* Mr. Blair, Mr. Bolton and The First Amendment: Freedom of Religion vs. Freedom of Speech

Pusillanimous Yale Press ?









It is symbolically poignant that the Yale Daily News chose the date 9/11/09 to publish former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's opinion that Yale Press did "the right thing" in censoring the controversial cartoons of Muhammad which caused such a firestorm around the world, resulting in bloodshed and death.

Mr. Blair, now teaching a course on religion at Yale up the hill where I studied, provides the antithesis to the thesis of John Bolton ('76 LAW and former Ambassador to U.N.) who called Yale Press's decision not to publish the controversial cartoons about Muhammad "intellectual cowardice."

Allow me as an alumnus of the Divinity School to be presumptuous enough to offer a synthesis.

It is ironic that the Judeo-Christian world has been so intolerant of the censorship imposed by the Muslim world on the image of Muhammad. The Old Testament is full of censorship. The face of God could not be looked upon, nor his name (Yahweh) written or spoken--hence the millennia-old text-message-type abbreviation, YHWH.

Ham is cursed (Genesis 9:20-27) for "viewing" his father Noah's nakedness, and the 3000+ year history of racism begins.

And unless my memory fails me, one of the central pillars of the Protestant Reformation was the taboo against images: hence the ransacking of Roman Catholic churches and the breaking of statues and desecration of stained glass and painted images, something Mr. Blair's country knows about firsthand. (Ever use the word "iconoclasm"?)


So Mr. Bolton and his friends shouldn't get too huffy and puffy in their smug rejection of Muslim taboos which prompted Yale Press's censorship. Nor should Mr. Blair fail to see the fascinating and horrifying stalemate created between different aspects of First Amendment rights here: Freedom of Speech vs. Freedom of Religion.

When a taboo is elevated to the level of zeal bloodshed has often been the consequence. If I recall correctly, the Christian Crusades slaughtered a few folk in propagating its own taboos.

Paul D. Keane
M.Div. '80
Yale Divinity School

* KENT STATE, 1972 ; AIDS/YALE/NEW HAVEN, 1984

(MOVE TAB INSTRUCTIONS: 1st video ends and 2nd video begins at 4 minutes 41 seconds)
Christmas, Kent State, 1972 ; AIDS/Yale/New Haven,1984

* YALE DID IT TOO: Henry Louis Gates' Style Racial Profiling at Yale on Graduation Night, 1980

HENRY LOUIS GATES' STYLE RACIAL PROFILING AT YALE ON GRADUATION NIGHT: 1980


26 May 80
A. Bartlett Giamatti
President
Yale University

Dear President Giamatti:

I am deeply disturbed by an incident I witnessed on my graduation night, May 25, at approximately 9:20 PM, on the steps of Hendrie Hall-----an incident which brings shame on Yale University and portends ominously for race relations between town and gown.
As I was walking by Hendrie Hall I noticed three white policemen, from Yale surrounding a young black male (perhaps 25 years old). The youth was handcuffed with hands behind his back and he was facing a wall of the building. I inquired of the policemen what was going on, and, when they refused to tell me, I inquired directly of the young man, “What are you accused of by these men?”

He replied that he had been lying or sitting on the front steps of Hendrie Hall. “Is that all?” I prodded. He turned his head toward me and replied, “Yes” with tears streaming down his face.

I asked him his name (Mr. S._______) and told him I would do something about it.

I returned to my apartment and immediately called Dean Leander Keck [Divinity School] and Professor Henri Nouwen [Divinity School], described the incident, and asked them to phone the campus police department and express their concern. I told them that as a lifelong resident of New Haven I felt that this was yet another example of Yale’s hostility toward townspersons; and, that it more certainly was an incident of blatant racist harassment on the part of three white campus policemen. For, had a young white male or a stumble-bum been doing the same thing on Hendrie Hall’s steps, he most certainly would have not been handcuffed and arrested. Or, even if an intoxicated Yale undergraduate had passed out on the front steps of Hendrie Hall and been mouthy to police who prodded him awake, the magic of the I.D. card would have insured that he would have been treated with the kid gloves Yale reserves for its own

Mr. S _____ had the misfortune to be neither white nor Old Blue. And his treatment by Yale police reflected that fact.


Dean Keck and Professor Nouwen were able to determine that Mr. S _____ was sent to city jail, charged with trespassing, and released.

