On the Startling Pace of Global Warming: Calculus Applied

I went to Yale to study for four years (and then to Wisconsin for four years for post-doc study under a Harvard scholar), after having completed a Ph.D. program elsewhere (and decades later I went to Harvard (including auditing coursework at Yale for one term) for 1.5 years of continued study in comparative theology and ethics, and independent research) because my education at my first university, that of Kansas, was so bad; that university, run by sophomoric Jayhawks, did not heed the value of retaining faculty financially once promoted from the assistant level, and the graduate students who were teaching undergraduates were not trained in pedagogy. Significant to my unsatisfactory education at the University of Kansas was my decision to switch to business administration and accounting “mid-stream” without any regard to the opportunity cost of foregone coursework in the humanities in the liberal arts. When I was teaching accounting on the side while studying at Yale a decade later, I finally received confirmation that I had indeed made a significant educational mistake at KU, for when some Yale College students petitioned Dean Brodhead to create a major in business, he replied in the Yale Daily News, “Let us educate you first; then go out and get trained.” This priority and sequence are both severely eclipsed at “state” or public, universities in virtually every U.S. state, whereas the E.U. does a better job of distinguishing institutionally knowledge from vocational skill. Even the teaching in the liberal arts at the University of Kansas was lackluster, though I probably would have still made the move to business had the teaching been good. In calculus, for example, the graduate-student instructor did not think it necessary to explain that a derivative refers to the changing rate of acceleration rather than to acceleration itself; his exclusive orientation was to calculating so as to get us to arrive at correct answers. We were like trained seals. The graduate-student instructor of Physics, who could barely speak English (but that didn’t matter to the department’s receptionist), also did not feel obliged to explain what the formulae mean. Why does force equal mass times acceleration? Missing from E=MC² was the point that energy can become mass (Higgs would not be discovered for decades though). Whereas questions of physics have remained less than pressing through my adult life, climate change has turbo-charged the significance of the derivative, for the rate of acceleration of climate change, as evinced in the heatwaves in the E.U. during the summer of 2026, had already been positive and was increasing both as a number and in value qua significance. The melting glaciers in the Alps indicated then that the pace of human-caused climate change was much faster than previously expected. My inability to “see the forest” instead of individual “trees” at Kansas regarding my own college education can be likened to our species’ inability (and refusal) to grasp the true significance of climate change as a threat to our species’ very survival, and certainly comfort.

The full essay is at "On the Startling Pace of Global Warming."

On the Self-Entitlement of Yale’s Faculty

Whereas the emails that Larry Summers sent to the disgraced underage-sex-ring boss, Jeffrey Epstein, did not—at least to my knowledge—involve Summers’ role as a professor at Harvard, Yale’s David Gelernter, who had been wounded in 1993 by a mail-explosive that had been sent by the “Unabomber,”—an event that I remember in person as I was a Yale student back then—wrote not only on topics such as business and art, but also to recommend a hot female student to work as an editor for Epstein. Specifically, Gelernter had a Yale senior in mind—a student he described in the email as a “v small good-looking blonde.”[1]  Whereas Larry Summers apologized publicly (and to his class) in late 2025 for his bad judgment in having continued to exchange emails with Epstein even after the latter’s conviction, Gelernter saw nothing to apologize for in spite of the fact that the flagged email pertained to his role as a professor (in recommending a student). He was actually proud of the email that he had sent as a professor concerning a student to the sex-predator! The sheer brazenness of Gelernter’s self-defense reveals something about the privileged mentality of Yale’s faculty—a mentality that is not good for academia or Yale.

The full essay is at "On the Self-Entitlement of Yale's Faculty." 

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1. Dave Collins, “A Yale Professor Recommended a ‘Good-Looking Blonde’ Student for a Job with Epstein. He’s Not Sorry,” APnews.com, February 11, 2026.

