“You will regret this in ways you do not understand … I’ve seen students burn for things like this.” In Biblical terms, Jonathan Holloway, then-Dean of Yale College, warned me against following through on a counter-protest. Our school motto is light and truth, but Holloway was preaching fire and brimstone.
In April 2017, the Yale College Republicans and I organized a counter-protest against graduate students’ symbolic “hunger strike” for unionization. Our counter-protest was a barbecue right next to the grad students, but either a mistake was made or someone regretted sanctioning our event, because a few hours after the event was approved, I received an email from Holloway asking for me to call him. That is when he delivered his admonition to me.
During the barbecue, participants were actively forbidden by Director of Administrative Affairs Pilar Montalvo from engaging with the graduate student union, lest we be shut down. Montalvo’s office had a view of the protests, and when we disobeyed, she stormed out onto the plaza wildly, reiterating her threats. I later learned that it was Montalvo, who works in the Office of the President, who contacted multiple deans at Yale to pressure me to cancel the barbecue.
Regardless of who is ultimately right, it is important that campuses encourage controversial discourse. It is through these conversations that we seek out truth, and intellectual controversy should be an essential part of any university. Yale shamefully attempted to stifle a peaceful counter-protest at multiple levels and forbade two ideologically different groups from engaging with each other.
The larger message Yale intended to send us was clear: Certain discourse is forbidden on campus. Yale simply maintains the facade of free speech to pacify students and the press while intentionally fostering a campus with little ideological debate. Yale professors usually prefer classes without rigorous debate, and I noticed that, controlling for quality, students generally received higher marks when they conformed to the professor’s opinion.
To be fair, students are allowed to disagree in very specific environments, like the Yale Political Union. However, debate in controlled environments like the Yale Political Union is counterproductive. There is little genuine discussion that happens in this setting, and intellectual friction is the only true way to discover truth. Instead of fostering this, administrators have forsaken their vow to uphold the values of a liberal education in order to pacify their students. As a consequence, far-left illiberalism remains relatively unchallenged and is the perceived dominant ideology on campus. The university seemingly finds this preferable to intellectual conflict, which would attract unnecessary attention. Administrators do not want anyone to take a closer look at what goes on at Yale.
This academic lobotomy was made possible by two factors: Yale’s celebrated residential college system and a swarm of leftist professors. The residential college system gives undergraduate students material comforts reminiscent of European nobility, and students are quickly conditioned to accept nothing less than absolute serenity. This has created a sense of entitlement that has bled into classrooms across Yale. Eventually, students become incapable of handling opposition maturely. These issues have been exacerbated by an increasingly homogeneous faculty.
In 1989, New England’s liberal-to-conservative professor ratio was 5-to-1. In 2014, that ratio was 28-to-1. New England academia leans hard left, but with 97.1 percent of their donations going to the Democratic Party, Yale-affiliates boast the highest rate of donations to Democrats among all universities. These leftist professors are systematically creating an orthodoxy in which dissenters from campus groupthink are silenced. Professor Nicholas Christakis is perhaps the most famous victim, but he is not alone. Backed by sheer weight, illiberal leftists easily hijacked the campus.
The Yale orthodoxy has stunted intellectual growth by depriving students of stimulating academic friction. This stagnation is transforming Yale into a glorified finishing school whose graduates will lack the tools to effectively contribute to society.
Unless administrators confront the impending crisis created by hordes of underwhelming graduates, the Yale brand will continue to lose value. Employers are eventually going to take notice. Donors and potential campus speakers have, and Yale needs to once again stand behind its motto of “Light and Truth” if it wants to reverse the damage being done to a generation of students.