I think Yale needs to evaluate the morality of this official behavior. Is lying on the front steps of Hendrie Hall such a heinous and threatening crime that three policemen from Yale need to handcuff a frightened black youth and reduce him to tears? Is one’s need to lie down --- for whatever reason ---a crime?
Does Yale wish to disrupt a young man’s life by requiring him to appear in court and perhaps earn a police record simply because he had the misfortune to sack-out on the property of precious Yale University?

I think decency and humaneness require that your office intercede in this matter to ensure that this young man’s life and sensibilities are not further scarred by this official behavior by Yale University which I can only interpret as institutional racism.

But in a larger sense, I wish to know if my alma mater is so obtuse that it does not recognize that such police behavior contributes to a potential latent-dynamite scenario similar to that which exploded in Miami’s race riots two weeks ago?

I would like to work quietly, behind the scenes with your office to create a town/gown committee composed of black and white clergy from the Divinity School and New Haven to monitor Yale University Police Department’s arrests of non-campus persons. I believe such a watchdog committee could nip in the bud potentially explosive situations by creating an environment in which the campus police would feel themselves held more accountable for their behavior than they now are.

I would hope that you know me well enough by now to realize that I am willing to work WITH Yale in this matter. But if Yale ignores my concern and pooh-poohs what I consider to be a potentially grave situation, you do know me well enough to know that I will bring this matter to the attention of those who will take it seriously.

Sincerely,

Paul Keane
Class of 1980
Yale Divinity School

cc:
Roland H. Bainton, Professor Emeritus, YDS [Yale Divinity School]
Leander Keck, Dean, YDS
Harry Adams, Associate Dean, YDS
Henri Nouwen, Professor, YDS
Gene Outka, Professor, YDS
Charles Brown, Professor, YDS
J_____R_____, witness to the incident

* THOUGHT PROCESS : Middlebury Magazine, Letters to the Editor, Spring 2009

THOUGHT PROCESS

Letter to the Editor
Middlebury Magazine

Dear Editor:

Gary Johnson's question at the end of "When Worlds Collide" (Spring 2009 issue) raises another question: Does cerebration itself separate us from our ideation? In other words--Do we use the metaphorical complexity of the liberal arts to obfuscate rather than confront our own primitive murderous instincts? And do we need to engage in such obfuscation in order not to commit suicide? One famous psychiatrist began all his initial encounters with patients by asking this question: "Why don't you kill yourself?" The liberal arts offers a Jack Benny kind of answer: "I'm busy thinking."

Hemingway said his "typewriter" was his "psychiatrist". His prose purges every act of cerebration in favor of ideation---look at the description of what is in front of Nick Adams's eyeballs not behind them for example. But then we all know what happened to Hemingway when he stopped writing.

We may need metaphors (and the liberal arts is loaded with them) simply to survive. And what is the most persistent and omnipresent metaphor the human species creates : religion.

Paul D. Keane, M.A. English '97

"COME AND SPEAK THE TRUTH" : Text of a telegram, written in Latin, by the Kent State University President, Robert I. White, to Henry Steele Commager.

"The University and the Community of Learning", a speech by Henry Steele Commager, was delivered at Kent State University the year after the May 4, 1970 shooting of thirteen students by Ohio National Guardsmen, four of them fatalities ... Reflections on "The University and the Community of Learning" by Paul Keane, a bystander at the shooting and, a year later, a member of Commager's audience at Kent State, can be read by clicking on the title (link to Commager web site) preceding, or by scrolling immediately below.



Reflections on "The University and the Community of Learning"
By Paul Keane


It was April, 1971 and the word around campus was that Henry Steele Commager was going to speak in U. Aud., as we called the Kent State University Auditorium, on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. I was told by people in "the know" to go if I wanted to hear something special. I didn't know who Henry Steele Commager was but I had been told he had at first turned down the invitation to speak at Kent State, saying "No one there would be interested in what I have to say."

It was the year after the infamous shootings whose carnage I had witnessed the preceding May. During the intervening time the campus had been quiet except for one notable professor,a few of the nine survivors who had been shot, and a handful of courageous Yippies who protested the local kangaroo grand jury which indicted, not guardsmen, but students and faculty for the shootings. Shamefully, I too had been silent about the killings in my role as a graduate student and dorm counselor. I rationalized, "Surely Nixon will convene a federal grand jury to investigate this correctly." In August, four months after Commager's speech, Nixon proved me naive, when Attorney General John Mitchell announced there would be no federal investigation. Kangaroo justice would apparently be the last word.

