There are many flowery words commonly used to describe America’s most elite and prestigious Ivy League universities. But how about words like anti-Semitic, traitorous and anti-American? Judging by Yale, Harvard and Stanford’s admission policies, those words are certainly becoming applicable.

In a stunning declaration, former Yale dean of admissions Richard Shaw (now Stanford dean of admissions) acknowledged recruiting an Afghan with a background as a Taliban official into the student body (Wall Street Journal,March 30).

That’s right, a representative of the Taliban. The same Taliban that harbored al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The same Taliban that supported the hijackers who murdered almost 3,000 Americans by crashing planes into the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, and the same Taliban that just killed an American and a Canadian soldier last week in Afghanistan. Yale has just admitted to knowingly having the former deputy foreign secretary of this government within its student body.

When Shaw was asked why he admitted former Taliban envoy Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi—who, to be sure, is no Taliban defector, but an ongoing supporter—into Yale, he replied that it was essentially because of Hashemi’s “interesting” background, and because he didn’t want to lose another student of Hashemi’s distinguished status to Harvard (ibid.). Hashemi was accepted despite his fourth-grade formal education and despite not taking the university entrance sat exams because, Yale officials stated, “Universities are places that must strive to increase understanding” (National Review,April 3).

Shaw further related, “When I first met him I was a little anxious …. My perception was, ‘It’s the enemy!’ … [But] I walked away with a sense: Whoa! This is a person to be reckoned with and who could educate us about the world” (New York Times, February 26).

What a sad state America’s education system is in when even its elite colleges are looking to terrorist abettors to educate the educators!

This is especially loathsome in Hashemi’s case, since his prime qualification was working for one of the most oppressive dictatorships on Earth. Hashemi was the Taliban ambassador who toured the United States in 2001 defending his regime—the same regime that barred girls from school, stoned adulterers, conducted mass executions, and “pulled out women’s fingernails for the ‘crime’ of wearing nail polish” (New York Post, March 31).

Just last year Hashemi called Israel “an American al Qaeda” and trivialized Taliban mass stonings of adulteresses by comparing the executions to the death penalty in some of America’s states (National Review, op. cit.).

Mr. Hashemi’s résumé certainly sounds more like one that would gain him entrance into a prisoner detainee facility, not Yale. Amazingly, even Hashemi agrees. “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay,” he told the New York Times (op. cit.).

Yale has come a long way from the ideals it was founded upon.

Take Yale’s university crest for example. The school’s insignia has the words “Light and Truth” written in Hebrew across an open book. Would Hashemi agree with those ideals?

Decades ago, former Yale President Kingman Brewster (1919-1988) said, “A demonstrated failure of moral sensitivity or regard for the dignity of others cannot be redeemed by allegations that the young man is extremely ‘interesting’” (Wall Street Journal, op. cit.). Even today, this statement by Brewster is purportedly so important that it is on Yale’s official website with the annotation that it “is the foundation on which specific selection criteria are based” and that “It offers the primary orientation to all those who will be engaged in the admission process.”

Too bad Yale only pretends to follow this policy, as evidenced by Richard Shaw’s explanation of why he accepted Hashemi.

But Yale’s hypocrisy runs even deeper.

At the same time it embraces Hashemi as part of its student body—even reducing his tuition fees by 35 to 40 percent—Yale has banned U.S. rotc (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) programs and military recruiters from its campus.

Yale has become so backward that it actually welcomes al Qaeda abettors while banning American military officers from its campus.

America’s upside-down universities are just one symptom of the general decay from the ideals that America’s Founding Fathers helped to establish. By supporting Hashemi and the Taliban, Yale has shown itself to no longer have the vision and leadership qualities that universities should be building in their students. America’s universities certainly aren’t the beacons of light and truth they were intended to be.

There is a great paradox in education today. As the world’s knowledge has increased, so have the world’s problems. Although this doesn’t mean that the knowledge caused the problems, it does mean that it hasn’t prevented or fixed them. For more information on what true education is and where it can be found today, please read our booklet Education With Vision.