Centuries of Excluding Insiders at Yale

Jonathan Edwards fell out of favor with Yale’s president Clapp, who opposed George Whitefield’s Christian revivals as being too “enthusiastic.” So, Clapp had two pamphlets published to criticize Edwards, who had studied and then taught at Yale. In fact, one of Yale College’s residential colleges has been named after Edwards at least since the late twentieth century. I would imagine that few if any current or former JE students have been informed that Edwards ceased attending Yale Commencement exercises and even visiting campus once he had known of Clapp’s vitriolic pamphlets. It is ironic that in Edwards’s time, Yale’s faculty minimized the impact of original sin in what became known as the New Haven theology. It seems that compassion for people who hold a different theological (or political) view, as in “Love thy enemy,” was nonetheless above the grasp of Yale’s administration. Fast-forward from the first half of the eighteenth century to roughly three hundred years later and incredibly the same hostile, highly dysfunctional organizational culture was still well ensconced at Yale.

The full essay is at "Centuries of Excluding Insiders at Yale."

On Yale’s Anti-Conservative Ideological Faculty

In 2025, “Yale professors made 1,099 donations to federal political campaigns and partisan groups . . . Not one of the recipients was Republican.”[1] Other than the 2.4% of the donations that went to independent candidates or groups, the rest—97.6%—went to Democrats. In that same year, U.S. President Trump became very publicly critical of elite private universities receiving federal research dollars while being so partisan (i.e., Democrat-leaning). Trump may have been more concerned that the universities benefit by receiving the indirect-expenses portions of federal research-grants while the professors infuse their personal ideologies, which are in conflict with conservatism, into their lectures. I took many, many courses, including at Yale, in my formal and post-doctoral education, and the infusion of a professor’s ideology—nearly always progressive—was not uncommon, especially at Yale.

The full essay is at "On Yale's Anti-Conservative Ideological Faculty."

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1. Jaeha Jang, “Yale Professors Donated Overwhelmingly to Democrats in 2025,” The Yale Daily News, January 14, 2026.

On University “Police Departments”: Accountability at Yale

Whereas in the E.U., universities do not have their own private police departments because the state governments hold the police power, the situation in the U.S. has devolved from such democratic accountability such that even small colleges (and even hospitals!) typically have their own “police departments.” This presents the unwitting American public with a potentially problem of conflict of interest: in disputes between a college or university administration, which is not democratically elected, and stakeholders, including students and the general public, the organizational police forces take orders from one side. This is especially problematic in cases, such as at Yale, in which the organizational police employees patrol off campus—off the university’s own “territory”—and arrest people who are unaffiliated with Yale and have not even been on the campus. Such a usurpation of the prerogative of the city of New Haven comes with the loss of democratic accountability.

The full essay is at "On University 'Police Departments'."

Dying

As a Jewish kid in Nazi Germany, Michael Roemer, a filmmaker who went on to teach documentary at Yale (I took Charles Musser’s seminar a semester after Roemer left), had to lie in order to survive. In making the film, Pilgrims Farewell, he wanted to get as close to the truth as a human can. He didn’t want to lie anymore. He wanted to deal with the real thing. In making the documentary, Dying (1976), he realized that the people whom he documented as they were dying were more real that what he was going through in his family in New York. Artists and their families pay, he remarked decades later at Yale. “I neglected my family; I was always working. Once I started, I had to make the film,” he said after a presentation of the film on dying. “The people dying knew something we didn’t know,” he added. The prospect of death apparently makes things incredibly real, before they’re not.

The full essay is at "Dying."

