YALE TALIBAN UPDATE:

Yale now doesn’t even attempt to claim that Mr. Hashemi has changed. In conversations with donors, president Richard Levin has fallen back on two arguments: that Mr. Hashemi currently is a nondegree student, and that the State Department issued him a visa. But Mr. Hashemi’s application to become a sophomore in Yale’s full degree program, the same type of program that Mr. Farivar graduated from at Harvard, is pending before Mr. Levin. That makes his continued presence at Yale especially relevant as Yale’s Board of Governors, the body that supposedly runs the university, prepares to meet this week.
Many in the Yale community are appalled at the damage university officials have caused by their failure to address the Hashemi issue after seven weeks of controversy. “That silence has provoked bewilderment and anger among many,” David Cameron, a Yale political science professor wrote The Wall Street Journal last week. “Yale appears to have no convincing response to those who ask why, given the nature of the Taliban regime, his role in it, its complicity in the 9/11 attacks, and his apparent failure or refusal to disavow the regime, Mr. Hashemi has been allowed to study at the university.”

Even some who defend the right of Yale to make its own admissions decisions now say it went too far with its Taliban Man. Mark Oppenheimer, a Yale grad who edits the New Haven Advocate, an alternative weekly, says he has “finally come to the conclusion” that “Yale should not have enrolled someone who helped lead a regime that destroyed religious icons, executed adulterers and didn’t let women learn to read. Surely, the spot could have better gone to, say, Afghani women, who have such difficulty getting schooling in their own country.”

Read the whole thing. Plus, a related article from the Yale Daily News:

Former Taliban diplomat Rahmatullah Hashemi’s presence as a non-degree special student at Yale has put pressure on administrators to expedite ongoing efforts to clarify the difference between the Non-Degree Students Program and the degree-granting Eli Whitney Students Program.

If Hashemi intends to gain degree status next year — as he told the News in February he would seek to do — his application to the Whitney Program must be received by the May 1 deadline. Some students within the degree program have questioned in internal e-mail messages whether Hashemi’s background merits his acceptance, and Assistant Dean William Whobrey, who oversees both the Non-Degree and Whitney programs, said that, pending approval, next year’s Yale College Programs of Study will attempt to clarify the distinctions between the two.

This really represented an appalling lapse of judgment on Yale’s part.