Art & Angst at Yale

After my 50th high-school reunion this past Saturday, I visited the splendid, new-and-improved Peabody Museum, Yale’s natural-history museum, and the university’s art gallery. I grew up in North Haven, a ten-minute drive from Yale but another world. I got my Ph.D. at Yale. Indigenous as I was, I was an amalgam of town and gown. My maternal grandfather was an Italian immigrant and a construction worker, part of the crew that built the dozen or so residential colleges at Yale during the Depression. It’s always good to visit the campus, even better this Memorial Day weekend to collate then and now.

Yale, praise the Lord, doesn’t have Harvard’s pathologies, or at least not their depth and toxicity. By the by, brimming with good though unorthodox ideas as I am, I wrote a few months ago that Harvard University belongs in receivership because of its board’s gross negligence. The school’s thick with Jew-hate, the ultimate social cancer. The trustees hired a serial plagiarist as president. The Supreme Court said its admissions policy was illegal. Goodness, a Harvard medical-school staffer illegally sold dead bodies Harvard inherited for research. A more ostentatious abuse of donor intent is hard to imagine.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

After my 50th high-school reunion this past Saturday, I visited the splendid, new-and-improved Peabody Museum, Yale’s natural-history museum, and the university’s art gallery. I grew up in North Haven, a ten-minute drive from Yale but another world. I got my Ph.D. at Yale. Indigenous as I was, I was an amalgam of town and gown. My maternal grandfather was an Italian immigrant and a construction worker, part of the crew that built the dozen or so residential colleges at Yale during the Depression. It’s always good to visit the campus, even better this Memorial Day weekend to collate then and now.

Yale, praise the Lord, doesn’t have Harvard’s pathologies, or at least not their depth and toxicity. By the by, brimming with good though unorthodox ideas as I am, I wrote a few months ago that Harvard University belongs in receivership because of its board’s gross negligence. The school’s thick with Jew-hate, the ultimate social cancer. The trustees hired a serial plagiarist as president. The Supreme Court said its admissions policy was illegal. Goodness, a Harvard medical-school staffer illegally sold dead bodies Harvard inherited for research. A more ostentatious abuse of donor intent is hard to imagine.