Few times do I get upset at a substack content as this by Dr. Naomi Wolf, for on reading (& I knew of her struggles) but this revealed the depth of her pain at Yale from sexual assault at Yale U &

what was done to her as she sought redress! Many women, our girls must contend with abuse, savagery, at the hands of men around them & for many it was the 'cost' of progress as the society felt

This is a sobering at times painful piece and I decided to re-print (as written) it for I myself needed to read it…support her work please.

I wish to thank Naomi (she is a friend of mine) for this bravery, clarity. Beautiful powerful writing as she lets us get a glimpse at the powerful elite at places like Yale. I ask you when you have time, to read, it is lengthy but sobering. It helps one grasp what women, at all levels of life, face as they make their way. I think its key to also understand, Yale is as Ivy as they come and in all universities, all institutions, you send John and Suzie to learn but it can destroy them too. Be careful. Many there are tenured sickos, perverts, rapists. Many of the professors and some female too.

We all may have a story of some sort, something, some major, some slight but to each it was and could have been life altering.

Many never have the chance to face their demons. And it tears them up and eats them inside out. Life-long, carrying it. In some way this may help others and Naomi must be thanked for this. Her story is the same for many.

Not many are as strong as Naomi. No doubt scarred for life, but this seminal piece by Wolf may help some who struggle with helplessness, hopelessness, vulnerability, loneliness. In our life’s journeys yet COVID also made that front and center as powers at be worked to dehumanize and isolate us and criminalize us. Make us voiceless.

I wish to thank Brian, her husband, a great man. A friend.

Even in the COVID struggle, folk like Naomi with all her depth and breadth, must struggle to be heard, to be taken seriously, despite her and her Daily Clout team with Amy Kelly etc. having done extensive work to highlight the devastation from the COVID mRNA vaccine.

Start here:

‘Can You Go Home Again? Yale's 40th College Reunion (substack.com)

Can one go home again?

What is privilege? What is inclusion? What is “meaning”?

How do all these work to reward and punish and thus to police our societies and cultures, our knowledge base itself, our moral norms — in the subtlest, and yet the most gently tyrannical of ways?

Dr Ethan Haim, a whistleblower from Texas Children’s Hospital, has given an eloquent interview to Christopher F. Rufo about “gender affirming care”, and about how the medical industry, and especially doctors and administrators in academic medicine, adopted an ideology around these harsh, irreversible and dramatic procedures, unquestioningly.

Rufo asked Dr Haim — Why? Why did so many physicians latch onto this unproven, dramatic, dangerous set of interventions? Dr Haim responded that science has become ideological — the unproven interventions of COVID being obvious examples. Dr Haim also explained that a main reason the medical community embraced an ideology of dangerous gender reassignment interventions, has not been in exchange for money, but rather, in a search “for meaning”.

This is the most significant summary I have yet heard, from someone on the inside of privilege, of how so many souls “in our tribes” are losing what they know to be their way.

Dr Haim pointed out that people (that is, “people like us”) want to feel virtuous by speaking up for “the oppressed.” However, he went on, they don’t want to take any risks by actually resisting anyone or anything powerful. So, in an absence of what used to support our lives in the form of Western, Judeo-Christian values, and in an absence of hard work devoted to building a life lived virtuously, an ideological source of life’s meaning — such as COVID-adherence “meaning”, or “gender affirming care” “meaning” - rushes in.

Unsurprisingly, Dr Haim was charged with four counts of criminal HIPAA violations, days after having come forward to reveal the horrors taking place in the name of “transitioning” children at Texas Children’s Hospital.

Dr Haim, who is surrounded by the same kinds of often liberal, always highly educated, urban upper-middle-class people, who once surrounded me, does much to explain the “why” of the last few years.

Why do decent, educated people follow iniquity and nonsense? I think he is right — that “meaning” defined in this way is a powerful attraction. And “belonging” is as powerful a motivator, and “non-belonging” is a powerful deterrent, for the policing of the limits around a received, permissible set of belief structures and ideologies.

