Last week I blogged about how the real purpose of government assistance — the dole —is to keep the dole recipient in line, ensuring that he doesn’t stray too far from supporting his dole provider. I pointed to Columbia University, which was recently threatened with a reduction of its dole for having invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is a personal enemy of U.S. officials, to speak at the university. Needless to say, the president of the university, Lee Bollinger, who went out of his way to issue personal insults to President Ahmadinejad in his introduction of him, did not tell state officials what they could do with their threats. The fear of losing any portion of a dole is almost always paralyzing to dole recipients.
Now, another example of the dole phenomenon is in the news. Yale Law School had refused to permit military recruiters onto the law school campus because of the military’s discrimination against gays. In retaliation, the federal government threatened to terminate millions of dollars in grants to the university.
So, guess what happened. Yep, fearful of losing the dole caused the law school to cave in. Here is how law professor Robert A. Burt bluntly put it: “We had a choice, which is we could continue to exclude the military, and Yale University would have lost $300 million per year. We’re not going to bring the medical school and the whole science enterprise to its knees.”
What professor Burt fails to acknowledge, however, is that in making that decision, the Yale Law School went down on its knees, kissing the feet of its federal masters and dole providers. It’s a textbook example of what the welfare-state system has done to a once-proud and independent people.