Time is running out for Georgetown University Law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz to secure the 4,000-plus signatures from Yale alumni necessary for those not otherwise selected by the university to win a seat on the ballot for the Yale Corporation, the body overseeing Yale University’s administration and operations.
No doubt university President Peter Salovey will breathe a sigh of relief if Rosenkranz cannot get the thousands of signatures needed for a place on the ballot. Alumni would then be forced to vote for a candidate selected by the “Yale Alumni Association for the Nomination of Alumni Fellows,” a body which includes the university secretary, another fellow selected by the existing corporation, and the president of the University Council (who is elected upon the recommendation of Salovey).
If this convoluted structure sounds familiar, it should: It is essentially the mechanism by which the Islamic Republic of Iran runs its elections, with overlapping committees preselecting those invested in the status quo and excluding anyone too reformist.
That might sound like hyperbole and it is. But the broader question remains true: Why, year after year, do so many alumni feel the university seeks to avoid transparency? Rosenkranz’s campaign is not a Democrat vs. Republican or a progressive vs. conservative issue. Rather, he seeks fundamental answers from the university:
- Why is Yale University increasingly hostile to free speech and the unfettered discourse at the heart of a quality institution?
- Why does Yale have nearly twice the bureaucracy of peer universities like Harvard, and why does it have proportionately more management staff than all but four of 1,622 colleges and universities surveyed by The Chronicle of Higher Education?
- Why has tuition more than doubled over the past 20 years, far outpacing inflation while faculty salaries lag behind peer institutes?
Yale University is increasingly off-the-rails from its core educational missions. Superficial diversity by skin color supplants intellectual diversity and an appreciation for competition for ideas. Students feel cowed into silence by peers willing to silence those who diverge from accepted politics or views on social issues, and the administrators who almost universally side with the silencers rather than the silenced. It destroys historic architecture to accommodate ever-proliferating safe spaces. It has lost alumni support. (I stopped giving when then-university registrar Barry S. Kane told me, “Yale doesn’t give a f— about alumni.”) And yet, it still subordinates free speech in a quest for foreign support, for example, quashing protests to avoid embarrassing visiting Chinese leaders.
The problem at Yale, as with many peer universities, is that university leaders know they have derailed the institution. They know that a gap exists between reality and what they tell alumni when soliciting funds. They also realize that years of political pandering has effectively put the inmates in charge of the asylum, each seeking to use the university name and prestige to endorse the latest social obsession or political trend, even if it comes at the expense of core mission: education and competition of ideas.
Keeping out transparency advocates and those who might ask critical questions essentially doubles down on opacity and continues the academic equivalent of a cover-up. It’s time Salovey and the Yale Corporation’s nominating committee ask whether hostility to divergent opinions is rooted in realization that they now seek to defend the indefensible.
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.
