Yale-pril Fools!

This year’s April Fools Day brought its usual dose of idiocy, along with some semi-amusing pranks, some good one-liners, and one of two jokes that were actually convincing, if only for a minute or two. But I think my favorite of this year’s crop of April Fools jokes has to be the article the Yale Daily News (YDN) ran, in which reporter “Art Anderson” (a reference, of course, to the beleaguered accounting firm involved in the Enron debacle) reported that Yale’s endowment had taken a billion dollar hit, due in large part to tremendous losses because of the devaluation of Enron’s stock.

The premise of the joke was not bad, and it was fairly well-executed by whoever its writer was—all in all a reasonably funny, if somewhat unspectacular, attempt at humor by the YDN. Much more intriguing about the joke, however, is what it seems to say about how some Yalies view the world. In Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious, Freud points out that jokes tend to reflect inner desires, fears, wishes, and the like. What desires, fears and wishes does this joke seem to indicate exist in the collective unconscious of Yale—or at least the staff of the Yale Daily News?

To answer this question, some context is necessary. A recurrent theme in Yale campus media in recent months has been the remarkably successful performance of Yale’s endowment during the recent economic slump, especially as compared with (gasp!) Harvard’s, which has sustained a loss of about a billion dollars during the downturn.

That the YDN selected a billion dollar loss to falsely ascribe to their own endowment is no coincidence, but rather a jibe at Harvard’s troubled year. This is further borne out by the quotation that closes the article, where “Larry Summers” says of Yale’s president Richard Levin, “I guess Rick [Levin] isn’t quite the economist we all thought.” The implication here is that in the wake of Harvard’s poor performance of late, Summers himself is perhaps the one who is not quite the economist we all thought.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that the financial disparities between Harvard and Yale (as most patently embodied in the multi-billion dollar distance between Harvard’s 18.2 and Yale’s 10.7 billion dollar endowments) constitutes a particularly sensitive subject for Yalies. Even so, the extent to which many at Yale seem to have a deeply embedded inferiority complex, whether legitimate or self-created and self-imposed, is somewhat startling.

A reader’s comment posted to the online edition of the article pretty well sums up the mood of the piece as a whole: “HARVARD lost a billion last year, while Yale was up a billion...And those are the REAL numbers.”

Am I ascribing unduly harsh motives to a simple April Fools’ joke? Again, context is necessary for an accurate answer. In both the news article and the editorial published when the most recent endowment figures were released in the fall, the YDN did not fail to mention Yale’s success as compared with Harvard; in fact, the title of the editorial was “Recession? What Recession? Ask Harvard.”

It seems, then, that Freud’s idea about jokes is eminently applicable to the YDN’s April Fools gesture, which marks not so much an innovation in content, but rather one in form; an ironical joke has been substituted for what had already been stated in straightforward editorial—and news—form several months earlier.

What exactly should we conclude from the fact that last year’s tired material is being rehashed in slightly changed form? I don’t quite know. What is fairly clear, though, is that until Art Anderson’s creators can come up with something better than the fact that Harvard’s endowment is now only 70 percent, rather than 90 percent, larger than Yale’s, the joke will continue to be on them. And I’m not fooling.

—ZACHARY S. PODOLSKY