When I was a student at Yale, I was a member of the Party of the Right (POR) in the Yale Political Union (YPU). I was pretty much a libertarian back then, and the POR consisted of libertarians and Burkean traditionalists. The Burkeans dominated the positions, and they had their little club within the club to protect their prerogative. John Kerry, who would go on to be a U.S. senator and a presidential candidate, had been president of the YPU in 1968. At least as of my student years at Yale, the YPU has consisted of several “parties,” which are really little debating/drinking societies spanning the ideological spectrum. This is merely the surface, however. Beneath, Yale's culture of exclusivity reigned and undoubtedly still does. Getting into Yale is just the first of several levels of greater and greater exclusivity.
At least until the year I graduated, the POR had a secret society, which through the nineteenth century at least had been a Southern literacy society. Continuing the society's tradition, POR's secret society was only open to men while I was at Yale. So much for the women in the POR! They have been (and, I believe still are) ineligible for membership in the party’s secret organization. I didn’t like that exclusion even though I am not a woman. However
To be sure, the unfairness wasn’t limited to women. The only guys who were invited into the secret society were those who were in leadership positions of the POR--in effect, Burkeans. This didn't stop the party's chairman from inviting women (even those who had risen to the party's leadership ranks) and the rank and file generally to watch the special few get tapped for the secret society. I was out, I presume, because I was a student at the Divinity School. Although the M.Div. degree is undergraduate in a divinity school, it was easy for undergraduates in Yale College to view us as graduate students (the same goes for JD and MD students, as they seek the first degree in their respective schools (i.e., undergraduate). To make matters worse for me, I was in my 30's when I attended Yale, after having earned two masters and a Ph.D. degree elsewhere.
So I was surprised, when in the year that I joined the party, the party's chairman invited me to a Friday night party, which was being held in a room half way up Yale’s bell tower. He told me that the new members of the POR who are men would be inducted into the secret society, so I should come. So I canceled my other plans and attended. Actually, he wanted all the party members to be at the party to serve as an audience for the two or three guys in the party’s leadership who were to be tapped for the secret society.
Here lies Yale's rank underbelly: It is no fun for the extant insiders to select others to go to the next level of exclusivity if none of the excluded were around to watch it. As much as I detested this squalid mentality, I was most upset that the chairman had lied to me. When I confronted the chairman, he (and his friends in the leadership) denied that he had told me that the men who were new members of the party would be inducted into the secret society, formerly a men's Southern literary society. Only now does it occur to me that the guys controlling the access were themselves Southerners. At least one of men occupying the chairman's position of the party was from Kentucky--close enough. With the exception of some of my Quaker ancesters, who fled North Carolina in the 1830s as those Quakers were stanch abolitionists, I don't have a Southern bone in me. Plus, I was older than the students studying for their first undergraduate degree.
The usual means of protesting the leadership of the party was, in my time at least, to address the party before one of the weekly debates (held in the residential colleges, with a full bar) and formally hand the chair a letter of resignation. I think those protestants overestimated the impact of their “act” of defiance. I did not resign; no, I simply ignored the party’s leaders on campus and did not attend any more POR functions. I think that annoyed the leaders more than had I resigned in voiced protest, for the leaders were used to that. So even today, I suppose I am a member of the POR, in spite of the fact that my ideology has become much more independent. In hindsight, I wish I had joined the Independent Party. The lesson I learned back then from the POR was how easily people in power can lie. That is a tradition that even the staid traditionalist Burkeans can give up.