Educating Scholarly Priests: The Cult at Yale

Speaking at a Bhakti-Yoga conference in March, 2025 at Harvard, Krishma Kshetra Swami said that scholars who are devoted to the academic study of religion are also undoubtedly also motivated by their religious faith, even if it is of a religion other than what the scholar is studying. The Swami himself was at the time both a scholar of Hinduism and a Krishna devotee. He was essentially saying that his academic study of Hinduism was motivated not just by the pursuit of knowledge, but also by (his) faith. He also stated that he, like the rest of us in daily life, typically separated his various identities, including that of a professor and a devotee of the Hindu god, Krishna. Although his two roles not contradictory in themselves, a scholar’s own religious beliefs, if fervently held, can act as a magnet of sorts by subtly swaying the very assumptions that a scholar holds about the phenomenon of religion (i.e., the knowledge in the academic discipline). To be sure, personally-held ideology acts with a certain gravity on any scholar’s study in whatever academic field. Religious studies, as well as political science, by the way, are especially susceptible to the warping of reasoning by ideology because beliefs can be so strongly held in religion (and politics), and the impact of such gravity can easily be missed not only by other people, but also by the scholars themselves.  

The full essay is at "Educating Scholarly Priests."

E.U. Citizens on the Union’s Enlargement

Having recently been presented with an E.U. citizen denying the E.U. has citizens even as he admitted that he could vote for a candidate to represent him in the European Parliament, I had my faith in human rationality restored the following day in reading of a poll of E.U. citizens on whether additional states should be added to the Union; ideology, even of the tribal sort, need not distort rationality beyond recognition. Even in the reporting of such a poll, however, the Euroskeptic, or states’ rights, ideology left its imprint. Even such an auxiliary presence is a sign of the headwind that has been facing the E.U. since its founding.

The full essay is at "E.U. Citizens." 

On Kindness to Detractors: Compassion Beyond Universal Benevolence

In late April, 2025, Richard Slavin, whose Hindu name and title are Radhanath Swami, spoke on the essence of bhukti at the conclusion of the Bhukti Yoga Conference at Harvard University. Ultimately, the concept bhukti, which translates as devotionalism directed to a deity, such as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, refers to the nature of the human soul. The immediate context is selfless love, which is directed to a deity, and this context immediately involves extending universal benevolence to other people (and other species), and even to nature (i.e., the environment). After Radhanath’s talk, he walked directly to me. I thanked him for his talk and went on to suggest refinement to compassion being extended universally, as in universal benevolence even to other species. To my great surprise, he touched my head with his, which I learned afterward was his way of blessing people, while he whispered, “I think I want to follow you” or “You make me want to follow you.” A Hindu from Bangladesh later translated the swami’s statement for me. “He was telling you that he considers you to be his equal,” the taxi driver said. I replied that being regarded as that swami’s equal felt a lot better than had he regarded me as his superior, for in my view, we are all spiritually-compromised finite, time-limited beings learning from each other.

The full essay is at "On Kindness to Detractors."

Harvard vs. Trump: Yale Doesn’t Matter

Less than a week before Harvard’s graduation ceremony in May, 2025, and about a month after Trump had frozen $2.2 billion in federal funding that would have gone to Harvard and then threatened to remove the university’s tax-exempt status, an Obama-appointed U.S. district judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration’s order that foreign students at Harvard must either transfer to other universities or leave the United States, effective immediately. In its complaint filed with the district court, Harvard argues that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law. It requires that a rational basis be given by the federal government, which must take administrative-law steps before such an order can be definitively executed against a university. Even then, a university can appeal the last administrative-law decision to federal district court. At the very least, a university must be provided with the alleged violation of visa law and given the chance to make corrections or defend itself rather than be caught off-guard by a fait accompli by fiat. Less noticeable in the midst of the brawl, it is no small matter that a director of the federal security agency so brazenly and obviously violated administrative-procedure law. At the very least, it is duplicitous and hypocritical for a government official tasked with enforcing law against criminals to knowingly violate law to which she herself is subject in her official capacity. At the very least, Noem’s conduct should raise concerns regarding the need for greater oversight over DHS by Congress and whether it should be easier for Congress to remove a Cabinet-level political appointee. Perhaps it should be within the purview of a federal judge to suspend and even dismiss a Cabinet secretary judged to have violated federal law in an official capacity. In the context of an increasingly imperial presidency, more checks are arguably necessary. This is not, however, the topic at hand; instead, my thesis here is that even though Harvard should indeed pursue its case in federal court against the Trump Administration, and the university’s values are superior to the way in which Yale has capitulated to that government, Harvard’s administration could improve the university by exercising the sort of maturity that recognizes the kernels of truth in the otherwise spurious claims. Such maturity would be two degrees of separation from the mentality of Yale’s administration with respect to spying on student with the help of the FBI.

