The student editors of the libertarian Yale Free Press learned after Thanksgiving that 2,400 copies of their November issue, the entire print run, had disappeared over the break -- stolen, apparently, from every residential college where they'd been stacked. Editor Diana Feygin '06 told the Yale Daily News she believed the issue had been stolen because of its controversial cover story about politics in the classroom.
I called Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History and Yale's unofficial conservative spokesperson, and asked whether he had any comments. "This takes place about every five years" with one of Yale's conservative student publications, he said. "No one is ever caught; no one is ever punished. We should be intolerant of this kind of intolerance."
Kagan sees the theft of the Free Press and the failure to punish it in terms of Yale's larger political makeup. Yale "leans overwhelmingly to the left," he said; if copies of a liberal student publication were stolen, there would be an outcry and demonstrations on campus.
Statistics from the November election back him up as to Yale's political inclinations. Thirty-five times as many Yale employees contributed to Kerry as to Bush in the past election, and the student vote on campus went 741 to 116 for Kerry (see "Election 2004 by the numbers," p. 17).
But would Yale be more aggressive, as Kagan implied, if the political positions of the antagonists were reversed? That's questionable. Consider a much more serious incident in which the conservative perpetrators got off lightly. In the spring of 2003, Katherine Lo '05 hung an upside-down American flag out of her dorm room window to protest the Iraq war. According to Lo, a group of male students entered her unlocked suite the next day without permission. She had locked herself in her bedroom; the group of students stayed in her outer room for several minutes and left an obscene note excoriating "Muslim bitches." Some of the students were later penalized by the Yale College Executive Committee, but they received probation -- a minimal punishment relative to the offense. (Because Executive Committee proceedings are not made public, however, the male students' response to Lo's charges isn't known.)
After the Lo incident, the administration did send out campus-wide e-mails, condemning the harassment and calling on students to honor free speech. The Free Press case, too, deserved an e-mail rebuke. Censorship by theft is inexcusable. If the thieves were in fact left-leaning students offended by the Free Press's politics, they should have clenched their teeth, gone back to their dorms, and written liberal broadsides to stack in the dining halls next to the Free Press. 