Yale University – the final disgrace

To: Peter Salovey, Ph.D., President, Yale University, Woodbridge Hall, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

From: Terry A. Hurlbut, B.S., M.D., Yale College Class of 1980

Dear Sir:

With a heavy heart, I write to you yet again, to express my outrage at what Yale University has now become. In its response to rumors of a killer pandemic – and that’s all they ever were, unsubstantiated rumors – you, your colleagues, and your subordinates have turned Yale University and Yale College into an institution that I not only no longer recognize, but of which I am thoroughly ashamed to say that I am an alumnus. For the benefit of my visitors, I will now trace, as best I can from various reports, the shocking change in the institution I once loved. Then I am going to demand of you an explanation for this unmitigated and unmitigable disgrace.

The last time I wrote the President of Yale

On 6 September 1976, Dr. Kingman Brewster, Jr. welcomed me, and over a thousand others, to what he called “the privilege of Yale.” For the next four years (ending in May of 1980), I really thought I had a privilege. I did, too. It ended when Dr. A. Bartlett Giamatti conferred upon me the degree and title of Bachelor of Science, and it included the admittedly stormy interim Presidency of Hannah Holborn Gray.

But today I have the burden to tell you that Yale is now anything but a privilege.

I wrote you once before concerning the Grand Rounds in Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine by Dr. Aruna Khilanani. I objected then to the spectacle of letting someone vent her paranoid ideation as if it were sound clinical precept. Neither you nor the Yale School of Medicine ever explained the decision to have her speak, to my satisfaction. I will not repeat the transcript of her remarks here. For that I refer you or any other reader to the original article. That article also contains the repudiation of her talk by Yale Medicine – a repudiation I found and still find lacking.

But I had no idea of the wider context of her talk. Remember this quote from the flyer announcing it?

The number of Karen and “It’s my right to not wear a mask” videos are exploding.

That was a hint. But no other hint of the totalitarian tyranny that now pervades Yale came forth. Until last week.

A student security service

The details of the disgraceful situation that now prevails at Yale come to me courtesy of the Washington Free Beacon and The Republican Informer. I will ask you in advance to spare me your criticisms of these unconventional sources. When “convention” in journalism changes to turn it into propaganda, unconventional sources become the only reliable sources.

And what do I read?

Since March 2020, Yale University has put in place a COVID reporting system that has transformed the student body into the university’s very own Stasi.

For the uninitiated, the Stasi, or Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service), were the secret police of the German Democratic Republic. That any students at Yale, individually or in concert, should act like Communist secret police, should shame you. And I indeed hold you personally responsible – and will tell you why later. Worse than the “surveillance state” tactics these articles describe, is how the authorities are handling them. A Compact Review Committee handles these often anonymous complaints. Usually it does not afford an accused student the opportunity to face his accuser. Sir, that is unacceptable. As a Fellow in Medical Information Science at Dartmouth College (1989-91), I once took part as a Faculty Adviser to a student who came before that college’s Committee on Standards. When I compare that experience to the reports that have reached me, the lack of due process by the Yale Compact Review Committee shocks me beyond words.

Embeds and links available

From the two articles I have access to a wide variety of digital resources. I will now embed or link to them here, for your and anyone else’s perusal. Thus you will see that I have far too much evidence for you to dismiss lightly.

• Herewith a description of the Yale Community Compact and its enforcement provisions.
• Here also one can read the Title IX procedures, to provide contrast.
• This notice came to a Yale senior who evidently was trying to enjoy a movie in a library without a mask. The reports do not say which library and in fact redact that detail. But they do say that not one living person was within 150 feet of this senior.

• Warning the student received, evidently without a hearing.

• Report in the Yale Daily News about the annual holiday dinner taking place that very day. According to this, the Compact Review Committee never disciplined anyone regarding this event.

• Notice banning “close contact greetings” at Yale sporting events, dated 12 November 2021.

• Report in the Yale Daily News describing the mental health toll of these restrictions.

Selective application of the rules

The Washington Free Beacon article gives more damning information. Evidently all students are vaccinated – which is according to the Compact. Yet the restrictions continue. Worse than this is their selective application. The circumstances of the library incident above paint a picture I imagine to be typical. A tattletale rags on a student trying to enjoy himself. Every class has such vindictive students in it. The target mocks the tattletale – or does he? We have only the tattletale’s word on that, or that he was coughing up a storm at the time. The target tells us that the tattletale ratted him out by cellphone. When he asked the tattletale her name, she “gave him the finger” and left. Two days later he received the first notice I embedded above.

I fault the university on two counts relating to this specific incident. First, the Compact Review Committee accepted an anonymous tipster’s unsubstantiated word to accuse someone of a violation of, and disrespect for, this highly dubious part of campus law. Second, the Committee rendered a verdict with no hearing and not even an opportunity for cross-examination. Again this takes me back to my Faculty Adviser experience at Dartmouth. I had an opportunity to cross-examine, if I felt the need. I even had an opportunity to give a “defense summation,” which I gave. That is how one does things, to train a student in how to function in a republic. But that is not how the Yale Compact Review Committee does things. And that is worse than sad – it is infuriating.