The full essay is at "Harvard vs. Trump."

Mickey 17

Ethical, theological, and political issues are salient in the film, Mickey 17 (2025), which is about Mickey Barnes, a character who is repeatedly cloned on a space-ship and on a distant planet. The one-way trip alone takes over four years, during which time Mickey is tasked with dangerous tasks because when he dies, another clone is simply made. A mistake is made when the 18^th clone of Mickey is made even though the 17^th is still alive; they are “multiples,” which is a crime for a theological reason. I contend that reason is erroneous, as is the political, ethical, and theological regime that undergirds clones being expendable. 

The full essay is at "Mickey 17". 

October 12th: Happy Vikings Day!

I contend that the ideological war being waged in the United States by the 2010s over whether October 12^th should be “Indigenous People’s” Day or Columbus Day became real in 2021 when President Biden issued a proclamation commemorating “Indigenous People’s” Day not coincidentally to fall on the same day as Columbus Day. Similarly, though only unofficially, the United American Indians of New England have labeled Thanksgiving Day as “The National Day of Mourning” since 1970. The de facto hegemony of ideology in changing official U.S. holidays, including in the refusal of some people and even businesses to say “Christmas” even on Christmas Eve Day, has proceeded without the premise that ideology should play such a role being debated in public discourse. Instead, the onslaught has been enabled by the vehemence of the conquerors in insisting that their decisions be recognized and not contradicted. Once I went to a Unitarian “church” on a Thanksgiving expecting a spirit of gratefulness, as per President Lincoln’s proclamation establishing the date of the holiday after two years of brutal war between the CSA and USA. The sermon was instead on the need for sorrow instead. I walked out, shaking my head in utter disbelief. Perhaps some Americans might one day insist that a similar mood be preached in churches on Christmas Day. Both the need and insistence come with a tone of passive aggression, and are indeed power-grabs based in resentment, which Nietzsche argued is a major indication of weakness rather than strength, and thus self-confidence. Perhaps the manufactured dialectics, such as the one centered on October 12^th, can be transcended in a Hegelian rather than religious sense at a higher level.

The full essay is at "October 12th: Happy Vikings Day."

Cancelled Classes: Harvard’s Far-Left Ideological Courses Take a Hit

I contend that the more courses that are heavily ideological and biased in advocating a particular ideology that a university has, the higher the chances that a university will eventually suffer from a lack of educational legitimacy and perhaps even have to close down for want of students. Even great American universities such as Harvard and Yale are not immune. Their huge endowments could even function as organizational slack enabling a particular ideological bent to percolate throughout the universities for a long time with impunity due to the sheer amount of money in the universities respective invested wealth. When I was a student at Yale, I worked part-time at the Development Office calling alumni to give to the already-wealthy university. I had no idea at the time that being rich could actually harm a university, or allow for educational decadence with impunity. At Harvard in 2024, there was some indication that the students’ freedom in selecting some of their courses was serving a good purpose in putting biased-ideological courses out of business for lack of sufficient enrollment. The student marketplace could substitute for compromised university administration in its educational oversight function. Adam Smith would be proud.

The full essay is at "Cancelled Classes at Harvard." 

