The Yale Daily News recently published a guest column by C. Wallace Dewitt, class of 2003, noting that next year marks the 350th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Swift. If the connection between the famous satirist and contemporary life at one of America’s most revered—but rapidly deteriorating—educational institutions isn’t immediately obvious, well, I encourage you to let Dewitt explain it:
Yale’s wry sense of humor has been in rare form lately. Reminiscent of Swift’s famous suggestion that Irish poverty could be alleviated by selling Irish babies for consumption by the rich, Yale has not shied away from vigorously lampooning the politically correct contretemps that have plagued lesser universities. (I’m looking at you, Harvard Law!) Thus, we now have the delightfully styled “Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming” and “Committee on Art in Public Spaces,” names so patently outlandish as to make the Ministry of Truth blush. Hilarious! George Orwell is surely looking down on us with a chuckle from that great Catalonia in the sky. And then there’s the whole “Heads of Residential College” bit, a subtle dig at fanatics who suggest that Yalies aren’t capable of distinguishing between (i) an abominable relic of antebellum oppression and (ii) an utterly inoffensive term in continuous academic use since the Middle Ages. Ha! You’re killing me, Yale, stop it already!
Read the whole column here.