Commager had refused the invitation to a campus where freedom of expression had not only been chilled by the student and faculty indictments, but frozen by fear that the Ohio legislature would act on some of its members' threats to close Kent down permanently if there were any more demonstrations.

Robert I. White, President of the University then (and at the time of the shootings), to his credit, sent Commager a telegram in Latin saying, "Come and speak the truth."

Come he did. "The University and the Community of Learning" was his truth.

I went to U. Aud. that April 10th hoping that Commager's truth would amount to a dressing down of the local Portage County grand jury and its obvious prejudice. What I got instead was a speech which placed my current local Ohio moment in the context of 800 years of the history of academic freedom.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with my own sense that silence on my part was more than cowardly, it was a betrayal of something precious, a tradition whose flame had been kept burning solely by the protective walls of the Academy.

My silence - our silence at Kent State - jeopardized that flame. I left that auditorium resolved to await my opportunity, and when it came, to speak.

When Mitchell refused to convene a federal grand jury in August, I returned to Kent in September and mounted a student and faculty petition to Nixon to reverse that decision. A lot of others wanted to speak too and 10,000 signatures were gathered in only ten days, including that of co-author of the petition, Greg Rambo, president of the Kent State Young Republican Club and, in an ironic twist of fate, a former page to the very Ohio Governor who sent the troops to Kent State in 1970, James A. Rhodes. Kent State's new president, Glenn A Olds, personally brought the petitions to the White House. Six years later, while a divinity student at Yale, I persuaded Yale's library to begin a Kent State Collection in its Manuscripts and Archives division to house manuscripts and documents which I believed could not be housed impartially at Kent State's library. That Collection still exists at Yale and still generates controversy.

Both of these projects (the petition to Nixon and the Kent State archives at Yale) were inspired by Henry Steele Commager's speech that day. In the year 2007, as I re-read its words, I believe it to be one of the great speeches of the 20th Century.
As we now plunge into a digital world and a world replete with genetic engineering and its attendant dreams and nightmares let us hear again the words of Professor Commager: "The university - and the scholar - have in addition one function which is bound to excite misunderstanding and hostility in society; that is to serve as the conscience and critic of society and of whatever establishment is in power."

May it long continue to do so.


Paul D. Keane, M.A., M.Div., M.Ed.

commager.org/legacy_paul_keane.asp

* NO CAKE IN THE ELM CITY:Yale Daily News Letter, January 16, 2009

NO CAKE IN THE ELM CITY
January 16, 2009

Letters to the Editor
Yale Daily News

Dear Editor:

Although I am sure you did not intend it, there is an implicit “let them eat cake” quality to your Jan. 12 article “Endowment falls 25 percent,” which discusses the reduction of Yale’s endowment from $22.9 billion to $17 billion. Yes, that’s billion, not million.

I grew up in a white-picket-fence neighborhood in Mt. Carmel, but my grandmother lived on a third-floor walk-up with no hot water two blocks from Yale at State and Elm streets.

When I would visit her as a tot, she would walk me across the New Haven Green, hand in hand, and as we neared Old Campus, I would ask her in my childhood naivete, “Who lives in those castles?”

The juxtaposition of Yale’s majestic architecture with New Haven’s ghetto that encroaches several of its boundaries is as inexplicable to me today as it was back then.

Why do some people have so much wealth and others so little? To put it another way, why does Yale’s ivy itch like poison on the skin of New Haven’s poor?

Seventeen billion dollars?

My mother taught me it is always rude to eat in front of others without offering them a portion.


Paul D. Keane

Jan. 14

The writer graduated with a master’s of divinity from the Divinity School in 1980

* IN HIS PUSH TO RENOVATE AND EXPAND HAS LEVIN FORGOTTEN SOMETHING? Yale Daily News Letter, September 16, 2008

IN HIS PUSH TO RENOVATE AND EXPAND HAS LEVIN FORGOTTEN SOMETHING?

Letters to the Editor
Yale Daily News

Dear Editor:

I have just read President Levin's impressive report to the alumni on the state of Yale: a new campus for science and collections; renovation in schools of drama, architecture, art; a new management building; new residential colleges and libraries; study abroad; investment in New Haven buildings.

Everything but the liberal arts. Where is HGS (literature, philosophy and history) in all this planning for the future? Are Yalies merely going to be computer geeks, scientists and economists who go to theater and travel abroad?

What about the beauty of thinking? Writing? Speaking?

Will there be no more Harold Blooms?

Paul D. Keane
Yale Divinity School '80