Yale alumnus Clint Taylor isn’t too happy with his alma mater’s decision to admit the former spokesman for the Taliban. So he has joined with other Yale graduates to start the “Nail Yale” campaign:

The Taliban’s misogyny ran so deep that they would chop the fingernails from women who dared to wear nail polish. Please join me in sending to the members of the Yale Corporation red cosmetic fingernails, as a reminder of the brutality of the Taliban regime whose minister their university has welcomed to American soil.

For those of you new to this story, it is interesting to note that while Yale was rolling out the red carpet (in the form of a generous tuition discount) to a former Taliban official, the school was also arguing to the Supreme Court that it should be allowed to continue its campus-wide ban on U.S. military recruiters.

Yale is accountable to its trustees who make up the Yale Corporation. Yale’s decisions reflect on them. Recently the Corporation decided, for sound moral reasons, that the University should divest all holdings in companies operating in Sudan. In doing so, it said that the companies involved in propping up the Sudanese government were committing a “grave social injury”. But the injuries of the Taliban are also grave, and they are ongoing.

Taylor argues that Yale’s trustees might be able to bring common sense back to the once-great Ivy, and that the “mail a nail to Yale” campaign combined with an alumni donation boycott can get their attention. For the convenience of interested alumni, Taylor has also assembled the contact information for various Yale Corporation board members, including the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.

This is an issue that concerns all Americans, and indeed all free people. Its implications reach far beyond Yale, but if you have donated money to Yale in the past, please make clear you will give no more until the situation is resolved.

The Yale Corporation meets, as far as I can tell, around April 13-14. Let’s make certain they’ve been briefed about this issue, and the damage it has done to Yale’s reputation.