Yale takes a cue from scandalous experiments

This state of affairs reminds me of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiment. You can look up the details of the experiment, perhaps, in the annals of your predecessor, Whitney Griswold. Briefly, thus: in 1962, the future Dr. Milgram found that people will willingly obey orders to violate the rights of others, if they have a “higher purpose” in which to believe. The experiment involved the infliction of severe, often life-threatening, electric shocks to a relative stranger.

Of course, no subject received any shocks, but that isn’t the point. The point is that other subjects were willing to give them. And they often gave them even after the “victim” cried out in pain and terror, then fell deathly silent. In short, one cannot rely on human nature to stop tyranny.

I first learned of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiment by watching the television drama The Tenth Level. William Shatner appeared as a direct analog to Dr. Milgram.

Years later, I took Introduction to Psychology from Judith Rodin, Ph.D., who screened the Milgram documentary in her class.

Nine years after the Milgram Study, a worse experiment took place: the Stanford Prison Guard Experiment. It showed that the role of a prison guard can turn an inoffensive person into a bully – or worse. Marquis Alphonse de Sade would no doubt stand in awe of the results.

What Yale should have done instead

And now, Dr. Salovey, I come to the point. Naturally you will ask what I would have had Yale do instead.

First and foremost, no university officer should have accepted uncritically the word of the National Institutes of Health in this matter. Yale School of Medicine has its own research laboratories. The Dean of Epidemiology and Public Health ought to have realized something was wrong from the start.

Didn’t you know that Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease, has a reputation for scientific plagiarism and patent trolling of treatment regimens? How could you so uncritically accept the Bat Soup Theory of SARS-CoV-2 without even an elementary research program to see whether it was feasible? If you follow enough of the links I have provided, you will find a pathway to clear and convincing evidence that in fact this same Dr. Fauci:

1. Directed and funded Gain of Function research on what became SARS-CoV-2 – which means, weaponization of a member of the family of viruses that cause the common cold.
2. Gave or sold his prototypes and notes to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Let’s just call that institution the People’s Liberation Army Biological Warfare Directorate, Virus Corps. They didn’t just leak that virus. They deployed it. So it was up to the research staff at Yale School of Medicine to figure it out. And it was up to you as President to task them with such a research program.

Failure of community leadership

As President of the university, you are the leader of a community. So you must utilize the resources of that community in response to an external threat. Particularly when someone suggests that you infringe upon the basic liberties of community members.

Understand this: the COVID 19 narrative was a lie from the beginning and already begins to unravel. If you wish to review all that I have written on the subject, and my sources, you may do so at this link.

Therefore Yale’s institutions of science and medicine had the obligation to do their own research. Please don’t tell me that Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and others did the same thing you did. That does not excuse Yale. (Furthermore, Johns Hopkins now admits that lockdowns and quarantines were wrong and did no good.) Yale had the opportunity to strike a blow for medical liberty – and sound medical and epidemiological practice. And Yale flunked the test.

That flunking has an even more dire consequence. You have condemned up to one-third of your student body to early death. The COVID vaccine is a death lottery. The only reason to doubt that thirty-three-percent death toll projection is that the politics of Connecticut militate against it. See here for details, and sources against which to check all vaccine lots.

In summary

Now I come to my summation. How dared you turn a university community into a model for a totalitarian state? How dared you subject students, faculty and staff to the equivalent of the Milgram Obedience and Stanford Prison Experiments? And how can you sleep at night, knowing you have taught students to be secret police bullies on the one hand, and subjects on the other?

Furthermore, how will you explain the suicide of a certain freshman in March 2021, also as the Yale Daily News archives will confirm? Actually how did you explain that? Give thanks to your lucky stars that I am not her father. Otherwise I would be reviewing my options for appropriate legal action.

I repeat: the Yale COVID-19 experience has been and remains a disgrace. A traitor to his country – Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. – tells you a story. You believe it. With all the resources at your disposal you don’t bother to check it out. Worse yet, you have not prepared these students to take their place in a republic – a society of laws rather than an oligarchy. Instead you have done the exact opposite.

For shame

Shame on you, sir. Shame on the institution you lead. You have brought it to grave disrepute, and I ask you: what have you to say for yourself?

I can guess. You will say that the steps you took, and the order in which you took them, prevented many virus deaths. I dispute that. This is a respiratory virus we’re talking about. So if it were really as deadly as the NIAID pretends, it would have wiped out the entire city of New Haven in a trice. But it did not.

The city lives. But a university community of which I was once proud to count myself a member, has turned itself into part of a Ministry of Education in a Communist country. Worse, it has become a microcosm of one. And for that I condemn you.

In righteous indignation,

Terry A. Hurlbut

Editor and Publisher

Conservative News and Views

From an open letter

Across the country, students have been blamed, snitched on, policed, sanctioned, suspended and dismissed for violations of COVID-related guidelines, including minor infractions. Students who fear harsh disciplinary action will become expert at hiding their activities, exposures and symptoms, contributing to the breakdown of contact tracing efforts and potentially increasing the risk of ongoing transmission.From an open letter protesting inhumane treatment of students. Its 111 signatories included nine professors at Yale, and the present director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.