WHY WOULD A UNIVERSITY refuse to celebrate an offer from some of its most devoted alumni to raise $ 20 million or more for its coffers? For reasons of principle, apparently, because the same university sacrificed a $ 20 million gift for precisely the same reason just last year. The university is Yale, and in both cases the money was to be raised for the purpose of teaching western civilization to freshmen.

In March, representatives of 15 classes of Yale alumni, led by the class of 1937, sent a letter to Yale president Richard Levin after Texas billionaire Lee Bass pulled his $ 20 million grant from the school. The alumni offered to “control the heavy damage caused by the failure of the grant” by raising funds for the creation of a western civilization major, a significant enlargement of Yale’s acclaimed freshman Western Studies program, and the creation of a Center for Western Civilization.