OMG they're going to let that vicious Medusa take over the Ivy League Draft! Oh, she's easy to look at, and seems nice enough. No...she'll turn you into stone...don't look directly into those alluring eyes.
You think this is a joke? Every white dude on campus is going to be a lame-looking limestone statue with a cardigan sweater and flood pants.
Yale Law dean whose controversies include meager response to campus antisemitism now ‘frontrunner’ to become president
By Fitz-Gibbon
Published Jan. 21, 2024
The controversial dean of the Yale Law School, who turned the other cheek to students’ antisemitic concerns on campus, is now the “frontrunner” to take over as president of the prestigious Ivy League School.
Heather Gerken has been immersed in a series of scandals at Yale since taking over the law school reins in 2018 — but is reportedly at the top of a list being considered by a presidential research committee, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Gerken most recently came under fire for advising Jewish students who were concerned about a spike in antisemitism on campus after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel to seek counseling, the outlet said.
“She would be the worst choice out of all the current faculty,” one Yale student told the Free Beacon. “Her handling of campus politics has been abysmal.”
The controversy comes amid growing concern across the country over a rise in antisemitism on college campuses, which has already forced two high-profile university presidents — Claudine Gay at Harvard and Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania — to step down from their posts.
Gerken, the first woman to head the school’s law school, faced calls to step down in 2021 for coming down hard on a Native American student who used the word “trap house” in a party invitation.
The law school chief claimed the term had “racial connotations,” and school officials even drafted the letter of apology and forced the student, Tret Colbert, to sign it.
“I was told that things might ‘escalate’ if I failed to apologize,” Colbert blogged at the time.
“I was told that an apology would be more likely to make the situation ‘go away,’ and it was implied there would be lingering impacts to my reputation because the ‘legal community is a small one.'”
Gerken worked to integrate diversity and inclusion programs at Yale, hiring a diversity trainer in 2021 to conduct a mandatory “antiracism workshop” for incoming students, the outlet said.
Still, when a conservative speaker, Kristen Waggoner, was shouted down while speaking on campus, Gerken took no action against the offending students — despite the school’s free speech policy.
Gerken also feuded publicly with law school professor Amy Chua, a conservative voice on campus who recommended promising students for clerkships with right-leaning judges — including Yale Law School alumn Brett Kavanaugh, who now sits on the US Supreme Court.
The controversy prompted dozens of federal judges to refuse to accept clerks from the law school, including Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Ho.
“Yale presents itself as the best, most elite institution of legal education,” Ho wrote at the time. “Yet it’s the worst when it comes to legal cancellation.”
According to a subsequent lawsuit, Gerken stripped Chua of a teaching spot and pressured to students to provide false testimony against the professor.
Then last year, Jewish students urged the law school to take a stronger stand against antisemitism that blew up on campus following the sneak attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists.
Gerken’s response was to have her secretary draft a letter acknowledging only that “these are deeply challenging times” and counseling the students to seek counseling.
However, sources told the Free Beacon that Gerken has clout with the school administration because of her friendships with several wealthy alumni who are backing her push for the presidency.
Neither Gerken nor the Yale presidential search committee responded to requests for comment from the Free Beacon, the outlet said.
An official list of candidates for the post has not been made public, but sources said Tamar Szabo Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is also in the running.
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