“Meaning” and “belonging” often go together, in our former circles. But to “belong”, one must share “meaning” — share the reigning ideology, no matter how contradictory or illogical or even cruel.

I have been learning these lessons for 20 years, in my relationship to my powerful alma mater, Yale University. Most recently, I re-learned this at my 40th reunion, the first time I had been on campus as a non-combatant, essentially, since I graduated in 1984.

I wrote an expose in 2004 of histories of sexual molestation and assault at that university, which were covered up decade after decade by multiple Yale administrations. My essay was featured on the cover of New York Magazine, where I had been a columnist.

I also described in the article, my own traumatic experience of having been molested by my Independent Study professor, the famous and renowned literary critic Prof Harold Bloom. I was 19 when this happened; and this event took place only twelve years after I had been sexually assaulted extremely violently by a male babysitter (is any rape of a child, or of anyone at all, not extremely violent? But I mean here to describe multiple physical injuries).

Many women have suffered more than one sexual assault by the time they reach adulthood. College administrators should bear in mind how many of their students arrive at universities already victimized, before they make light of faculty members placing those students once again in dangerous, terrifying situations.

I sought in 2004 to narrate Dr Bloom’s molestation of me in as calm and objective a way as possible. Victims are expected to have emotions about their experiences, in order to be credible as “real victims,” yet at the same time to not have emotions about their experiences — that is, to not seem “hysterical” or “overwrought” when reporting their traumatic experiences. This is all a tonal minefield.

The trauma of what Prof Bloom had done to me, was compounded at the time by my realization, as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, that Yale had known perfectly well, for many years, that my Professor had been accused of harassment or molestation, and yet the administration had not warned me, or any female student, not to take his classes, or never to be alone in a room with him.

It was very hard to publish that essay when I was 42. Decades after the event, I was still scared of my perpetrator.

It was not made much easier by the fact that two former victims of Prof. Bloom’s, from two different student generations, contacted me after publication to confirm that the same kind of thing had happened to them.

One victim, the younger, was too frightened to go on the record. The other one, who was older than I — meaning that her abuse preceded mine — allowed me to report her experience publicly, which I did. But the waters of reputational collusion covered over that credible, validating story at once, even though my own account had been held up to be isolated, prodded, and scrutinized in international media, and my own experience had been internationally minimized (“Naomi Wolf Makes Much Ado About Nuzzling at Yale”, Observer. “What’s the Big Deal, Naomi?” The Spectator . “Who’s Crying Wolf?” The Guardian. )

The hysterical reaction to my expose in 2004, and the more sober treatment of the news event when I tried to file two police reports and a formal grievance from 2016-2018, reveal how bad things had been for sexual assault victims in 2004; and yet demonstrate the way things have gotten only superficially better.

In 2015, now a Professor myself, and well aware of the vulnerability, the need to trust authority figures, and the lack of life experiences in my own 19-year-old students, I began the process of filing a formal grievance against Prof Bloom with Yale University. At least what happened to me would be on the record, a legal precedent that would help to protect any future victims.

The process ground on, and I was in touch with Yale’s Byzantine Sexual Assault Grievance Committee — the “University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct.” They must have notified Prof Bloom.

In 2016, I was menacingly accosted outside my then-New York City home by Dr Bloom’s son, who put a camera in my face, took a photograph of me, and then informed me that his mentally ill brother was angry with me, due to my efforts to file a grievance at Yale.

This event sounds outlandish and not-possible.

But I can tell you, having worked in a rape crisis center and reported on sexual assault for decades, that often, things happen to victims who may speak out, or who are speaking out, that seem unbelievable or bizarre, in part because someone who is a predator is already capable of doing other insanely predatory, bullying things, in order to silence his victim; and in part because incredible-sounding things are done to intimidate survivors of sexual abuse so that their stories will sound unlikely.

