So a bunch of pledges at Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity acted like moronic, five year olds.  They stood in the quad, chanting.

No means yes.
Yes means anal.

This raises three very serious problems.  And that’s without knowing whether the pledges were dressed in diapers. 

First, these kids have the maturity of a newborn gnat.  They may have gotten 1600 on their SATs, but they still crowd the TV when Spongebob comes on.

Second, these kids aspire to be half-wits. This isn’t funny. This wasn’t funny. It’s just stupid.

Third, if they ever hoped to lose their virginity, they’ve just ruined their chances.

And it certainly doesn’t reflect well on Yale, either.  Does it create an “atmosphere of sexual harassment?”  For those who will look under every rock, of course.  But this isn’t about sexual harassment, any more than it being unusual for every boy in college has sex on his mind.  They aren’t being bold, or even misogonystic; they’re being babies trying to bluff their way through hormonal insecurities, scared to death that the girls whose interest they so desperately seek to attract will realize that they’re just little boys.

And the girls who get all bent out of shape over such infantile antics are just as immature and insecure.  And if anybody should know this, it’s the Dean of Yale College, Mary Miller.  That could explain this letter:

I’d like to begin by making clear that Yale University takes very seriously any and all allegations of sexual assault. Not only do we encourage students to report such instances directly to the Yale Police Department, but we have had on campus, since 2006, the Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources & Education (SHARE) center, which provides counseling, information, and advocacy to victims of sexual violence. The list of our efforts could go on, but that is not my purpose in writing today.

It was a trying episode for all involved, but it was also, as your boss President Obama would say, a “teachable moment.” Good speech responded to bad speech; the marketplace of ideas was at work.

Still, some called for punishment of DKE, saying that we should not allow such hateful rhetoric on our campus. More recently, others have pointed to punishment as a means to appease your office, as it would serve to publicly display our commitment to stopping sexual violence as well as gender discrimination.  Though I want nothing more than to shed the notion that Yale is harboring a “hostile” environment in terms of gender, I cannot in good conscience sacrifice our time-tested principles in the name of appeasement.

The only problem is that this letter was written by Harvey Silverglate and Kyle Smeallie, offered as the alternative to Yale President Richard Levin in response to the pressure being applied by the Department of Education to clean up its gender-inappropriate rats nest. 

Yale was presented with an option, to appease the forces of political correctness or to uphold its principles.  This is what really happened:

In a letter to students and faculty members on Tuesday, Mary Miller, dean of Yale College, said the Executive Committee, the college’s disciplinary board, had imposed sanctions on the chapter, which is not an official student organization. The fraternity will no longer be able to communicate with students via the Yale bulletin board or Yale e-mail, and its use of the university name will be severely limited.

The letter said Yale had formally asked the national organization to suspend the chapter for five years.

It’s so much easier to capitulate, even when the nature of the offense is a bunch of dumb words alone.  There was no sexual assault, and indeed, had any of these dweebs touched a young lady against her will in the course of their initiation ritual, then we’ve got an entirely different animal on our hands.  And lest one suspect that stupid words are owned by one gender over another, consider this  letter to the editor of the New York Times:

Hurrah for Yale University’s disciplinary board! In its decision, reported in “Yale Restricts a Fraternity for Five Years” (news article, May 18), the executive board showed guts and heart, as well as compliance with the law, in punishing a fraternity for its sexually offensive chants.

Above all, this is a case where a message needed to be sent about what is tolerated on campus; the old “boys will be boys” canard cannot be and should not be upheld.

I hope that current and future male students can see that the tide has turned, irrevocably.

Let’s applaud Yale’s “guts and heart” for punishing “sexually offensive chants.”  They were sexually offensive.  But they were mere words.  Let future male students fear that if their speech will get them punished>  Let them cower in fear lest something they say offend.  That will teach them to be wary to never do anything that might upset women.  Let men be afraid.

Yale University has produced leaders.  Two of the last three presidents hung out out Skull and Bones, where never is heard a negative word about women.  And the lessons taught at Yale will be the ones carried forward in life, as future Yalies take their rightful place at the helm of the ship of state.  One lesson will be that the fundamental right of free speech comes in a distant second to not hurting women’s feelings.  

Did it not occur to Miller and Levin that women could just as easily have yelled back at the chanting fools that they just killed any chance they ever had of getting a date?  Does it ever occur to those in academia that there is a bigger lesson at stake, that one doesn’t throw away fundamental rights to appease the wounds of the politically correct?

And did it not occur to Miller and Levin that the proper way to deal with dopey infants is to give them a stern talking to and send them to bed without their supper?