Yale under investigation
The Trump administration’s investigation into Yale’s admissions process is not legitimate civil-rights enforcement. It is part of a broader campaign to pressure universities into surrendering control over admissions, curricula, discipline, and campus life.
Yale should not capitulate. A settlement granting the federal government broad oversight would compromise the university’s independence and chill the free inquiry and expression essential to teaching, scholarship, and the arts. Other institutions, including Harvard, have resisted similar demands; Yale should do the same.
Yale enabled generations of students and artists—including me—to honor their histories and find their creative voices. Creativity cannot flourish on a campus where cultural identities are delegitimized or where students feel compelled to hide the sources of their inspiration.
As a Yale alum and a member of the Committee for the First Amendment, I urge Yale’s leaders to stand firm. Defending institutional independence now would affirm the values Yale claims to uphold and help protect academic and artistic freedom far beyond New Haven.
Ken Novak ’79
Palo Alto, CA
I have been proud of my connection to Yale since I first walked through Phelps Gate as a freshman in 1978—until now.
Now, I am angry, disappointed, and deeply worried for Yale’s future. Caving to blackmail from the Trump administration by negotiating a settlement that will compromise the university’s independence would be the height of hypocrisy for an institution whose motto is Light and Truth.
Recent history shows that institutions that negotiate and settle (universities, law firms) do not achieve freedom from future demands, but they do earn a reputation as toadying patsies. It would be heartbreaking to watch Yale go down this road, and even worse to witness the damage it would do to the school’s ability to attract top students and faculty.
The institutions that fight back often win, and they always earn admiration for their courage in standing up to bullies. It’s not too late to move Yale to that side of the equation.
Margaret Corvini ’82
Huntington, NY
To all alumni: I strongly urge you to suspend your donations if Yale settles with the Trump DOJ. As reliable groups on campus have discovered, the Yale administration has made offers to settle without good reason, doing the DOJ’s work for it. Such settlements have not worked for other universities—including UVA and Penn—that have continued to be bullied by the DOJ after they thought they had a settlement.
Bullies respond to strength, not to accommodation. The strategy that Yale is using is not only impractical (it won’t work)—it is shameful, secretive, and craven. It weakens Yale, tarnishes its reputation, puts it on the wrong side of history, and has already resulted in a significant degradation of the climate on campus, where self-censorship has increased among both faculty and students, many of whom feel that if they speak out, they are on their own, with no backing from the university.
Make the resumption of your donations contingent upon a public commitment by the university to go to court to defend its essential values.
Stephen C. Stearns ’67
Camano Island, WA
Mr. Stearns is the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Emeritus, at Yale.—Eds.
I stand with the alumni concerned about the protection of academic freedom at Yale, and I urge President McInnis to stand up to the Department of Justice’s illegitimate demands. Yale must be completely independent or scholarship—and indeed, Truth—will not be served.
I learned this when my father, Richard W. Lyman, was provost and then president of Stanford in what he later termed “the time of troubles,” 1968 to 1972, giving me a catbird seat on the stress of decision-making in defense of academic freedom in the teeth of Nixonian politics, the Vietnam War protests, and the ferment of the civil rights movement. His alliance with the other members of the Association of American University Presidents (AAUP) was critically important in navigating that fraught era, just as it is now.
Whether allowing Black Panther Angela Davis to speak on campus, despite anxiety on the Board of Trustees and hostility among donors, or limiting war protest on campus when it verged into violence, he was criticized by all parties on all fronts. Throughout, he and the other AAUP members made decisions in consultation and solidarity. President McInnis can take this courageous stand against government manipulation.
Holly Lyman Antolini ’74
Thomaston, ME
Trust in higher ed
I appreciated Yale’s initiative in confronting the important issue of public trust in universities, and YAM’s coverage (“Faculty Report Considers Decline in Trust,” July/August). The conversation is overdue. Yet the Yale report and its solution fall into a familiar academic trap: defining excellence by looking in the mirror.
Universities and the report overlook a harder truth: Even brilliant people can make poor decisions that affect the public. Public trust is shaped not by academic brilliance but by how our work improves people’s lives, how honestly we explain it, and how humbly we own up to our mistakes.
