OpinionJournal - Yale Out of One Crisis and Into Another

First, as a Yale alumnus myself, I'm glad to see that Yale is tightening the standards for its Eli Whitney program for "mature students." Consensus says that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, also known as Taliban Man, will not measure up.

But now Yale is going to do something stupid that will wipe out any kudos that it might have earned. They're going to hire Juan Cole, Professor of History at UMich, as a professor of contemporary Middle East studies. This although he has done almost no scholarship on the Middle East past the nineteenth century. In fact, he's more blogger than professor--and his blog is one incoherent rant after another.

The Ivy League is in bad enough shape when it hires more polished propagandists to lay their propaganda on captive audiences. When they hire people who pass off rants as "informed comment," they've sunk to a new low.