Note: In this essay, Jim Sleeper reports on Death of a Yale Man, a memoir from Malcolm Ross, Yale 1919. Ross, a son of an “old stock,” prosperous family, who graduated Yale in 1919, sold bonds briefly and then turned to years of body-wracking labor alongside miners and oil drillers and became a New Deal official with the National Labor Relations Board.
Note: In 2012 I gave a talk to a group of Yale undergrads who gathered at the Yale War Memorial on Beinecke Plaza — about how liberal education, especially at elite institutions such as Yale, finesses but sometimes clarifies the difference between self-censorship that’s prompted by fear of a state, of corporate employers, and of other authorities versus a kind of self-censorship that’s prompted by the seductions of power, i.e., by calculating that …
Reprinted from an email thread from Jim Sleeper.
“Someone just sent me this. I hadn’t seen it before now. (‘Spirit of youth, alive, unchanging, under whose feet the years are cast…’) I was in the Glee Club in another century — 1966-68.
We once tried to do an impromptu concert in Grand Central Station, but we were shooed out of there by railroad police. But check out what happens now.”
[Op-Ed] Author’s Note: I learned it when I watched some Democrats rigging an election 40 years ago. Today’s Republican Party is anti-democratic (as well as anti-Democratic) in a reactionary – “populist” way that’s trending toward fascism, but the harder, subtler truth — new to many in America’s neoliberal chattering classes — is that many ordinary […]
The late pundit prized civic trust and the common good. With his death, I wonder: Do America’s elite schools even teach those ideals anymore?
Note: Jim’s Op Ed in Salon argues that it isn’t just the Second Amendment that is the problem. There is a broader problem with neoliberalism, commercial speech and social media.
Editor’s Note: This is a recent Op-Ed published by a classmate. Send in any that YOU have had published recently.
Putin must be stopped by force, and his American apologists must be thoroughly discredited, much as Hitler and Mussolini and their American apologists and collaborators were, even if doing so requires pain and sacrifice from the rest of us.
What T.S. Eliot called “very much reality” doesn’t stop there. […]
Op-Ed in Foreign Poilicy magazine:The university set out to train the next generation of U.S. leaders—but it often failed to educate them.
Yale professor Beverly Gage has been praised widely for defending academic freedom by announcing her resignation from the directorship of Yale’s Program in Grand Strategy. But there are more politically urgent, and arguably profound, questions at issue here beyond professors’ right to design their courses free of outside interference.
Elsewhere Than Vietnam, a historical novel-cum-memoir by classmate David Schwartz, is a fictionalized account of his experience as an Army language specialist and interrogator for military intelligence.
As both a novel and a memoir, Elsewhere takes us to places where Dave served and wandered, from the Army’s language school in California to Munich and even to an Israeli kibbutz.
Note: This is an Op-Ed with a “pre-note” classmate Jim Sleeper added here for us Yale ’69ers.
As a lecturer at Yale when this joint venture with Singapore was announced, Jim had a 360-degree view of events. Here he offers evidence for his thesis that the US failed in Afghanistan AND in Singapore for the same reasons — both grounded in evangelical presumptions and military-economic motivations.
Note: The tragedy in Afghanistan has prompted Jim Sleeper to re-issue, with new comments, a 2017 column for The Washington Monthly. He criticizes the “Grand Strategy” methodology of Yale faculty who sought to advance foreign-policymaking developed at the post-war Yale we’d attended and that persisted up through General Stanley McChrystal’s teaching stint at Yale from 2012-17.
Editor’s Note: This is an Op-Ed that our classmate, Jim Sleeper, wrote for Salon, upon the passing (and subsequent memorial service at Yale) of one of the founders and leaders of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, Charles Hill.
[Originally published on 26 May 2019; This is fourth in a series of re-published Essays from the 50th Reunion ClassBook.] Even if most of us weren’t thinking of getting into foreign-policy as we entered Yale in September, 1965, foreign policy would get into us, and the consequences would rattle Yalies not only on campus but also in State, Defense,…
Corporate capital and Trump’s coup: Will business elites take a stand? Trump’s war on democracy is clearly bad for business — but the leaders of corporate America helped create this mess By JIM SLEEPER Nov. 20th, 2020 The latest news out of Michigan — in which the current occupant of the White House has not only summoned Republican legislative leaders…
Editor’s Note: from dissentmagazine.org
Stopping Trump’s Coup By Jim Sleeper ▪
Tuesday night’s presidential debate can best be characterized by two of Donald Trump’s favorite words: it was a “disgrace” and a “disaster.” Our challenge now is to think not just morally or theoretically but also politically, in the way that Trump himself […]
Editor’s Note: In the Comment below the article, classmate Jim Sleeper announces his retirement from the Yale faculty, highlighting the times he’s criticized the University’s corporatism (and, in this Op-Ed from the New Republic, reminding us why he protested Steve Schwarzman’s speech at the Reunion).
When 18-year-old Stephen A. Schwarzman, the son of a Philadelphia dry-goods store owner, entered Yale in 1965, he took his meals, like all freshmen, in the Commons, a vast, baronial dining hall in a cluster of beaux-arts [,,,]