I had filed a police report immediately following this event, with my local precinct in New York City. The officers told me that this was a two-state offense and that I had to file a police report at Yale as well. I had been informed by NYPD that if it happened again, I should get a restraining order.

I called the Yale police to describe the event outside my home.

The Yale police told me that they could not find Dr Bloom. So they could do nothing. I checked on my phone, and saw that his class schedule was public and that his exact location two days a week was at that very moment online. I pointed this out, and there was silence from the Yale police.

Then, following NYPD’s directions, I sought to file a formal grievance in person with the NHPD, and with the Yale police.

I returned to Yale, with my then-partner, now-husband, Brian O’Shea, to give a report to the Yale Police — which Connecticut State Law forbade me from recording.

The report, attended by four detectives, lasted almost two hours.

Subsequently, the Yale police also did nothing.

We went to the New Haven Police station as well, to file a police report (there are two police jurisdictions at Yale, college police and NHPD.) There I filed the report yet again.

Weeks later and then months later, I was advised by multiple different New Haven police officers, that the police report had been lost, so nothing could be done. I filed it again, over the phone. Months later I checked, and again it had been lost.

By 2017, no action whatsoever had been taken, except that the UWC had told me in a letter that in order to file my complaint I had to remove the description of what had happened to me in 1983. Yes, you read that correctly. I could only report to Yale what had happened to me if I censored what had happened to me.

A year later, the predator was still meeting in person with undergraduates on campus. So I decided nonetheless to file in person, with the Provost’s office, and I brought a physical copy of my statement that included what had happened to me in 1983.

Returning to Yale to do what any responsible adult would be expected to do — indeed, to complete a minimally responsible task from any alumna or alumnus in my position — was highly re-traumatizing.

A Town and Country reporter, Norman Vanamee, who took the photograph above, covered me on my trip. In the reporter’s presence, I was physically blocked by Yale police officers, who prevented me from approaching the Provost’s office in order to report both the original assault and the recent act of intimidation.

“Wolf, a Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford, has stated that while attending Yale as an undergraduate she was sexually assaulted by Harold Bloom, the noted literary critic and Yale faculty member. Bloom, in a 2015 interview with Time magazine, and in a recent email to Town & Country, denied her claim. Wolf has also stated that since 2016 her attempts to file a formal grievance with Yale’s University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct have been thwarted.

There was nobody outside the building to greet her, so Wolf made her way into the lobby, where a silver-haired security guard was chatting with a maintenance worker. “Hello, my name is Naomi Wolf,” she told them. “I am here to see Dr. David Post to ask him to formally accept my grievance…”

“Ma’am,” the guard interrupted, after a quick look at his notebook. “I know who you are. You are not allowed to be in here. I’ve been asked to ask you to leave the building.”

Wolf and the guard exchanged variations of these lines for 10 or so minutes, until Wolf said politely, “I very much respect that you are doing your job, but it is my duty as an alumna and a parent of a school-age child to present my complaint so future students will be not be in danger.” Rolly bag in tow, she walked toward the elevator.

Yale University has a 93-person police department, and, after the guard called for backup, three of its armed and uniformed officers appeared and stationed themselves between Wolf and the elevator bank.

She explained to the police that she was prepared to spend the night in the lobby if that’s what it took to get her grievance accepted. An officer brought out a chair for Wolf to sit on and said, “Dr. Post isn’t even in the building right now.””

I was an alumna seeking to meet with the head of the UWC — the man was who literally responsible for students’ physical safety. I was also at the office where the Provost and Yale Counsel, who should be aware that there was a predator on campus, should have received my notification.

Instead of being ushered in to file the report, which Yale parents should expect would happen when an alumna has filed two police reports and one UWC report about a predator on campus, I was accosted by Yale police and aggressively escorted several blocks away to the “University-Wide Commitee on Sexual Misconduct”. There I was also prevented from filing the report.

