Author Archives: Bijan Aboutorabi

Two weeks ago, an alumnus of the Yale College Class of 2012, the field manager for his father’s congressional re-election team, was caught on film acquiescing to a sting investigator’s suggestion that he commit voter fraud. He has since resigned his position on the campaign. Over the summer, another 2012 graduate lost her internship at »

What to think of self-styled defenders of the liberal arts who refuse to take seriously the father of Western philosophy? That is the question raised by certain condemnations of Yale’s partnership with the National University of Singapore. Singapore’s censorship laws, argue the outraged, are inimical to the liberal arts spirit. A truly humanistic education demands »

It was heartening to see Ted Lee’s ’12 column grace the op-ed page of Friday’s paper (“Love, sex and intimacy,” Sept. 22). Lee offered a sincere reflection on the intricate relationship between sex and love, the physical and the emotional. He encouraged us to consider the fundamental question that must underlie any proposed reform of »

Last spring, the editors of the News wrote that “the project of reforming Yale’s sexual culture is a formidable one.” This challenge followed upon an academic year punctuated by a number of events that drew attention to Yale’s sexual culture and the problems that mar it: rape, harassment, objectification of women and the ways in »

Whether by design or by accident, two of last Thursday’s guest columns (“Words for a new age” and “New colleges, fresh names,” Sept. 8) offered striking examples of the same peculiarly modern sentiment: the contempt of the past. In the left-hand column, Scott Stern proposed that the two new residential colleges be named after figures »

Kathryn Olivarius’s column last Friday (“Back off, faux feminists,” Oct. 29), enthusiastically upbraided “conservative feminists” in the mold of Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell. But it did little to illuminate the real disagreements between liberal and conservative claimants to the title of feminism. Instead, it was an exhibition of half-arguments and complacent assumptions, which illustrated, »

Writers from Thucydides to George Orwell have observed that, in political disputes, the meaning of words is often the first casualty. Perhaps I was wrong to be surprised, then, by Yale College Dean Mary Miller’s and the Freshman Class Council’s hasty abandonment and replacement of the design it had chosen for its Yale-Harvard game T-shirts. »