RUTHFULLY YOURS

Even in the heat of summer, when the streets of downtown New Haven have emptied of students, Yale can’t escape the clutches of controversy.

The most recent incident in the long-running saga of Yale’s Calhoun College, named after the former South Carolina senator and vice president John C. Calhoun, comes at a time of national racial tensions that only heightens the sense of drama. Calhoun, who served as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century, was famous in his day for his staunch advocacy of slavery. Months of student agitation to change the college’s name came to naught this spring when Yale refused to do so. Corey Menafee, a black man who worked as a dishwasher in Calhoun College, smashed a windowpane in the college’s dining hall that depicted two slaves carrying bales of cotton on their heads. According to his remarks in the New Haven Independent, he acted on an impulse and climbed up with a broomstick to smash the panel. He was promptly arrested and has now resigned from his job; he says that Yale agreed not to press charges if he resigned.

Yale is keeping its part of the bargain, but that probably doesn’t matter to Menafee right now, because the state is doing what Yale refused to do. Despite Yale’s stance, Connecticut is charging Menafee with a felony and a misdemeanor, leading to a progressive outcry over the incident. Charging Menafee with a felony might seem harsh (convicted felons lose voting rights), but it is in compliance with the letter of the law: In Connecticut, first-degree criminal mischief, the felony with which Menafee is charged, involves property damage in excess of $1,500 (which, if you ask me, seems rather low for a felony charge, but the law is the law. The window he smashed was worth at least that much). Yale’s administration, ever the butt of criticism from student activists, does not support the criminal charges, is not seeking restitution, and seems content to sever ties with Menafee. Yale is also removing from the common room other stained-glass windows that depict scenes from the life of Calhoun.

None of that, of course, has stopped the usual brigade of progressive crusaders from defending Menafee, to the point of demanding that he be rehired by the university whose property he destroyed. “Thank you for taking down racist imagery,” read one sign hoisted by demonstrators outside the New Haven courthouse where Menafee appeared earlier today. According to another protester, Yale must also “stop exposing workers to racism,” whatever that means and however one might go about it. John Lugo, a frequent activist in New Haven, has said that Yale should rehire Menafee. In a statement reported in the New Haven Independent, Lugo asked, “What is more valuable to Yale: a stained glassed window of enslaved people picking cotton, or the humanity of the African American people who work at Yale?”

It’s a simple formulation, one familiar to anyone with a cursory knowledge of modern protest movements: Rehire Menafee, or you’re racist. It’s a surefire way to force Yale into a very uncomfortable spot, and it may well succeed in cowing a university administration that’s already prone to appeasement.

As a brief thought experiment, let’s consider what would have happened if Menafee had gotten angry about Yale’s supposed institutional racism and had, in a sudden fit of passion, destroyed a random window he happened to be walking past. If that had been the case, if his act of vandalism had been so obviously craven, there would be no controversy. If his broomstick had struck two inches to the left of the windowpane in question, there would be no controversy. Affinity with the progressive social agenda should be no excuse.

The idea that companies — for that’s what universities are — shouldn’t fire employees who wantonly destroy their property is absurd. In the real world, when you break things, you face consequences; when you break your employer’s things, the employer fires you. That shouldn’t be a controversial idea. But when the minefield of racial politics gets lumped in with the mix, all bets are off. Destroying valuable private property, you see, is a perfectly understandable, reasonable thing when it’s done in pursuit of the Cause. And the fact that such destruction advances the Cause means it should be treated with impunity.

The question of whether felony charges — which, remember, are not being pressed by Yale — are merited or are a vast overreaction is a separate question from the one about Menafee’s firing. I have some sympathies with those who argue that felony charges go too far. But the argument that Yale is wrong to fire Menafee relies on an assumption that if your cause is the correct one, then otherwise reprehensible actions are permissible if they advance the agenda.

If all sides of the debate got away with using this logic, we’d soon have anarchy. One might ponder the hypothetical situation of a Palestinian-American worker who burned the Israeli flag that hangs prominently outside Yale’s Center for Jewish Life. Or you could play the game called “What if a conservative did this?” — in which case the progressive reactions would be predictable. The Menafee controversy is simply the most recent example of a common phenomenon among progressives: an inability, or an unwillingness, to consider how their logic might be used by the other side, to think about what might happen if a President Trump, and not a President Clinton, held power.

We should judge a person’s actions by the results they bring about, not merely by intentions. Menafee deliberately destroyed Yale’s property. In any other situation, all parties would regard his firing as a clear-cut issue. That the progressive Left treats this as an exception to the law of the land is a reminder of their intellectual hypocrisy. What might be the consequences if their ideology were put to use by people elsewhere on the political spectrum?

— Noah Daponte-Smith is an intern at National Review.