Yale students upset at a political party that “favors the wealthy”

An East Coast Aero Club customer from Switzerland wanted to burn up some Cirrus SR20 time. So it was off to KHVN and the Yale University Art Gallery. Walking around the campus we saw signs preparing Yale students for the upcoming election. I posted the following on Facebook:

Students at a school that costs more than $73,000 per year are upset at the idea of a political party that “favors the wealthy”…

(You’ll have to click on the images to really see them; WordPress is not nearly as smart as Facebook about image display.)

My friends immediately jumped to Yale’s defense. The school gave huge discounts to the poor. I agreed that this was great, but pointed out that only 2.1 percent of Yale undergrads come from bottom-quintile families (nytimes) and also that the school apparently created poverty because 7.8 percent of graduates fell into this bottom quintile for income: “Maybe it is time to re-think some of those majors!”

I then added the following:

The Yale students are upset because Trump is “disrespectful to women”. But if they respect women, why wouldn’t they save a ton of money and attend University of Connecticut, where a higher percentage of faculty is female? (CollegeFactual says that 62 percent of teachers at U. Conn are female; the corresponding number at Yale is only 56 percent) “The ratio of male to female faculty at Yale is above average.” Yale students want to respect women faculty at other schools rather than at their own? Or Yale students respect women in general, but, compared to students at other universities, they prefer to take classes taught by men?

The Yale students say that Trump “subjugates people of color” (unlike the Yale students who call 911 whenever there is a sighting… (nytimes)) and “supports white supremacists”. Did Trump ever name one of his buildings after a white supremacist? The NYT reports that Yale named a college after “one of the 19th century’s foremost white supremacists” (nytimes). And, apparently, blackface was a common Halloween costume at Yale until recently (TIME).

A fellow Facebooker pointed out that Calhoun’s name had been replaced by Grace Hopper’s (sacred female computer nerd). So Yale should be off the hook because they supported white supremacy only for a few hundred years and stopped in 2017.

A thoughtful friend:

I’m not sure why you think the two notions are mutually exclusive. Why can’t one be well off, or from a family that’s well off, and still support a party that strives to represent people equally, as opposed to lobbying to protect wealthy people from, say, paying less than their fair share of taxes?

My response:

Sure. In the same way that a person can put a “I want to help the poor” bumper sticker on the back of a $70 million Gulfstream or $120,000 Mercedes. If these folks actually did care, though, why are they consuming so much personally rather than giving money to the poor. Why do they need to wait until Robin Hood is elected before they stop spending it all on themselves?

If these kids cared about the non-wealthy, wouldn’t they use their $300k in Yale expenses to fund 15 poor people to graduate from state schools? (And then use their academic smarts to get a full ride at a high end university with merit scholarships.)

Separately, I happened to be at the Providence, Rhode Island airport during Brown University’s parent weekend. The PVD ramp was clogged with heavy personal jets, including a Gulfstream G650. The folks working at the FBO said that fueling bizjets for parents visiting their 91-percent very liberal or liberal children made it the airport’s busiest weekend. By noon on the Sunday they had already sent 22 families off in their private jets.