Yale Police Arrest 47 Students: A Symptom

A university is not an inner city, and thus should not be policed as such, as if students were even potentially hostile gang members in need of constant surveillance. On April 22, 2024, I was not a bit surprised in reading that Yale, which I had hitherto described as a private police-state on steroids, ordered its own private police to arrest 47 students that morning on charges of criminal trespassing on campus for having brought and set up tents days earlier. Even though temporary housing goes beyond political protest per se and the students could have returned day after day to Beinecke Plaza to protest—venting off stream that could be justified by the U.S. Government’s continued financial, military, and political enabling of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza—that Yale’s administration put the plaza under police guard after employees had removed the tents is indicative of a police-state mentality that is not conducive to academic pursuits. Furthermore, arresting students for criminal trespassing rather than simply removing the tents demonstrates an inner-city policing mentality that is out of place on a prestigious university's campus.

The full essay is at "Yale Police Arrest 47 students."

The University of California at Berkeley

In visiting a university even for a short period of time, a surprisingly deep grasp of its dominant organizational culture's mentality is possible, especially if it is foreign to the outsider's perspective and yet draws on  instinctual urges whose imprints one has previously seen. It is perhaps human, all too human to relish sending harsh messages to outsiders, albeit indirectly because cowardness and self-illusion are included with the appetite for blood. This can be so at a university even if scholarly visitors are among the targets. The primitive instinctual urge to aggressively harm people by reminding them unnecessarily that they are not in the tribe can have sufficient power to overcome other contending urges to characterize the very culture of an organization. I will argue that the University of California at Berkeley can be characterized as such. For I witnessed this triumphant urge in rather  obvious behavior of some faculty and administrators. I came rather quickly during my visit to grasp the nature and roots of the favorite blood-sport of enough rude faculty members to get a picture of those primped  up, intellectually stunted "scholars" at that heavily passive aggressive university. The message of exclusion for taxpayers visiting the campus and scholars invited to give a lecture there, I being neither, was made clear to me by a student employee at the main library,  which tellingly is closed on Saturdays even during the semesters: Even if a visitor on the large campus does not have an umbrella and rain is pouring down, the university's shuttle buses are only for students, faculty, and staff. The student enjoyed his power to say no to me; I could not detect even the slightest tone of shame in representing such an inhospitable institutional host. Bad air! Instead, the he relished the firmness in the power to say no, which is to say, to exclude. In contrast, the campus shuttles at Yale, ironically a private university, transport anyone around campus! So much for California being easy-going. So much for UC Berkeley sporting intellectually curious and passionate scholars in search of new ideas from visitors. Rather, Nietzsche’s new birds of prey, whose spite naturally issues out from deep ressentement, populate the faculty and their bosses. So much for even common courtesy and gratitude to California taxpayers and distinguished professors from other universities invited to deliver a lecture; if you are walking around campus or walk out of a library and get wet, tough luck! Public is apparently below even common. 

The full essay is at "The University of California." 

Yale Divinity School

On February 21-23, 2024, Rowan Williams, a former archbishop of Canterbury, delivered a series of lectures on the topic of solidarity in moral theology. In my own research, I relate that field to ethics and historical economic thought. Williams’ theory of solidarity goes beyond what he calls “the vague feeling of empathy” that is emphasized in the moral writings of David Hume and Adam Smith. Williams has solidarity, unlike mere "fellow-feeling," reach a person’s identity and even one’s soul through a shared experience of existential fragility. Solidary pertains to interpersonal relations and is thus relevant to neighbor-love, which includes being willing to attend to the human needs even of one’s detractors and enemies, as well as just plain rude people. I contend that the upper echelon at Yale Divinity School is at two-degrees of separation from this sort of solidarity, especially as it is wholistic rather than partisan in nature. It is no accident, by the way, that the self-love that characterizes the school's culture has manifested in some courses being almost entirely oriented to advocating very narrow ideological partisan positions, politically, economically, and on social issues at the expense of sheer fairness to students, wholeness, theology, and academic standards. At the time, the school was accepting 50% of studen applicants. I leave these ideological and academic matters to the side here so I can focus on the astonishing distance between the school's dean and the sort of solidarity that he heard of in the lectures and that could lead to Christian leadership for Yale's Christian divinity school, which includes two seminaries.  