This is a fake office providing fake sympathy to victims, only to entrap their complaints and prevent any forward motion; it is where undergraduate and graduate student women’s (and men’s) complaints about sexual harassment, rape and assault, go to die.

I have reported on this office before - the deeply-concerned-sounding female intake staffers, including senior members of the Administration; the branding of claims of sisterly “confidentiality” — the faux right-on-ness — which all obscures the fact that the whole UWC mechanism is set up to feed information about victims to the University’s legal counsel, and to prevent real university investigations of perpetrators, let alone civil or criminal action, from ever taking place.

In that office, with the reporter as a witness, my phone’s signal was blocked so that I could not record what was happening to me. There, the Secretary of the UWC, Alex Menon, refused again to accept my grievance filing, no matter how diligently and repeatedly I sought to report what had happened to me, both in 1983 and in 2016. I invited her to call Dr Bloom in to ask him directly about my statement, and she refused to respond to this.

After quite a long time of this Alice-in-Wonderland-style refusal by Menon to accept my filing, and after Alex Menon told the reporter witnessing the event to leave, I kept trying for another half hour, then had to leave the UWC office momentarily to speak to a legal counselor —as the staff would not allow him up to advise me.

Once I was in the lobby, yet another Yale police officer appeared, blocked me physically from re-entering the UWC (my grievance still had not been accepted by Alex Menon), and warned me that I would be arrested eventually and would be taken to be held in a prison facility if I did not voluntarily leave the premises.

I received a letter later from Yale’s lawyer, stating that I had withdrawn my complaint. This letter’s assertion was false, which I stated to him in reply.

So — I knew by this time that there was now no recourse. I would die eventually, at least knowing that I had done all I could to be responsible to the next generations of Yale students.

I did do some good though, perhaps, after all; Dr Bloom, some time after that, met only with undergraduates not in person, but electronically.

Why was this decision made?

I leave that to you.

#####

My point is, when you are outside of the University consensus and ideology, as well as outside of other elite-sanctioned consensuses and ideologies, horrible things happen to you.

Yale was not done with me, nor I with my alma mater.

More horrible things happened in 2022, when I returned to Yale to warn the student community not to take the bivalent “booster”, which at that time had been tested on eight mice. The University was, sensibly enough, inflicting this experimental injection on a healthy population of young people, and sparing the Faculty and Administration. (I later learned that Yale receives more funding from HHS than it does from tuition; so the university was essentially trafficking its students’ bodies, as defined by Connecticut state trafficking laws, for money).

This protest, which was organized by another Yale alumna (of my Class of 1984) and a group called TeamRealityCT, had to take place on the town green, some distance from campus and from the students, as we were informed by the University that if we stepped foot on campus to present this message, we would be trespassing.

Thus — surprise! We would be subject to arrest.

This edict from Yale required us to walk in complete silence, carrying our signs, through the campus, but only on the streets that traversed it; unable to answer any potential questions on campus from the subdued students who watched us walking. Many of their parents were frantically emailing us, saying that neither the students nor their parents wished them to take the experimental injection.

The Yale Daily News called me a “conspiracy theorist,” using boilerplate language that had been launched by the White House in 2021, when it illegally pressured social media sites to deplatform me. The Yale Daily News also got a criminally misleading quote from the soulless Chair of the Department of Obstetrics Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale School of Medicine and Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Yale-New Haven Hospital:

“Dr. Hugh Taylor ’83 — Chair of the Department of Obstetrics Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale School of Medicine, and Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Yale-New Haven Hospital — told the News that there has been no research tying adverse effects in fertility to the Pfizer vaccine. 

“There’s no risk to fertility or to a pregnancy,” Taylor said. “But on the other hand, there’s a tremendously increased risk of complications from the virus if you are pregnant when you get COVID. The risk of major complications in pregnancy and even death significantly increase in pregnant women compared to others of the same age.”

