Yale has a World Fellows Program. When launched, it was talked about on campus as a kind of mid-career equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship: bring the rising thinkers and doers of the world to Yale for a semester (people with careers, unlike newly minted undergraduates, usually can’t afford to take more than four months off), expose them to American higher education and all its wonders, recruit them into the Yale cadre, and toss them back into the lake to fructify and rise to run the world.

The scheme hasn’t been a complete failure, but, predictably, it has made only a limited impact on Yale—partly because the university lives an almost self-contained life and has little interest in visitors with a four-month tenure, and partly because Yale tends to select World Fellows who mirror its own prejudices. In other words, if you already think that America—and all the ills for which it is supposedly responsible—is the world’s biggest problem, Yale doesn’t have much to teach you.

So what were the World Fellows doing midmorning on 9/11? They were listening to the following program, offered, as part of a regular series, by one of their own:

Meltdown: Eye-witness Accounts of Catastrophic Climate Change Arctic explorer, environmental scientist, and World Fellow Tim Jarvis presents dramatic eye-witness evidence of melting polar ice-caps. His presentation will be supplemented by short accounts of the effect of catastrophic climate change on front-line countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. The discussion will focus on what has already occurred and is demonstrable, and what the consequences of further climate change will be.

I don’t demand that on 9/11 Yale focus only on 9/11. I don’t even object, too much, to the obviously propagandizing nature of the event—even though a scientist should be willing to accept that eyewitness anecdotes are no substitute for data. But would it be too much to ask that the World Fellows, living for the time in the United States, on one morning focus on the actual and demonstrated dangers posed to the U.S. and many other nations by Islamist mass terrorism? Yes, it evidently would be. Get back into the memory hole, 9/11.