It’s Our Turn to Defend Yale

Cynicism about Yale is easy. Making the case for it is harder.

Of course the Trump administration has come for Columbia and Harvard. Of course it’s framed as a culture war. And of course there’s an instinct, especially among academics, to reach for the most catastrophic label available. Jason Stanley and others have called it fascism, have claimed it part of a broader attempt to gut nongovernmental institutions and consolidate power.

We don’t entirely disagree. But we also don’t think crying “fascism” is the appropriate response. The deeper challenge that elite universities face is born not from evil characters in scary offices, but from democracy. Swaths of the American public have lost faith in elite institutions of higher learning. They have no desire to see their tax dollars allocated to campuses rife with vaulted ceilings, Parades of Comestibles, and academics calling dogs “prejudiced.”

Confidence in institutions of higher education is plummeting. This is bad for Yale not only because it puts our federal funding in jeopardy, but also because the whole point of our project is to improve the world. It’s hard for Yale to do that when members of the public, the media, Congress, and even the judicial branch write off our scholarship and students as “woke.”

Panicked, some Yale faculty want President Maurie McInnis to “speak up,” though no one really has any clue as to what that means. In April, over 1000 faculty members signed a letter urging university leadership to “defend the values and ideals of higher education” and to “resist and legally challenge any unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance.” Conveniently, the letter offered no blueprints.

The most specific course of action was proposed by Professor Daniel HoSang, who said in an interview, “If behind the scenes, what we’re saying is, ‘here’s the critical research that’s done on our campus and why [higher education] needs to be protected,’ why would we not say that publicly?”

Professor HoSang makes a fair point, but what exactly does he want? News articles from Yale about the work we do? (Done that.) Free online courses from Yale? (We have those.) A committee? (Sure thing.) Statements from Maurie McInnis? (Who’ll read those?) Our very bright, very distinguished university is aware that it has lost much of the public’s trust and favor, but is fumbling for answers about what we can do differently to earn it back.

We, too, worry that the public has lost faith in places like Yale. And, oftentimes, we give them reason to. The tabloids have a field day with our absurdities — some of them well-earned. But this place is flawed, not forsaken. Yale still admits America’s most talented writers, scientists, and economists, and puts them in a suite together. Our classrooms and laboratories are a confluence of brilliance that have led to breakthroughs in quantum information processing, RNA, and financial crises.

Someone’s got to make the case for the university; YaleNews is certainly not that someone, and neither is President McInnis, nor is Professor HoSang. Who’s left? It just so happens that Yale has very close ties with tens of thousands of American leaders: politicians beloved by rural constituencies, teachers adored by students, and doctors trusted even by anti-vaxxers. We’re speaking of Yale’s many alumni and students who know what Yale really means, what Yale really does.

It’s too bad that many of those who know the university most intimately are not great ambassadors of Yale. For decades, we’ve been criticizing the university through mainstream platforms, from New York Times essays to popular books (e.g., God and Man at Yale). And it’s not that we see the critic as evil or their job as unimportant—that’s why we write for Publius, after all—but we cannot help but wonder if Yale affiliates (ourselves included) have overdone the criticism, and in so doing, have painted an incomplete picture of the university. It’s not clear to the public that when we write about Yale students tearing down the American flag, we know that most of our friends were horrified. Nor is it clear that the people who say that Yale is full of “complete bots” (see: Fizz) are the same ones who genuinely love this place, who cry heartily at graduation.

For every thing we don’t like about Yale, there is something about it that we love more. There’s a reason we applied. There’s a reason we’re still here. But we don’t communicate our love in our op-eds or our conversations because we assume that our appreciation is obvious — and, because appreciation tends to be less interesting.

A lot of the work done at Yale is not tangible—this place produces bright minds, research papers, and other quiet contributions to human knowledge—but it’s still vital. Yale is a special place. It’s a place worth aspiring for, a place we are so proud to have ended up in. Most of all, it’s American excellence, and worth defending.

If we want to recapture the trust of those skeptical of us, of people who aren’t on board with Yale and its ethos, then we need to play our part in earning it back. That doesn’t mean every Yalie needs to pen a sharp op-ed, or deliver some sweeping public defense against claims that this place is nothing but a bastion of excess, a black hole for taxpayer dollars. Sometimes, it just means speaking candidly in the spaces we already inhabit — saying out loud, without irony or apology, what’s for so long gone unsaid: why we love this place deeply.

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