BUZZ
A crowd of students gathered outside a Yale University professor’s classroom after an email came to light where he called an undergraduate attractive.
Professor David Gelernter emailed disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2011, according to a message found in the three million new emails recently released by the federal government.
“I have a perfect editoress in mind,” he wrote to Epstein. He referred to her as a “v small goodlooking blonde.” As the Yale Daily News noted, Epstein “was convicted on state prostitution charges in 2008, indicted for sex trafficking of minors in 2019 and died in a jail cell that year.” It does not appear Gelernter knew about the prostitution charges when he was emailing with Epstein.
News of the email prompted “around 30 students” to show up outside of Gelertner’s class earlier this week. The university also reportedly sent two administrators to monitor the situation and ensure no one disrupted the class.
“I wanted to remind you that it is not in line with our free speech and peaceful assembly guidelines to prevent a class from happening,” Associate Director for University Life Nina Fattore reportedly told students. (In 2022, Yale attracted national attention for letting its law students disrupt a Federalist Society event).
The class went off without problem, the student newspaper reported.
The computer scientist for his part questioned why anyone cared about his old emails.
“Students who are bored enough to spend their time demonstrating against the use of descriptions in private correspondence have got this whole Yale thing wrong,” he told the student newspaper. “Is that why you came to Yale?
He also told the campus newspaper:
Anyone planning to censor my rec letters for my students might just as well go back to sleep. In recent years, there have only been a few. Those who have got them seemed pleased. (And who gives you the idea that you or anyone else are qualified to edit my private correspondence, in order (what’s more) to apply your own worn-out 1990’s platitudes to the letters I write?
Being protested by a few dozen students is hardly the worst thing the professor has endured while at Yale.
As noted by the Yale Daily News, Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” sent Gelertner a bomb in 1993 that “severely wounded” him.
“The bomb had severely wounded his abdomen, chest, face and hand, and even today Gelernter does not have the use of his right hand,” the student newspaper reported in 2007.
