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Feb 27, 2006 09:19 AM by Stefan Beck
Not since a middle-aged Rodney Dangerfield went back to school has an institution made an error in judgment so likely to cost it in donations and prestige. I’m referring, of course, to Yale University’s appalling decision to admit Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former international PR man of the Taliban, who himself remarked of his good fortune: "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." It wasn’t dumb luck, of course. It would be nice to think that only some clerical oversight--you know, the kind of thing that lets Saudi hijackers remain in the United States on expired visas--could result in an "admit" like this. But we are talking about the modern university: Many foreign readers of the Times will no doubt snicker at the revelation that naive Yale administrators scrambled to admit Mr. Rahmatullah. The Times reported that Yale "had another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber apply for special-student status." Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Times that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn’t want that to happen again."What "caliber" (interesting choice of word) are we talking about here? Well, Hashemi al-Haw Haw, whose primary objective while in the employ of the Taliban was to justify the dynamiting of some 1000-year-old statues of the Buddha in Kabul, Afghanistan, has "a fourth-grade education and a high-school equivalency degree." There you have it. Probably makes Scutch the Quarterback look like Cicero by comparison. Do you, dear reader, have a child or grandchild you’d like to send to Yale? If so, now is a good time to start shopping around for regimes that offer high school study abroad programs. Remember, the competition’s vicious.
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