An anonymous tipster just forwarded us an email from Professor Solman on his reaction to the students’ first papers, which he found incredibly unsatisfactory. This? From supposedly the smartest, most powerful and influential people on campus?  Apparently the papers were so bad that Professor Solman had to tell the whole class (and validate his criticism with examples).  The email begins, “I have just read 14 of your first papers. I offer the following reaction with great earnestness and considerable goodwill. That said, I was taken aback by much of what was submitted.  Let’s leave aside the standards of the fancy school you’re attending and the hard-to-get-into course for which these papers were written. Much of this prose wouldn’t pass muster at a good high school.”

What was the problem?  Solman decided to send out some of the very worst lines he received, making sure to include at least one example from each paper.

“the venerabilities of the Spartans”  (the Spartans may have been old and therefore “venerable,” some of them, but they surely did not have “venerabilities,” a rare word for “the quality of deserving veneration, which even the default spell check in Word just underlined in red, and of which Google aptly asks: “Did you mean vulnerabilities?”)

“It is insightful that Fabius is the ultimate victor?”

“Pericles’ centralized control over the government vice the more democratic rule after his passing”

“”a book of advises on a judicious use of war”

“spies are important because information is tantamount,”

“At this point, a light bulb must have been illuminated in the minds of Athenian strategists.”

This class is intended for Yale’s most accomplished students, whom the professors have tapped to be the future leaders of the world—so Solman knows they could do better. He ends the email saying “Look, I know first-hand that you’re a smart, spirited, highly motivated and interesting bunch. But if you’re to succeed as you wish, unless the world changes radically or, I suppose, disappears entirely—you’ve simply got to take more care…. If you were to present these as written policy briefs next semester, god help you. And I write as the closest thing to a pushover on the Murder Board… Some of your mistakes may have been typos. But all of them show a negligence that (I’m just being honest here) amazed me.”  Who are the braniacs behind these abysmal papers?  The full admit list is here.