Why Yale Law School's Diversity Office Should Be Sued, Investigated by Department of Education

Welcome to Yale University, where inviting your fellow students to a party can deprive you of your professional future.

This is what a second-year law student who belongs to Yale Law School’s Native American Law Students Association and the nominally conservative Federalist Society discovered last month, after he sent a mass e-mail inviting his fellow legal scholars to what he called a “Trap House” party featuring “Popeye’s chicken” and “basic-b****-American themed snacks,” along with cocktails and soft drinks. (asterisks added)

The occasion was to celebrate Constitution Day (September 17), the day in 1787 on which the Founding Fathers signed the famous document guaranteeing freedom of expression in our country.

Not everyone at Yale Law — some 70% of whose students self-reported a mental health issue, according to a 2017 Yale Law Review article — agrees with basic constitutional principles, however.

Within minutes, the president of Yale Law’s Black Law Students Association fired back to accuse the student — who unsurprisingly wishes to remain anonymous — of “celebrating whiteness,” promoting “black face,” and belonging to the Federalist Society, which she claims “has historically supported anti-Black rhetoric.”

On the basis of this public rebuke, within 12 hours Yale Law School’s Office of Student Affairs summoned the student to a meeting and informed him that it had received nine complaints of discriminatory harassment against him, actions for which he could be disciplined under Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972.

The student had the presence of mind to record this and two subsequent meetings, which standard investigative procedures normally prohibit, and shared the recordings with the Washington Free Beacon, which published lengthy excerpts and posted the original audio.

The taped interview reveals that Yale Law’s Dean of Student Affairs Ellen Cosgrove and Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Yaseen Eldik (a former Obama administration official) informed the young man that “trap house” sounds like “crack house” and has connotations with hip-hop, that Popeye’s serves fried chicken, and that the Federalist Society “belongs to political affiliations [sic] that are oppressive to certain communities.”

Six of our nine Supreme Court Justices belong to the Federalist Society, as do hundreds of federal and state judges, but to belong to it as a 2L at the nation’s purportedly best law school is apparently now a punishable offense.

Yale’s diversity creeps did not have a problem with “basic b****,” which some argue refers to young white women of simple tastes.

The student’s only salvation, Cosgrove and Eldik explained, was to apologize.

If he refused, Cosgrove menaced, she could disrupt his qualification for the bar by reporting “discreditable information” about him under “character and fitness” standards.

In a second meeting held the next day, Eldik feigned concern about the student’s “reputation as a person,” again threatened his chances of qualifying for the bar, and attempted to intimidate him further with the observation that “the legal community is a small one.”

The student refused to apologize, but offered to discuss any issue with his party invitation with any concerned individual.

Eldik rejected his suggestion, musing that it risked making his office “look like an ineffectual source of resolution,” likely because it would not involve the required admission of guilt and self-abasing apology before principles of DEI.

Instead, he wrote a draft apology for the student to sign, explaining that it would serve his “character-driven rehabilitation.”

The ritual language is all there. The student was to offer his regrets for “any harm, trauma, or upset [sic]” he may have caused, along with an admission that he “must learn more and grow” and “educate myself so I can do better.”

Again the student refused.

Cosgrove and Eldik retaliated by sending out a stigmatizing message to the entire second year class informing the student’s classmates that they “condemn [his party invitation] in the strongest possible terms” and “are working on addressing it.”

Faced with a courageous student unwilling to participate in his own cancelation, the matter sat for nearly a month.

On October 12, the repulsive diversity duo backtracked and assured the student that they would not snitch on him to any bar authority. Eldik then suggested that the student’s Native American heritage might even mitigate his punishment because “as a man of color, there probably isn’t as much scrutiny of you as there might be of a white person in the same position.”

Reactions are already strong, with even some liberals chiming in for a change.

Dour Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who has been whitewashing cancel culture for many years, struck out, comparing Yale Law School to “Maoist reeducation camps,” though, with the afterthought of someone desperately afraid of losing her liberal media job and probably a fair percentage of her friends, she quickly backpedaled, calling her own comparison an “exaggeration” and taking a gratuitous, posterior-covering shot at cancel culture as a concept.

Who cares what she thinks?

This brave anonymous student’s recording is a rare, stunning document of how university diversity bureaucracies function, what their true goals are, and how underhanded their method of operation is.

Eldik’s statement that accused whites would face greater “scrutiny” in investigations of this type is itself a violation of Title IX for which he, and Yale, should be investigated by the Department of Education.

The investigators’ failure to address the term “basic b****” — which is generally associated only with white women — while harping on the allegedly anti-black overtones of “trap house,” Popeye’s, and Federalist Society membership, stands as a corroborating evidence that Yale Law School’s administration bears an unlawful anti-white bias.

On that basis, every single white member of the Yale Law community who has ever been subjected to disciplinary, action and has not yet done so, should sue immediately.