On Oct. 1, 2018, Yale University announced its endowment reached $29.4 billion, a level greater than the GDP of dozens of countries including Congo, Armenia, Iceland, Rwanda, and Jamaica. Despite Yale’s incredible resources, it still receives heavy subsidies from the federal government. In 2014-2015, the federal government granted Yale University more than a half billion dollars, representing 75.3% of Yale’s grant and contract income. That figure increased by almost $80 million by year 2017-2018.
Money is fungible and against the backdrop of federal government subsidies, Yale has expanded its administrative staff at rates far greater than peer institutions. According to Alumni for Excellence at Yale, Yale now has 81.8 administrators per 1,000 students, almost twice the rate of Harvard University. Of more than 1,600 colleges surveyed by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Yale comes fourth in overall bureaucracy. Between 1995 and 2016, as Yale received even more federal grants, Yale’s managerial ranks swelled by more than 77% while its maintenance staff grew only 10%.
In 1955, British Naval Historian C. Northcote Parkinson published a satirical article in the Economist outlining what now is commonly known as Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Bureaucracies grow exponentially, but do not improve efficiency. Indeed, multiple layers of bureaucracy, and theoretical checks and balances, did little to prevent Yale falling victim to the college admissions scandal. Typical of Yale culture, there was also little accountability for the administrators who failed in their own due diligence. After all, the fraudulent admissions application made it past at least seven Yale officials who all failed in their jobs.
The increase in federal funding also coincides with Yale’s increasingly unapologetic discrimination against the Asian American community, an outrage reminiscent of the quota system Yale once imposed on Jews. It also coincides with Yale’s increasingly overt politicization. Yale now sports a “Committee on Arts in Public Spaces” which has used politics to justify the alteration of statues and banishment of artwork. Yale Law Professor John Fabian Witt’s defense of Yale’s decision to rename Calhoun College reflects Yale’s bubble with seeming ignorance of how Orwellian his column reads to those outside the university.
Of greater concern, however, is that Yale has taken several billion federal dollars over the past decade, yet now lobbies to receive waivers of security restrictions in order to share its fruits with China. This comes after a Yale geneticist shared research data with China’s Ministry of Public Security which facilitated China’s repression of its Uighur minority, more than a million of whom remain incarcerated.
Such kowtowing to Beijing is more the rule than the exception. In 2006, for example, Yale administrators censored questions and forbade protests within sight of visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao. More recently, authorities in Beijing have reportedly threatened Yale students who criticize the communist regime or stand up for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. That University President Peter Salovey, under such circumstances, would remain willfully blind to the national security and academic freedom implications of China partnerships is troubling.
There is broad bipartisan consensus that student debt is crippling. Federal grants to Yale and other peer universities have subsidized faculty and laboratories but have had no discernible impact on expense. It now costs Yale students more than $72,000 annually to attend university, and even more if they need healthcare. That’s over $10,000 more than Yale charged just four years ago, and almost three times greater than the tuition I was charged 25 years ago. Federal money does not make Yale more affordable but rather seems to encourage university administrators to expand the bureaucratic class and pursue political objectives, arguably at the expense of educational quality, competition of ideas, and pure research.
Yale administrators seek to deflect attention from Yale’s changing priorities. They solicit cash from alumni convinced that Yale remains the university it once was rather than a bloated, bureaucratic, and politicized place where education, competition of ideas, and free speech are subordinate to social justice.
Alumni are catching on, however. Donations have declined, albeit partially offset by increasing federal grants. Yale seeks to prevent oversight by staffing its governing corporation with those unwilling to ask tough questions. Georgetown University Professor Nicholas Rosenkranz is now pursuing an insurgent candidacy to take a seat on Yale’s governing board but Yale requires that he gain the signatures of several thousand alumni (Yalies can submit their names, here). If Rosenkranz gains his seat, he might return Yale to its core mission and stop the wanton squandering of federal dollars.
Perhaps the federal government should also begin to ask tough questions as to where its donations go, and why U.S. taxpayers should subsidize a university more dedicated to political posturing than education and competition of ideas.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
