Yale lost its mind? A better question is: Who can stop it?

Defending the policy on Twitter, Yale’s Howard Forman confirmed that it did not apply to staff. “They can’t tell me where I can and can not go in my private time,” he explained, whereas, when you are a student and “you choose to live in a residency hall, you follow rules.” This, naturally, is true. But it also underscores the dynamic here — which is that, knowing full well that Yale’s students need Yale more than Yale needs its students, Yale staffers have set the game up to benefit themselves. As Nate Silver was quick to point out, Yale’s faculty is “just as likely to transmit” Covid-19 as is the student body, and “subject the school to more disruption if they test positive” than its students do. But, of course, that’s not the point. The point is that Yale knows it can do whatever it wants to benefit its staff, and, wholly unencumbered as it is, it has elected to do just that.

It remains remarkably strange that the American university, which ought by rights to be our nation’s most scientific, open-minded, risk-tolerant, and intellectually diverse institution, tends in practice to be its most conformist and cautious. Two years into this pandemic, despite requiring its students to be vaccinated, boosted, and masked, Yale has instituted a set of Covid-mitigation policies that would be regarded as too hysterical and exorbitant even for the military. Why?

Why not?