Of course we know now, and we knew even as Dr Taylor spoke — and he should have known — that there is dreadful risk posed by the mRNA injection to fertility and to a pregnancy. Over 80 per cent of the pregnancies tracked in the Pfizer documents to completion, were lost to miscarriage or spontaneous abortion. And we know that vaccines do not stop the virus; with Pfizer concluding a month after rollout, in November 2020, that the vaccines did not work to stop COVID: “Failure of efficacy."

Neither Dr Taylor, nor the hapless student reporter assigned to the story, asked to see or evaluated the scientific reports of our team of physicians and scientists examining the Pfizer documents, upon which I was basing my warnings to the Yale community. But even if Dr Taylor was unaware of our, and obstetrician Dr Jim Thorp’s, research on mRNA and LNP damage to pregnancies, Dr Taylor knew that the injection was experimental — the “bivalent booster” being the most “experimental” injection possible, having been tested on eight mice — and that pregnant women are not supposed to be experimented upon.

Speaking as an alumna, the pain of that day for me was more than just emotional. It was intellectual pain, if such as thing can be described. It was the pain of being targeted with speech-suppression, and of watching the students, who of course reminded me of my teenaged self, being targeted with thought-suppression.

All this at a place famous for its motto, “Lux et Veritas” — light and truth.

So we stood on the public commons — us moms, and some dads — shouting hopelessly into a microphone, far from the lovely Gothic heart of the campus.

It was a bitterly cold December day.

We should have been welcomed into Battell Chapel, to share our message and take open questions.

We should have been invited onto a panel in a classroom or auditorium with opponents, to debate our evidence.

That’s what Yale, my Yale anyway, had taught us was supposed to happen. That was what Yale 84 had instructed us: that was what civilized, educated people were supposed to do with new ideas and information.

But no. Now, no.

Far from the warm heart of Cross Campus, far from Battell Chapel’s beautiful stained glass windows, we stood on a jerry-rigged wooden podium, at our mics; and the cold wind tore our words out of our mouths.

****

A couple of weeks ago, believe it or not, I decided to attend the 40th reunion of my Yale class. I stayed as long as I could.

This was a decision I had made with a mixture of feelings.

There was the old, familiar grief: grief for my so-beautiful former world, for the loss of its once-so-inspiring values; grief for my nearly two-decades-long estrangement from what had been my beloved Alma Mater.

I had never sought to be estranged from Yale.

My choice would have been forty years of what my peers had had — experiences that they had often shared happily with me. My peers and classmates had described decades of being invited to address classes, to sit on panels, to have lunch with faculty; they shared in the robust, exciting life of the mind of distinguished Yale alumni. They got to connect with and share ideas with generations of students.

No matter what I achieved in the last few decades, those doors had never opened to me.

I had misbehaved.

Thus, I had been deprived of that rich relationship that many of my peers had with the university, and with its networks; and any students who may have wanted to talk to me for the last four decades were deprived of that too.

That estrangement was a decision that Yale made.

Still, I wanted to attend my reunion. It is a big milestone: 40 years after graduation. There was something in me that wanted to match the 61-year-old Naomi with the 21-year-old Naomi, to connect with those with whom I had been a student so long ago, and to reflect on life and the passage of time.

So I booked a train and a hotel room, and I went.

I walked up Chapel Street, and was awed at the changes. In some ways, the town looked glossier and more prosperous than ever. The Town-Gown tensions of the 1980s had been “solved”, it seemed, by “Gown” pumping money into the infrastructure.

The spare, Preppy, understated luxury of the 1980s had been replaced by overt international-style luxury boutiques. The brownstone 19th Century buildings of Old Campus looked more beautiful than ever; their arched windows and entry gates were buffed clean, and the grounds around them were perfectly landscaped. Had they been so firmly locked, in my day? I did not recall. Security to all the quadrangles was very tight.

Students streamed happily in and out of colleges, or enjoyed lattes in outdoor cafes, and sat in the bright sun outside tequila bars and poke joints.

