Author Archives: James Kirchick

Hardly a week seems to pass at Yale without some agitation group bringing up charges of grand malfeasance against the University. Exploiting the life of Martin Luther King Jr., a coalition of graduate and undergraduate students, along with local labor leaders, has accused the University of discriminatory practices in its tenure, hiring and graduate student »

The death last week of former South African President Nelson Mandela’s only surviving son, Makgatho, to AIDS puts in stark relief the indiscriminate nature of the HIV virus. The horrific toll of that disease includes not only the poor and disenfranchised but every sector of African society. Even those individuals who belong to the most »

While Harvard students lament pending restrictions on their already lackluster social lives in light of the 121st Yale-Harvard bout, a controversy is brewing over a stain in that university’s past that should more seriously trouble their collective conscience. According to a recently delivered historical paper by Oklahoma University professor Stephen H. Norwood, Harvard University and »

President George W. Bush should not have won re-election last week. Both liberals and conservatives alike can file grievances with this administration. The president, through massive tax cuts foolishly enacted in a time of war, has created deficits as far as the eye can see. His repeal of the estate tax, couched in the language »

Who ever thought that praising your political opponent’s daughter would get you called a “McCarthyite” and “not a good man?” Well, John Kerry, who last week had the audacity to applaud Dick Cheney for accepting his lesbian daughter Mary for “who she was born as,” has conservatives seething. Earlier this week, New York Times columnist »

With a two-day scholarly conference on Michael Jackson, Yale has taken one more step into the depths of academic nihilism. While I am hesitant to agree with this paper’s editorial board in its assertion yesterday that “scholarship shouldn’t be deemed irrelevant or unimportant solely because its subject is contemporary culture,” (“Value of Reflecting on the »

In case you thought that national political conventions no longer held any import, that they are puffed up, propagandistic, overly scripted acts of meaningless political theater, the events of this past Monday night will restore your faith in government. For one Yale undergraduate sought to stand up to the political establishment and speak truth to »

Turn on your television, listen to your radio or open up a book about current events today, and you will be hard pressed to decipher the valid arguments amid the cacophony of name-calling, partisan rants and distortions. On both the left and right, nuanced and sophisticated commentary is increasingly being crowded out by the loud, »

Back from fighting the terrorists, Geraldo Rivera graced Yale with his presence Wednesday. Love him or hate him, Geraldo is an undeniable cultural icon, one of the few one-name celebrities we have left. And when the average speaker at Yale is someone like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria, or »

This article has been corrected. You may view this article’s correction here. Lurking in a cave somewhere near the Afghan-Pakistani border, Osama bin Laden is cackling. If he’s still alive that is. For the specter of Munich has cast its ugly pall over Europe once again — and, for the time being at least, the »

When all else fails, tax Yale — this seems to be the agenda of some in our community. Last Tuesday, the New Haven Board of Aldermen unanimously voted to form a committee to explore new ways of raising revenue and a bill that seeks to tax Yale on not strictly commercial properties is currently making »

For those at Yale who imagine themselves warriors in the perpetual and valiant struggle against the oppressor that is this University, it has been a rather uneventful couple of months. Major hostilities in Iraq have ceased; tensions between the administration and the unions have quelled. Yet last Friday, the perfect protest opportunity emerged out of »