Our favorite story about Yale concerns the statue of Nathan Hale. He was the young Yale graduate who, in 1776, went to the gallows for spying against the British and declared that he regretted he had but one life to give for his country. The statue of him in bronze* stands in the Old Campus, alongside Connecticut Hall. The story we like — it could well be apocryphal — goes that the Central Intelligence Agency sought to borrow the statue of America’s first spy so it could make a copy. Yale refused. Then one morning, Yale awoke to discover that the statue had disappeared. This caused great consternation, until the campus awoke one morning some days later to discover that the statue had been returned to its pedestal.** The mystery was never solved, but a statue of some similarity soon appeared in front of the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

It’s surprising that Yale’s president, Richard Levin, failed to make any mention of Nathan Hale when he issued his statement criticizing the New York Police Department for visiting the Web site of, among other Muslim student groups, the Muslim Students Association at Yale. “I am writing to state, in the strongest possible terms, that police surveillance based on religion, nationality, or peacefully expressed political opinions is antithetical to the values of Yale, the academic community, and the United States,” Mr. Levin said. “Also I want to make sure our community knows that the Yale Police Department has not participated in any monitoring by the NYPD and was entirely unaware of NYPD activities until the recent news reports.”

Mayor Bloomberg issued a terrific response. No doubt he shares, as do most Americans, an appreciation of the importance of avoiding improper surveillance of Muslims or anyone else. But that’s not what the NYPD was doing. Said the mayor, according to the report in the New York Times: “If going on Web sites and looking for information is not what Yale stands for, I don’t know.” He added: “Of course, we’re going to look at anything that’s publicly available, in the public domain. We have an obligation to do so, and it is to protect the very things that let Yale survive.” Why in the world couldn’t President Levin have made this simple and reasonable point? It’s enough to make one hope that the next time the CIA needs a copy of the statue of Nathan Hale, maybe it just ought to hang onto it — for safe keeping.

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* By a one-time assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Bela Pratt.

** This is the version of the story we once heard from a guide at Yale. An alternate version holds that under cover of night a covert casting of the statue was made.