With Fox News’s Glenn Beck in the spotlight for his role in the resignation of Obama adviser Van Jones ‘93JD, it’s as good a time as any to point out a little-known fact I learned only recently. When Beck was a radio personality in New Haven (on WELI, which is known to Yalies for broadcasting football games and to everyone else for Rush Limbaugh and other right-leaning talk shows), he took a course at Yale as a special student. As a GQ profile from a couple of years ago tells it:
With a letter of recommendation from Senator Joe Lieberman — who came on Beck’s Connecticut radio show several times and whom Beck voted for — Beck enrolled at Yale as part of a special program for older students, studying theology. He took only one class — the night before the semester began, he and his first wife decided to divorce, and suddenly he had two households to support — but when his professor told him, “Glenn, you belong here,” it was an experience that gave the high school grad a new sense of intellectual worth.
One course — probably in the non-degree special student program — apparently doesn’t get one into the alumni directory. But the take-away here is that if it hadn’t been for Yale, Beck may never have acquired his current sense of intellectual worth.
