Yale's latest folly.(Rahmatullah Hashemi, Yale University)

One thing Mike Joyce would not have liked is the spectacle of the Taliban's former ambassador-at-large cozily ensconced as a special student at Yale and studying (no, we are not making this up) such courses as "Terrorism: Past, Present, and Future." As The New York Times Magazine reported on February 26, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, who a few years ago toured the world to explain why his government was blowing up 1,000-year-old Buddhist statues, is enjoying life in New Haven: "In some ways, I'm the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." Indeed. The story in the Times maintained an air of neutrality--isn't it interesting what's become of those statue-bashing folks from Afghanistan?-but John Fund at The Wall Street Journal has followed up with several tart stories that ask the questions that should be asked about Yale's latest exercise in multicultural outreach. As Fund notes, "Something is very wrong at our elite universities." (Not that we needed this latest episode to convince us of that.) Last month it was Larry Summers with his girl trouble at Harvard. Now Yale is welcoming a chap who was, until his lease was revoked by the United States Air Force a few years ago, (in Fund's words) a "high official in one of the most evil regimes of the latter half of the twentieth century."

How exactly did Mr. Rahmatullah get his student visa to come to the United States in the first place? No one seems to know--or at least no one is telling. Why was someone with a fourth-grade education and a high-school equivalency degree accepted at Yale? Try that with your son or daughter. The Times reported that Richard Shaw, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, recalled another foreign student "of Rahmatullah's caliber" who had applied for special student status: "We lost him to Harvard," Mr. Shaw said, "I didn't want that to happen again." Yes, that would be a pity, wouldn't it?

Mr. Fund had come across Mr. Rahmatullah before. In the spring of 2001, the Taliban envoy had come to the United States on a public relations tour to explain his government's penchant for blowing up religious treasures that didn't fit into the Islamic scheme of things. At a meeting at the offices of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rahmatullah cheerfully noted that, before it set off the explosive charges to destroy the Buddhist statues, the Taliban had thoughtfully removed the hundred or so people living nearby. Well, ...