The Yale Taliban

Last week it emerged that one of the former Taliban foreign ministers has been enrolled at Yale University for the past eight months. I'd say this is something of an issue management file for Yale. And how did their spokesperson respond? This quote appeared in the OpinionJournal:

"Almost no one will now defend Mr. Rahmatullah's presence as a special student, even though a week ago many had no such inhibitions in a splashy New York Times magazine piece, which broke the news that he had been at Yale for eight months. In that piece, Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions before he took the same post at Stanford, explained that Yale had missed out on another foreign student of the same caliber as Mr. Rahmatullah but that 'we lost him to Harvard,' and 'I didn't want that to happen again."

Knowing how controversial accepting such a student would be, you'd think Yale would better prepare a spokesperson to deal with the issue. Perhaps they do see this person as a prized catch, but to frame his acceptance as merely part of the Yale-Harvard rivalry shows a lack of appreciation or compassion for the people who suffered under the Taliban. He would have been better off acknowledging the controversy, but then giving people some of the rationale why Mr. Rahmatullah was accepted. Framing the message to help people understand your motivation in taking this action would go a long way to defuse the controversy. Unless of course their decision was just as Mr. Shaw suggests - part of the Harvard rivalry.

As an aside, doesn't the picture of Yale accepting a former member of the Taliban government as a student make you think that Thurston Howell III wasn't far off?