But “Town” was suffering even worse than it had, it seemed, in the 1980s. Intermingling with the student population was what looked like a permanent population of homeless people, and of severely drug-addicted people. As in every city these days, some people were sleeping and living on the otherwise prosperous streets. What looked like a drug market was also operating with apparent impunity.

I was relieved that some things had not changed. The Anchor Bar! Our favorite dive bar was still there. And Claire’s Corner Copia! Natural food that dated back to my era, when bean sprouts, piled onto its hefty sandwiches, had been newly popular.

There were some ugly architectural incursions into the corners of York Street, but I was relieved that the majestic heart of the campus, a College Gothic architectural wonder built in the 1920s by stonemasons imported from Italy, was largely intact. The heart of the campus was clean, bright, safe, polished, glowing, lush.

First, I attended a panel on Free Speech at Yale, held at a hotel near campus and convened by the Free Speech-oriented Buckley Institute, at which a scientist said that for years, students had applied to positions on projects with “DEI statements” that were “painful to read”, as they either apologized for the “privilege of being white” or made some fragile, stretching claim to being “of color.” (The statements are no longer required). The historian on the panel said that one is no longer supposed to use the term Renaissance, as it is “elitist”. It has been replaced by “Early Modern.” One is also not supposed to say “Reformation.” Both men said that grants, and thus modes of scholarly inquiry, are being determined by funders with DEI portfolios who dispense grant money based on how DEI-oriented it is, so that if a project is not about “equity” in some way, or “colonialism”, it often does not get funded. (I am paraphrasing from my memory).

Having then signed up at the intake center and received my credentials and my key card to swipe in and out of Branford College, I pushed open the College’s heavy doors, and I stepped back forty years in time.

I was back in the perfect world.

The weather was that still, balmy clear New Haven early summer that defined “summer” for me for the rest of my life; the sky was pure blue.

Inside Branford’s grassy quadrangle, my class was gathered, excitedly chatting, in record numbers.

There it all was. It was like when Alice enters the forbidden garden. Stepping into Branford’s courtyard was like entering the forbidden garden in every forbidden-garden children’s book.

You would be tempted to do almost anything, say almost anything, just for the privilege of remaining inside. It was that perfect.

There were my classmates! Yes, startlingly older, but I too am startlingly older, even to myself. Still, so many were recognizable to me! Faces from classes, from clubs, from the library, from parties.

They all looked so lovely, as a group. Modestly, tastefully dressed; the women in lightweight Navy sweaters and white slacks; low-heeled sandals. Low-key gold jewelry. Low-maintenance hairstyles; lots of pony tails. The men were similarly unostentatious: sweaters too, and jeans, and loafers.

I got to talk to many old friends, and reconnect.

All of the people I met, or re-met, had done valuable things with their lives.

Some were appellate lawyers in DC. Some were judges. Some were English professors at prestigious colleges. One alumna helped to redesign an island in the vicinity of Manhattan. One was a headmaster of a private school in Maine.

A friend who had wanted to be a theatrical producer, had a theatre company. Friends who had been talented actors at Yale, regularly appeared on Broadway. It was satisfying to see that so many good dreams had been realized.

This was America’s upper middle class, the last generation, or nearly the last, that had overtly been taught in our curricula ideals of service, giving back, probity, work ethic. The value of all this showed.

It was so sweet to be inside those gates.

We were sheltered by an ancient tree. Soft wind sighed through its fresh green leaves. The quadrangle was dappled with light, as I remember it had been forty years earlier, and a soaring bell tower with carillon protected us all. At noon the carillon bells thrillingly sounded.

Spotless white tents overshadowed the food, presented elegantly but unpretentiously (Yale’s specialty) on white tablecloths.

The events staff, who are treated at Yale as if they are more invisible than are any support staff in any institution I have ever visited, silently set out platters of miniature burgers, and arranged colorful trays of raw vegetables and roasted vegetables, and baskets of fresh, crispy rolls. They silently laid out tables of chocolate cake slices for dessert.

