Yale Daily News

In September 1963, the first words I heard as a Yale freshman from Kingman Brewster Jr., the provost of Yale and later the University’s president, were “Lux et Veritas” or “light and truth.” These two words, he said, had been Yale’s motto for more than 250 years and constituted Yale’s core values. We had an obligation — we were, in effect, trustees — to protect them not just for our generation and future generations but for those past too.

Last Friday, The New York Times reported that I believed University President Richard Levin dishonored these two words in his mishandling of a controversy involving South Korea’s Dongguk University. I was referring to the fact that Levin and his administrations for months publicly denied that Dongguk had sought to verify an art professor’s claimed doctorate from Yale and then had received a verification of the degree back from Yale — only to admit 10 weeks after it knew the truth that its denials were false. A Yale spokesperson, Tom Conroy, referring to my statement, told the Times on Friday, “I have no idea what that means.” He also called Yale’s conduct just an “innocent mistake.”

Lanny Davis

I believe Conroy and Levin know the difference between innocent error and deceit, cover-up and then, to make matters worse, a dishonorable counterattack against the victim rather than accepting responsibility.

Recently discovered internal Yale e-mails and documents prove some undisputable and noteworthy facts.

In the summer of 2007, a Yale spokesperson, Gila Reinstein, in South Korean media reports, including an interview for a major television news broadcast, repeatedly contradicted Dongguk’s prior public assertions that it had sent a registered letter to Yale in September 2005 and received back a fax from an associate dean, Pamela Schirmeister, confirming that it was her signature on the certification that a recently hired art professor, Shin Jeong-ah, had received a Ph.D from Yale’s graduate school.

This public repudiation by Yale of Dongguk’s assertions was believed by most South Koreans; polls show then and even to this day that many Koreans believed Yale and believed that Dongguk had lied about its due diligence in seeking and obtaining verification of Shin’s doctorate. Naturally, this caused great shame for Dongguk, its faculty and its students. Dongguk former president Hong Ki-Sam, whose term had ended before the controversy over Shin occurred, was stripped of his professor emeritus status by the university, was humiliated and told friends, “My life is over.”

Internal e-mails from the same summer months show that Yale School of Art officials were “troubled” that Dongguk’s claims might be true. Yet they remained silent, permitting Reinstein to continue her public repudiations of Dongguk’s assertions in South Korea’s media.

Then, on Oct. 18, 2008, the cover-up began: On Oct. 17, Yale received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice, forwarded at the request of Korean prosecutors. The next day, Yale determined with certainty that Dongguk had, in fact, been telling the truth about the inquiry letter and the return verification fax from Dean Schirmeister and that Reinstein’s denials had been wrong. Yet for 10 weeks, President Levin and his administration remained silent.

Finally, Saturday, Dec. 29 — one of the best days of the year to reveal unpleasant information — Yale issued a public statement of “regret” that it erred in denying that Schirmeister had not sent the fax verifying her signature on the Ph.D certification. The statement was issued by the public relations department, not by Levin.

I believe the decision to wait 10 weeks to tell the truth and then release the truth on the “dark news day” of Dec. 29 by Yale’s public relations department, and not by Levin himself, was dishonorable.

Then, just last Friday, Yale’s spokesperson, speaking on behalf of the University and therefore Levin, compounded the Yale administration’s dishonorable conduct in this matter by attacking the victim on a completely irrelevant matter rather than taking responsibility, saying:

“We think the jury will certainly consider the fact that the chairman of Dongguk’s board was convicted of soliciting and receiving an illegal government subsidy from Ms. Shin’s lover, who was an adviser to the Korean president.”

The spokesperson was referring to the conviction of an individual for illegal receipt of government funds during a time when that individual also happened to be serving on the board of the oversight foundation for Dongguk. The conviction had absolutely nothing to do with the decision to hire Shin, which was solely based on her representation that she had received a doctorate from Yale.

This technique — to attack the victim on a totally unrelated side topic through innuendo and smear — is familiar. In the 1950s it was called McCarthyism. Today, it is called “swift boating.”

It is time for the Yale Corporation to conduct a full investigation to demand that Levin answer the questions: What did you know, when did you know it and why did it take you 10 weeks to tell the truth?

Ironically, only a few months after Yale finally admitted its mistakes, Levin gave a speech in Athens May 6, 2008, on the “Internationalization of the University,” in which he said, “Increased interdependence requires that the leaders and citizens of tomorrow have cross-cultural awareness, a trait that Americans in particular have historically lacked.”

To say the least, Levin’s silence for 10 weeks after knowing the truth and then his recent swift-boating of Dongguk concerning a completely tangential incident is far from the “cross-cultural awareness” he said was necessary for Yale — and, indeed, much less consistent with Yale’s core values of “light and truth.”

Lanny Davis, a former News chairman, is a 1967 graduate of Yale College and a 1970 graduate of Yale Law School. He was special counsel to President Clinton from 1996 to 1998 and is now a partner in the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery, which is representing Dongguk University in its suit against Yale.