FIFA’s President: Bad Judgment under the Subterfuge of Miscommunication

In the 1990s, I asked the CEO of ATT whether there is not a conflict of interest in him being chairman of the board tasked with holding the corporation’s management accountable. “The buck stops here,” Armstrong replied as the dean of Yale’s business school looked on, uncomfortably. Fortunately, I was a student in another school at Yale at the time. Fast forward to 2026. The board of FIFA backed up its president, Gianni Infantino in spite of the fact that he had overruled a red-card to favor the U.S. team in that year’s World Cup and then he proposed selling a minority share of FIFA to private investors—a plan that was almost universally viewed by the regional football (soccer) associations as selling out the world’s game to private financial interests so they might profit from the non-profit international organization. FIFA had Infantino’s back, which prompted regional associations, namely UEFA, CONCACAF, and AFC to publicly raise a red flag concerning the very credibility of Infantino for having tried to sell out a minority financial interest in FIFA. Albeit sheer speculation, given U.S. President Trump’s interest in financial transactions in relation to his political office, and Infantino’s having acquiesced to Trump’s request that the one-game suspension from a red card against a player on the U.S. team be revoked, I wonder whether the two men hatched the idea of selling off a minority stake in FIFA to private investors, which might have included Trump himself, his family members, and even the Trump Organization. Such is the nature of collusion in what James Burns refers to in his text, Leadership, as transactional, as distinct from transformational, leadership.

The full essay is at "FIFA's President."

On the Politics of Non-Politics at the University of Wisconsin

Avoiding “university politics” is under normal circumstances a wise move by non-tenured professors because of how vicious such politics can be. Perhaps if more scholars who take on administrative positions with considerable power were more passionate about learning more in their respective fields of knowledge, the power itself would not be used so much to settle scores (i.e., retaliate). As Jesus says in the Gospels concerning God and money, a person cannot serve two masters. When the president of a university system is a lawyer rather than a scholar holding a doctorate, a passion for acquiring academic knowledge cannot be relied upon to keep the occupant of the high office focused on the essentials rather than on “extracurricular activities.” When the Board of Regents fired Jay Rothman, a lawyer who had been the presiding officer of the University of Wisconsin system (i.e., the main and branch campuses) on March 7, 2026, the fact that he was not oriented as a scholar—he had earned two undergraduate degrees—was arguably part of the reason for the firing, given the salience of politics both in his conduct while in office and his firing.  

The full essay is at "On the Politics of Non-Politics at the University of Wisconsin."

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.

Selfishness and Damnation on the Boston Subway

Imagine a crowded, standing-room-only subway car during rush hour in Boston, Massachusetts. Even though many riders are standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his own seat. It would be difficult upon seeing such a blatant display of selfishness not make certain assumptions about the man’s values and character. I did, twice on Boston subway trains, as I stood looking at one young man, and then another on another train about a month later who was doing the same thing. Because many of the train operators in Boston ignore their training by slapping the brake lever backwards all at once rather than gradually just before abruptly stopping at a station-stop, standing can be perilous. Once I found myself running through half of a trolley car to re-establish my balance because the driver had applied the brakes too abruptly.  The inconsiderateness for the riders could easily be inferred, and from that, we could say that the reckless employees suffered from the vice of selfishness. The same can be said of the drivers’ supervisors, for whom the word accountability was not in the English dictionary. With so much selfishness delimiting intending benefits to others that are intended by one’s decisions and actions, moreover, a dysfunctional organization and even an enabling society can be inferred. Some Christian theologians have sought to relate the ethical vice of selfishness to the religious sin of self-love, which as Pierre Nicole made clear in the seventeenth century, is mutually exclusive with Christian love from compassion. Even amid such clear relationships, the ethical and religious or theological domains should not be fused as if the two domains were actually one. To view selfishness self-love as containing both ethical and theological implications and yet hold that the two domains are qualitatively different—each having its own unique aspects—is the goal.

The full essay is at "Selfishness and Damnation on the Boston Subway."

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."

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."