The bar was staffed, as it had been in my day too, by personable undergraduates. They refilled glasses of wine, and made icy martinis, and handed them out to milling attendees. The hum of excited chatter rose with the afternoon.

As I reconnected with old friends and acquaintances, I thought:

This feels so good.

I remembered that it was not just the physical beauty and luxury that lulled you, once you were inside these gates; it was the exciting conversations and the richness of the networks. I could do more with six conversations with the people in Branford’s courtyard, than I could with a thousand phone calls or meetings, with even the best-intended people, outside.

That was the real wealth that Yale and similar institutions offer — the networks, the access, the community. That is real power, as invisible and as silent as the hands that surrounded us, ordering and replenishing the resources and pleasures that attended us. And that is what you lose, that silent, comfortable power, when you go “against” the University’s values.

But my joy at being back, could not sustain itself for very long, unalloyed.

By midafternoon, someone who had been a dear friend of mine — formerly one of my best friends; someone irreplaceable; with whom, when I was twenty, we had made joking plans that if by forty we had not found anyone to marry, we would marry one another — told me, when I went up happily to greet him, this:

“Wolf,” he said, “you have caused the deaths of millions of people.”

#####

By midafternoon, my heart had been sliced with many incisions, large and small.

Many people had come up to me and leaned close in toward me — which was itself a bit startling — and whispered to me that they followed my work, and supported me.

Or they took me by the arm and drew me aside, out of a group, and stated that they supported me and thanked me for my work, and then they returned me to the group, like a book that had been quietly taken off a shelf, and then replaced.

I began to think of how well the country might have been steered in the right direction over the past four years, if more of these powerful, influential, connected people had stopped whispering, and had spoken their thoughts aloud.

I noticed some norms of discourse from which I had been estranged for a long time.

You can tell overt consensus from what people laugh at or mock in group settings. A panel on China, I had heard, had broken into derisive laughter at the notion that some believed an “invasion” was underway in the US, that benefited China. I was present at a panel on life lessons learned for the “third act”, at which I became uncomfortably aware of the way some panelists spoke disrespectfully about their husbands, or about their children or parents, in front of an audience of hundreds of strangers. I thought, “I am not used to this.”

At at one point, a panelist said, “I ask myself at times, What would Jesus do?” Not that I believe in any of that stuff”.

Again — the crowd burst into laughter.

I realized that I had gotten used to overt norms of respect for family, for others’ religious views, and for civil, open dialogue. To my surprise, I now found those norms outside, not inside, the ivied gates.

I was ready to be on my way.

#####

So I went back to my hotel room. There was a price to pay for staying inside that beautiful, luxurious, exciting setting.

Thus I missed the Office of LGBTQ Resources Open House; the Asian-American Cultural Center Reception; the Afro-American Cultural Center Reception; the La Casa Cultural Reception.

Which would I attend, anyway?

Who would have me?

The entire community was so much more fractured by “identities” than it had been in the 1980s, when the excitement of any reception on campus was that we were all together. The excitement then was that that at any event, you might meet anyone.

I packed my bags slowly, with the heavy heart of 61, saying farewell to the memories and excitement of 21. I put away the pretty cocktail dress that I would now not be wearing to any more festivities, and closed my suitcase.

So I made my way toward the train; away from the unforgettable, heartbreaking arches that formed a barrier to the heart of the university. My Alma Mater — which literally means, “fostering” or “nourishing mother.”

I stepped into the romantic, deep-blue, treacherous New Haven dusk.

####

So I missed going to the magnificent Woolsey Hall to hear the update to the Class of ‘84 on the status of Yale.

It was presented by Yale’s President Salovey — the same man who had overseen my forcible removal by his police; who had prevented me by physical intimidation from submitting my grievance to his Provost and to the UWC.

The same man whose lawyer had written a legal letter to me stating a falsehood.

I heard that President Salovey had completed his update:

His conclusion to the Class of 1984 about the state of Yale University was positive.

I was glad to hear that all was well.

’

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