The full essay is at "Yale Divinity School." 

Yale Vipers

Even though it is sometimes difficult to "read between the lines" to assess whether or not people in an organization are welcoming or tacitly "showing you the door," the message is undoubtable and even palpable when "all the arrows are pointing in the same direction." In the case of Yale, where I have been an alumni scholar temporarily in residence during the 2023-2024 year, the university's administration could do its alumni a big favor by explicitly saying that we are not welcome back on campus, except to visit and of course donate money. Instead, passive aggression, unaccountability, and even unwarranted retaliation rule the roust there, in what is a toxic organizational culture. 

The full essay is at "Yale Vipers."

On Universities Cancelling Classes on Some Minor Holidays for Ideological Purposes

Higher education is not valued equally in the various American states. Where academia is not particularly valued, other things can intercede as priorities even at the universities themselves at the expense of academics. In such places, even the universities themselves may value being academic institutions too little by allowing other societal agendas to eclipse the distinctly academic mission. Indeed, even academic administrators may be infected with an ideology currently in fashion societally, and insufficiently academically minded to thwart the interlarded non-academic values that seek hegemony even on academic campuses.

The full essay is at "Universities Cancelling Classes."

The Conversation

Winner of the Palme d’Or (golden palm) prize in the Cannes Film Festival for 1974, The Conversation (1974) was written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola; it was a film that he really wanted to make, whereas he had made The Godfather (1972) to make money. In both films, business comes to be something more than business. In The Godfather, Sonny tells Michael not to take being hit in the jaw by the corrupt police captain McCluskey personally. That Sollozzo expects Tom Hagen to objectively present a business proposal to Sonny after Sollozzo has had the Godfather gunned down with five shots and still he survived just shows how ludicrous it is to suppose that the consequences of the murderous tactics of that business would not be taken personally. Even so, the moral dimension does not enter into the considerations. In contrast, Harry, who runs a small business recording third-party conversations for clients in The Conversation, gradually comes to take his work personally in a moral sense. Whereas the murders in The Godfather are personal in the sense vengeance being part of the motivations, those in The Conversation are personal in the sense of moral responsibility being increasingly felt by Harry. Accompanying this realization of guilt, however, is a recognition of the extent of surveillance on him, and this too changes him. If the problem were just being morally responsible for what clients do with his tapes, then he could solve the problem by doing something else for a living. Being a target of surveillance himself, however, is something that he cannot change. Even in tearing his apartment apart, he does not find the “bug,” or listening device that his client’s assistant is using. By implication, we can reflect on just how much we are watched in the modern world—that is to say, how much the world in which we live has come to be characterized by surveillance. I contend that we are largely oblivious to it because it has encroached so gradually that its incrementalism is difficult to detect.

The full essay is at "The Conversation."

The Colorado Supreme Court Bars Insurrectionist Trump: Who Should Ultimately Decide?

On December 19, 2023, Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled that Don Trump, a former U.S. president, had engaged in insurrectionist activity as a matter of fact, and furthermore, as a matter of law, the U.S. Constitution bars him from holding any office, including the presidency. With an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a certainty, realized even by the Colorado justices, and some notable (and very visible) Republicans arguing that the American people should have the final say on whether Trump will be president again beginning in 2025, the question of who should have the final say—the judiciary or the people—was pressing, and indeed, very important. I contend that the determination of fact should have been made by a jury in a criminal proceeding, and that even absent that, the ultimate decision should still be made prior to, and thus not during, the election, for the question is whether Trump can be listed as a candidate for the office. Ultimately, the tension lies between the value of a politics-free judiciary and democratic (majority) rule.

The full essay is at "The Colorado Supreme Court Bars Insurrectionist Trump."