<p>I also wanted to add that I have never heard of Yale having a predominately large number of homosexual students.
But then I read the NYT far more than I read the WSJ
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Yale : "One in Four, maybe More" (last updated August 25, 2001) (back to top)
"One in four, maybe more." This slogan refers, without much factual basis, to the prevalence of homosexuals in the Yale student body, and it has been around the Yale campus for about 15 years, the legacy of a Wall Street Journal article based on a writer's observations and minimal reporting. A look at the slogan and the controversy around it says something about how bad statistics live on and on how far society has come in acceptance of gays since the 1980s.</p>
<p>Yale University had a rocky period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a controversial restructuring of its faculty, debates over Western Civilization's place in the curriculum, and growing fears over the decline of New Haven, especially with the murder of one student and a New Yorker series that depicted the city as a kind of urban hell (written by William Finnegan, reprinted and expanded upon in his 1998 book Cold New World).</p>
<p>And then, on August 4, 1987, a new controversy erupted.
That day, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Julie V. Iovine about the changes at Yale since she had graduated a decade earlier. The article dealt with fraternities and campus parties, but the first and foremost change described was Yale's new reputation as a gay school. Iovine wrote that a thousand students attended the annual gay-lesbian ball, apparently implying that only gay or lesbian students would go to such a party.
She also reported that a student said she had "received a notice before registering freshman year that said one in four Yale students was gay. That would put it on a par with San Francisco."</p>
<p>Iovine also described how one student broke down the gay student population into three three categories: "lipsticks" who were "radical-chic" lesbians; "crunchies" who were "granola dykes who have old-fashioned utopian ideas about feminism;" and assimilationists who "don't want to draw attention to their sexuality." Gay men were described as being mostly assimilationist.</p>
<p>Yale had been previously identified in a 1982 Newsweek article as a school with an unusually visible gay community, but this Wall Street Journal article put Yale on the defensive.
In a September 17, 1987 letter sent to about 2,000 volunteer fund-raisers, President Benno Schmidt Jr. attacked the article as "journalistic drivel" and calling its depiction "an extremely misleading picture of the student body." In particular, Schmidt and others attacked Iovine for writing her article after interviewing only three people and not double-checking their assertions.</p>
<p>For example, Schmidt said in his letter that no one at Yale had knowledge of any mailing to incoming students that a quarter of the student population was homosexual. He added in his letter that a 1986 survey by the Yale Daily News, the campus student newspaper, reported that 3 percent of the males and 1 percent of the women in 11 of the 12 residential colleges were homosexual (a head of the school's leading gay, lesbian and bisexual organization estimated at the time that about 10 percent of the student population was homosexual, about the same as other large liberal universities).
"I can understand your concern about the nonsense," Schmidt wrote. "If I thought there were any truth to the article, I would be concerned too.</p>
<p>"The article resorted to innuendo and exaggeration to paint a lurid picture of this place. No responsible newspaper would run such a piece by an unknown writer, not a reporter, and without checking to test for minimal accuracy."
The controversy is long-gone but the statistic remains a fixture in Yale campus life. Its source still remains somewhat unclear.</p>
<p>Sources: Julie V. Iovine, 'Lipsticks' and Lords: Yale's New Look, Wall Street Journal, August 4, 1987, page 32. Nick Ravo, Yale President rebuts story that depicted school as 'gay," September 29, 1987, page B1.
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But recently, Mr. Kramer, 62, the novelist and playwright, seized on a way he could get the last word in against his antagonists: he would bequeath Yale University, his alma mater, several million dollars to endow a permanent, tenured professorship in gay studies and possibly to build a gay and lesbian student center.</p>
<p>Yale will have none of it.</p>
<p>It has declined Mr. Kramer's offer -- at least on his terms -- and in a letter from the provost, Alison Richard, expressed the hope that he would consider other ways of directing his generosity, ''thereby benefiting gay studies and, perhaps, other endeavors here at Yale.''
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Writing</a> Own Script, Yale Refuses Kramer's Millions for Gay Studies - New York Times</p>