Too often we point to publications, grants, awards, and rankings as evidence of success. Yale Cancer Center’s research page, for example, highlights great academic achievements but little to nothing about health outcomes that matter most to the public. The Yale Impacts America website highlights the small number of students in each state attending Yale, but leaves the non-Yale public wondering “How has Yale made life better for me and my community?”
When I arrived at Yale, President Kingman Brewster had recently opened the gates of Yale College to demonstrate that Yale helped society. That vision remains compelling today.
A plethora of evidence tells a better story: research that improves lives, scholarship that informs policy, engagement that strengthens communities, alumni committed to public service. Those stories inspire trust.
The question is not whether Yale deserves the public’s trust. It is whether we are willing to earn it by focusing resources and actions to deliver outcomes that the public values, not just those that only academia celebrates.
James F. Oehmke ’79
New Brunswick, NJ
Having generally been impressed with President McInnis’s comments and priorities published in YAM, I was dismayed by her responses on the most critical issue for Yale’s health and future (“Trust in Higher Education,” July/August 2026). That was a weak swing which missed badly.
This is a leadership moment. Strong leadership, cutting through the array of “most critical” issues and the “yes, but” chorus, is desperately needed. Higher ed’s unprecedented loss of public trust (a) began long before the current federal administration, (b) is still accelerating, and (c) is not primarily rooted in the simple complaint about costs. It won’t be even slowed, let alone reversed, by (worthwhile) incremental steps regarding Yale’s cost or the distributions of student-loan debt. When soldiers are bleeding out in a battlefield hospital, the surgeons do not begin by promising to address their lousy pay. Yale’s core crisis might be at least stabilized (i.e., stop the bleeding) via some urgent action on the trust-and-confidence fundamentals.
Yet on every other topic in the interview, including the ones actually central to a broad loss of public trust, President McInnis’s response boiled down to naming the new committee that will ponder it. That might have been a proportionate response in 2006 or 1996; it is comically inadequate to the past two decades.
What’s needed at this point is clear blunt leadership that reflects the urgency of Yale and its peer group addressing the craters they’ve spent decades blasting in their collective public reputation. Moving bureaucratic needles will just leave that still-ongoing loss to become permanent and leave future Yale administrations wishing sadly that their predecessors had been wiser when the chance for recovery still existed.
Paul Botts ’85
Chicago, IL
David Brooks at Yale
Speaking as a doctoral Graduate School alumnus of Yale whose field involved the study of one part of the non-anglophone world, I believe that the Jackson School of Global Affairs has made a mistake in hiring David Brooks (“Talking Shop,” July/August). Much of what he says in this interview relies on crude distinctions and lazy assumptions, such as his suggestion that research and teaching are activities that come at the expense of each other. At one point, he makes the dubious and vainglorious statement that students who meet him will have at least encountered a “living person who really likes Edmund Burke.”
Brooks’s writing is thinly researched and often foolishly self-regarding, uninformed, and impressionistic. His writing about international affairs is especially weak, as it is often compromised by conceits about the exceptional character of American culture. What could such an openly provincialist commentator possibly have to say about global affairs? In my view, very little of value.
Alexandar Mihailovic ’93PhD
Bennington, VT
David Brooks explains why he began introducing his own political views into his classroom by saying “I don’t want anybody to graduate from Yale without having met a conservative.”
Brooks’s response to Yale’s almost total lack of intellectual diversity struck a personal chord. I was a philosophy professor at a state university. In the first meeting of all my courses, mechanics would be the first order of business. But for the same reason that drove Mr. Brooks, I would spend the rest of the class professing my libertarianism and explaining what that meant.
Of course, I was roundly criticized by my colleagues on the political left—virtually the entire department, including my chair—who all professed to be nonideological in the classroom. Their students were subject to stealth attacks. (“You can trust me. I’m totally objective.”) In contrast, my students knew where I was coming from and could factor in my viewpoint. In the bargain, they would be privileged to confront a novel ideology before graduating.
