Yale No Longer Taliban's New Haven

And so ends former Taliban ambassador Rahmatullah Hashemi's brief career as an Eli.

The New York Times’ education reporter, Alan Finder, told me that he has been in contact with the Boola Boola Mullah’s financial backers , and they say he hasn’t been admitted to the regular degree program at Yale. He may have a few credits left in his current program, so he might be back for one more semester or so in the fall, but he won’t graduate from Yale.

This is a bizarre, freakish chapter in Yale’s history, and even though I’m glad Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is leaving, I actually hope the story isn’t over. I hope that Yale will continue to examine the root causes of this awful decision. Right now Yale is a place that forbids ROTC from training on campus on one hand, but at the same time welcomes an unrepentant high official of one of the vilest regimes in recent history. In 2002, Yale turned down an opportunity to admit a group of academically qualified Afghan women, but a couple of years later they admit their oppressor. There’s something culturally wrong with a place that tolerates that sort cognitive dissonance and I hope they try to fix it.

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