Last year Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi was admitted to Yale University as a “untraditional student in a non-degree program”. Hashemi is a former roving ambassador for Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. The New York Times Magazine wrote an article about his experiences at Yale. Then the wingnuts went ballistic. Why were we allowing a former member of the Taliban government to take classes at an elite university? Dedicated web sites were set up, phone calls and op-eds came in by the thousands.
Now it appears that Yale changed their rules this year just to make it look better when they rejected Hashemi’s application to move into a degree program.
In its statement yesterday, the university said that only 2 of 29 people who applied for the degree-granting program, or 6.9 percent, had been admitted. In previous years, nearly 30 percent of those who applied to the program were accepted, Mr. Levin had noted in a prepared statement in April. He also said 8 to 12 people had been admitted to the program each year.
I doubt most wingnuts are familiar with Operation Paperclip, but we did a lot more than allow former Nazis to attend Ivy League schools. We employed them in the highest reaches of our government’s national security, and used them to set up West Germany’s intelligence agencies. It wasn’t all that bad an idea, either. But, I’ll agree it looks bad. It feels bad.
Score one for the wingnuts in this case. They pushed Yale around and made them look foolish. But maybe the wingnuts should lend more weight to other factors, like: Hashemi was not sent to Guantanamo, he was not sent to a secret Romanian gulag, neither the FBI nor the CIA advised Yale against admittance. And there is what Hashemi actually said about his experiences at Yale. Those seem like important pieces that are just ignored by scared little whiny babies on the right.