As for the alternative Brooks says he was expected to observe—“students should be paying attention to the readings, not to me”—a Marxist and a libertarian could use the very same collection of essays and present radically different courses without invoking their ideologies by name even once. Which essays are chosen, which paragraphs discussed, which criticisms offered, how assignments are graded—all these and more define the course takeaway.
Every professor has ideological and political opinions. Students have a right to know what they are. Therefore, every professor has a duty to reveal them.
Jim Stiver ’62
West Columbia, SC
A century's progress
Thank you for a great July/August issue. I could not help but notice the preponderance of accomplished women in the photos: Beverly Gage ’94, Becca Levy, Evan Yionoulis ’82, ’85MFA, Dawn Osborne-Adams, Mariko Silver ’99, Cheryl Henson ’84, Maurie McInnis ’96PhD, Kimberly Goff-Crews ’83, ’86JD, Okwui Okpokwasili ’96, and Rina Banerjee ’95MFA. On pages 22 and 23 is the 1926 graduating class, which was 100 percent male. We’ve really come a long way, haven’t we?
Eugene W. Brice ’62PhD
Fort Worth, TX
The symphony's beginnings
You rightly celebrated the success of the Yale Symphony Orchestra on its “60th birthday” (Symphony Celebrates 60,” May/June). However, the YSO is a bit older than 60, and it became a full symphony several years before 1968, the year you cited. In November 1965, the YSO performed a full program in Woolsey Hall, with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, Schumann’s third symphony, and the Saint-Saëns cello concerto, featuring Ralph Kirshbaum ’68 as soloist.
Getting a full orchestra together was challenging in the days before coeducation. Talented performers were dispersed throughout the university community, and the nascent orchestra had to compete with already established music groups that had dedicated rehearsal space and years of tradition at Yale. The director of the Yale Concert Band was not supportive, worried that we would steal his best wind players. The young YSO didn’t rely on Yale music school students, but several members were not undergraduates. There was a physics department professor who had played in the London Symphony Orchestra, and at least one violinist with no formal Yale connection drove down from Hartford to take part.
John Baron ’67
Chapel Hill, NC
Willliam Krinsky ’67, ’74MD
Stratford, CT
A manuscript’s twisted path
Thanks for covering the repatriation to Poland of former Beinecke MS 883, a 12th-century liturgical manuscript looted by the Nazis in 1939 from the Archdiocesan Archives of Poznań (“A Manuscript Goes Home,” July/August). I spent many hours in the early aughts pouring over this book as part of my graduate work in medieval studies. It was fascinating to learn so many years later about the twisted path by which it came to Yale and eventually returned to its homeland. That story has poignant continuity with the one I teased from the manuscript itself during my studies.
Under the tutelage of the legendary Walter Cahn and aided by Beinecke curator Bob Babcock, I made this artifact a centerpiece of my training in paleography, art history, religious studies, and musicology. I eventually gave a conference presentation on the death rituals the manuscript contains and published a scholarly article on its liturgical calendar, which sheds light on the history of Ląd Monastery and, more interestingly in view of the book’s modern journey, the long-standing and fraught relationship between Germans and Poles.
Founded in the 12th century, Ląd was reserved exclusively for German monks until the late 1400s. Former Beinecke MS 883 was used by the community for at least 400 years, and annotations in the liturgical calendar illustrate that a Western orientation was maintained for most of this period, even as the monks rewarded noble Polish patrons with liturgical commemoration for donating land, facilitating German settlements, and granting these villages special tax status unavailable to Poles.
In the late 15th and early 16th century, a power struggle ensued at Ląd, and after the Poles had wrested control of the monastery, the Germans fled to Cologne with what they deemed their most important documents. For whatever reason, the former Beinecke manuscript was not among them.
The Nazi pillagers who made off with the book during World War II surely had no knowledge of this history or that they were uncannily echoing their predecessors. However, the story of their plunder and the eventual return of the manuscript to Poland reminds me how long the tail of history is and how inextricably tied peoples are as they grapple with identity and the concept of nationhood.
Brian Noell ’06PhD
Marquette, MI
loading
Print
Email