Just heard this guy has been suspended by Yale:
And the Ugly was from a Yale Development Office Assistant Director, Alexis Surovov (Yale ’02), who sent us a love note entitled "Y Do You Hate Yale?":
What is wrong with you? Are you retarded? This is the most disgraceful alumni article that I have ever read in my life. You failed to mention that you've never contributed to the Yale Alumni Fund in your life. But to suggest that others follow your negative example is disgusting.
Mr. Surovov didn’t sign his e-mail, and he sent it through a Columbia account. After Debbie’s husband, a Yale Computer Science graduate, traced it back to him, Clint called him at his Yale office on Thursday to ask if he really thought we were retarded.
"Personally, that’s how I feel about it," he said. He didn’t approve of our "terrorist tactics" and when asked whether he really meant that, changed it to "terror tactics." He thought the red fingernails we advocated sending in were "a stretch," and a bit gruesome—"like something out of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Hostel." [Which is a horror film about backpackers being brutally tortured and killed.]
"Yeah, that’s the whole point," Clint said. "This isn’t a movie. The Taliban really did this stuff!"
While Mr. Surovov conceded that we were unlikely to drive Yale single-handedly into bankruptcy, he worried about the effects of all this negative publicity on alumni relations. Alumni satisfaction, he pointed out, is a critical component of U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of colleges. "It’s going to have repercussions," he complained. "It already has."
To answer the question posed in the title of Mr. Surovov’s e-mail, we don’t hate Yale. We love it. We’re proud to have gone there, and we both managed to get a good education. Both of us met our spouses at Yale and formed lasting friendships with a diverse and amazing group of Yalies. Both of us have been volunteer interviewers for Yale’s Alumni Schools Committee, and Clint worked as a recruiter in the admissions office all four of his undergraduate years while Debbie volunteered as a coordinator of the Yale Women’s Center. Not only is Yale important to us, it’s important to America. Three hundred and five years after its founding, it is still a top research institution and also a great source of American leadership. Three presidents have gone there as undergraduates, and two attended its law school. Heroes like Nathan Hale studied there, and the names of hundreds of Yale graduates who "gave their lives that freedom might not perish from the earth" are inscribed on the marble walls of Woolsey Hall.
When this great institution decides to let in the Taliban’s little Ribbentrop because of, rather than in spite of, his history, something is dreadfully wrong in New Haven. We want it fixed.
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