The perfect storm of social upheaval and the COVID-19 pandemic has focused an uncomfortable spotlight on universities. Rather than uphold themselves as centers of intellectual debate and the battle of ideas, universities have become drivers of cancel culture. Administrators and senior professors might deny they encourage any such thing, but the decline in intellectual and viewpoint diversity is even more pronounced as efforts to promote diversity based on skin color and sexual orientation proliferate. COVID-19 has put tremendous financial strain on universities as students question whether the price tag of tuition is worth the debt given the drawbacks of virtual learning and constraints on the formative college social experience.
Enter Yale, which seemingly has fumbled both. University President Peter Salovey has always been more a people-pleaser than an intellectual leader. Under his stewardship, inmates have taken over the asylum as ameliorating restive faculty and student groups increasingly takes precedent over the university’s traditional mission. Salovey, for example, allowed Yale to become a trendsetter both for renaming and for excusing violence when the political cause was favored.
Many alumni are, not surprisingly, upset about the direction Yale is going. Salovey and his predecessor, Richard Levin, have overseen the mindless destruction of traditions central to Yale’s identity, for example, destroying the century-old Freshman Commons in which all freshmen ate together in order to build class camaraderie, and homogenizing residential colleges in order to ensure that difference in leadership competence would not impact student experiences. In practice, this meant the end of alumni-funded projects such as Pierson College sending its seniors to Italy and other colleges raising their own money to sponsor extra speakers (each college can still raise its own money, but Yale’s central administration will deduct the same amount from college coffers).
Perhaps Salovey will cloak his actions in the cause of “social justice” or “equity,” all-purpose terms so often used to escape bureaucratic accountability or academic rigor. In reality, however, the administration’s prioritization of itself over students and the competition of ideas seems more a factor of the need to support Yale’s increasing administrative bloat. Consider, for example, that the Chronicle of Higher Education found Yale had proportionately more management staff than all but four of more than 1,600 colleges and universities surveyed and more than twice the bureaucracy of peer universities such as Harvard. From 1995 to 2017, managerial and professional staff increased by more than 77%; over the same time frame, there has been only a 10% increase in service and maintenance.
Through it all, Yale’s administration has circled the wagon and sought to insulate itself from accountability. The university, for example, will handpick alumni representatives to seek election to Yale’s governing board. Each has an impressive resume, but, in each case, their major qualification appears to be a willingness to do little and say less; none have asked fundamental questions about Yale’s turn away from both education and tradition. That three-quarters of Yale students believe that Yale is not welcoming to diverse viewpoints raises alarms.
Yale’s Board of Trustees (formerly known as the Yale Corporation) is meant to provide broad oversight and a check and balance to stewardship over Yale’s budget and $30 billion endowment. The problem is the same administrative interests at Yale that have shifted its focus from students to administration now maintain a stranglehold over the board. The board appoints 10 “successor” trustees, all of whom not surprisingly reflect the status quo that selected them. In addition, the alumni hold six slots.
While this, in theory, might infuse new blood into the process, the system is set so that an Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee of the Board of the Yale Alumni Association, itself dominated by the administration, selects candidates from which alumni might choose. No candidate is allowed to campaign or make themselves available to the press. Rather, the Alumni Association supplies Yale graduates with short bios from which people can choose.
Want to know about where candidates stand on freedom of speech? Tough luck. Which candidates hope to craft new administrative structures and hope to return Yale to its core teaching and research missions? There is no way of knowing. Who believes Yale should be about the undergraduates first and foremost versus those who want to emphasize the graduate experience? Again, good luck. Don’t bother even thinking about a debate to discuss problems and elucidate agendas.
There is another way: Candidates can self-nominate and appear on the ballot if they can gather 4,394 signatures, 14 months before the election. Why 14 months? That rule is meant to be just one more roadblock to anyone seeking transparency.
Enter Victor Ashe, a former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, and ambassador to Poland appointed to federal positions by every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. He outlines his goals and vision here. The reason why he garners such bipartisan trust is that he has demonstrated a commitment to openness throughout his career. As a young lawmaker in the 1970s, he sponsored legislation in the Tennessee House and Senate to require access to public records and to require open meetings of public bodies. As mayor, he sponsored a change to the city charter to make it easier for citizens to see public records belonging to the city. Frankly, he is the type of candidate that any university should want to have on its board — but which Yale University, for reasons it alone knows, always seeks to avoid.
The reality is this: Big institutions such as Yale embrace opacity into their internal affairs, financial books, and deliberation only when they fear that transparency would invite questions they hope to avoid. Most alumni seldom visit campus and, if only reading sanitized press releases, have little idea about how much the campus has changed over the last quarter century. Many remember their professors fondly without ever knowing their personal politics and grew as liberals or conservatives because of the intellectual diversity to which they were exposed.
Yale’s prestige and budget amplify its importance both in the national debate and as a subject in current discussions about the direction of U.S. education. Unless the university again embraces transparency and openness, those days will be a fading memory as Yale drowns within its own bloat. Frankly, Yale should have nominated someone like Ashe years ago, but, at present, the university seems increasingly desperate to prevent any introspection. Only if alumni enable a competent and principled technocrat to examine the university’s inner workings will anyone ever know why.
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.
