Yale Bans Right Turns: The Latest Campus Safety Crisis
Yale University, in collaboration with the city of New Haven, has taken a preemptive step to head off the next round of campus protests. In response to an anonymous complaint, the university has announced that it will begin dismantling all Right Turn arrows in street lights in and around campus. President Maurie McInnis, a renowned art historian who regularly lectures about the hidden meaning of straight and crooked lines, was among the first to detect the threat. “Shapes are no less menacing than words or sentences,” said McInnis to worried parents of new Yale students, the first class that will never hear the word “merit” at Yale. “We have already abolished the ‘M-word’ from campus and expunged any form of tough questioning from the Yale curriculum,” said McInnis. “But we cannot rest on our laurels. Right turn arrows must go!”
Not to be outdone … MIT president Sally Kornbluth announced that the storied technical institute would “henceforth prohibit all use or mention of the Right Hand Rule.”
A majority of the Yale Corporation was quick to endorse McInnis’ position saying in a press release, “we applaud the decisive action of the President to keep our students safe and feeling good.” A dissenting group of board members released their own statement saying the President had not gone far enough, calling for the “camouflaging of all right hand arrows on road signs as well.” When asked what camouflaging they had in mind, one board member replied, “An arrow can be turned into a Swastika rather easily, thus keeping down costs for Yale and the city.” “And, of course, it’s an ancient symbol meaning ‘good fortune’ which is one of the guiding principles of our endowment,” the group added.
Not to be outdone, some of Yale’s preening peer institutions announced their own initiatives. MIT president Sally Kornbluth announced that the storied technical institute would “henceforth prohibit all use or mention of the Right Hand Rule” (a mnemonic for relating magnetic field to current flow), saying the “close proximity of the words ‘Right’ and ‘Rule’ had apparently caused some MIT students to hide under their beds and eschew all bathing for a month. This reporter has not yet been able to independently verify that such behavior was unusual for MIT students. When President Kornbluth was challenged by reporters asking, “Without the Right Hand Rule, won’t MIT have to shut down its Math and Physics departments?” Kornbluth replied, “That depends on the context.”
Harvard, the university most directly in the cross-hairs of the Trump administration, chose to take a different tack consistent with its newly embraced policy of institutional neutrality. In collaboration with the cities of Cambridge and Boston, it has vowed to remove all Right Turn and Left Turn signals from traffic lights on all Harvard-owned land, (estimated to be 90 percent of the acreage) of both municipalities. Leaked minutes of the meeting between representatives of Harvard and the Interim Chief of Streets in Boston, Nick Grove, quote the chief’s response to the proposal, “Wicked cool!” An opposition group composed of a graduate student in the joint MIT-Harvard program between the Harvard Divinity School and the MIT Urban Studies department expressed concern, “I foresee cataclysmic traffic consequences of this wayward action. I call on the university presidents to retract their decisions and repent.” When warnings of increased chaos on the streets of Boston were relayed to Grove, he replied, “Uh, howz anybody gonna tell?”
Disclaimer (as required by Yale): This article does not represent the views of Yale University or its administration or assigns.
Counter-Disclaimer (by the author): That’s because they have no sense of humor.
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