Knowles wasn’t spinning a fantasy. Spurred by widespread conservative backlash to the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Republicans have advanced a deluge of state legislative initiatives that restrict how K-12 teachers and university professors can speak about racism and U.S. history. Since January 2021, over 100 of these bills — dubbed “education gag orders” by the free expression nonprofit PEN America — have been introduced in dozens of state legislatures across the country. “Schools and universities are being threatened today to a degree that has no recent parallel,” Jeffrey Sachs, a historian and political scientist who writes frequently on campus speech issues, wrote in February. “There is a willingness, and even eagerness, to bring the weight and power of government to bear on controlling classroom speech.”

That eagerness has been epitomized by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ’01, a likely 2024 presidential candidate and frequent Buckley Program donor, whom both Knowles and Burtka offered as a model for how conservatives should approach education. In June, DeSantis backed a Florida school board initiative that banned The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project from public schools and forbids teachers from teaching that “racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems.” Yale Richard C. Levin professor of history Timothy Snyder called the ban a “moral catastrophe” and argued that it would “make it impossible to teach basic elements of U.S. history, such as redlining, segregation, voter suppression, the racial cleansing of neighborhoods and counties, not to mention slavery itself.” Two weeks later, DeSantis signed a bill requiring public universities to survey students and faculty to ensure “intellectual diversity” and threatened that schools could lose funding if they were found “indoctrinating” students. “We know the results of government officials policing educators: paranoia, persecution and the opposite of the free speech Republicans say they want to protect,” wrote the Miami Herald’s editorial board in response. 

Many on the American right, however, have long argued that the greatest threats to free speech in America come not from lawmakers wielding state power but from censorious left-wing college students and their professors. In a keynote address at the 2016 Buckley Program gala, DeSantis himself argued that “the biggest problems in the U.S. with free speech exist on our college campuses.” It’s a narrative central to the Buckley Program’s identity. “A gospel of wokeness, enforced by an army of social justice warriors, has become the accepted dogma at Yale and at many posh colleges across the country,” the program’s chairman, conservative editor and publisher Roger Kimball GRD ’77 ’82, wrote in 2019. “The ironical consequence is that institutions that were created to perpetuate the search for truth and foster robust debate have become the graveyards of intellectual independence and free speech.” 

Though the Buckley Program has only existed since 2010, the arguments that animate its work have been at the core of conservative politics for over half a century. Many of the Buckley Program’s board members, speaking guests and biggest donors cut their teeth in decades-long debates over university curricula and culture that have indelibly shaped the current contours of the politics of campus speech and intellectual life. Considering the program’s recent actions in light of that history might explain why an organization that claims to be a space for students to “engage in intellectually open and respectful dialogue and to hear all sides of issues” ended its annual conference with a call for government censorship. 

WE’RE TALKING ABOUT CORPORATE SPONSORSHIP

In August 1971, a little-known corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell, just months before Richard Nixon elevated him to the Supreme Court, issued a confidential memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying organization representing U.S. businesses. The memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was a clarion call for a new era of business activism against New Deal and Great Society liberalism and the social movements of the 1960s. In Powell’s topsy-turvy world, “few elements of American society today have as little influence in government” as the American businessman, who had been turned into the “favorite whipping-boy of many politicians.” Of all the institutions he saw aligned against the “free enterprise system” — the media, the civil rights movement, labor unions, the arts and sciences — Powell regarded one alone as the “single most dynamic source” of the attacks: the university campus. 

“Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men who … despise the American political and economic system,” Powell declared, quoting the journalist and Yale alumnus Stewart Alsop ’36. Like Buckley, Powell noted that “the campuses from which much of the criticism emanates” were financially supported by the wealthy. But instead of Buckley’s penchant for invective and hyperbole, Powell called for a more nimble approach. “Few things are more sanctified in American life than academic freedom,” he admitted, and thus it would be “fatal” to attack the principle head on, as Buckley had in “God and Man at Yale.” 

Instead, intuiting that campuses would want to avoid the poor optics of “refusing a forum to diverse views,” Powell advised the Chamber to insist on “equal time” for pro-capitalist campus speakers. He’d  pioneered that argument when, as director of cigarette manufacturer Phillip Morris, he argued that the First Amendment entitled tobacco companies to “equal time” to dispute public service announcements about the health hazards of smoking. He also called on the business community to fund pro-capitalist scholars and then pressure university administrations and boards of trustees into promoting greater ideological “balance” within faculties, another value universities would find it difficult to explicitly oppose. 

In the same breath, Powell maintained that “there should be no hesitation to attack” anyone who “openly seek[s] destruction of the free enterprise system,” from consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader to German American critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. “There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system,” he concluded. “Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.” 

The Powell Memo crystallized a powerful strand of opinion in the business conservative community at that moment in U.S. history. In the following decades, Powell’s call was taken up by a group of extraordinarily wealthy, arch-conservative families, including the Olins — munitions and chemicals — Scaifes — banking and oil — Kochs — chemicals and oil — and Bradleys — manufacturing. Applying their industrial acumen to the world of culture and politics, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building a right-wing idea mill that would manufacture raw materials and refine them for public consumption. The result was a steadily expanding set of think tanks, legal outfits, political organizations, media operations, faith-based groups, academic centers and more. And their biggest target was exactly what Powell said it should be: higher education. 

“If you want to have an influence on the world of ideas, books are where you want to put your money,” Michael Joyce, the long-time president of the Bradley Foundation, said in 1999. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, several right-wing foundations bankrolled a rash of book-length broadsides against American universities, which included Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” (1987), Charlie Sykes’ “The Hollow Men” (1990), Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal Education” (1991), Martin Anderson’s “Imposters in the Temple” (1992), Christina Hoff Sommers’ “Who Stole Feminism” (1994) and Richard Bernstein’s “Dictatorship of Virtue” (1994). Together, these books helped produce a public belief that universities had been overrun by what came to be known as “political correctness,” or “PC”: the product of an intolerant and repressive left shutting down speech and tearing down the vaunted achievements of “Western civilization.”

One of these early salvos came from Roger Kimball, who has served as the Buckley Program’s chairman since 2011. In “Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education,” published in 1990 and supported by the Olin, Bradley, and Scaife foundations, Kimball argued that the student radicals of the 1960s had grown up to occupy cushy tenured positions in the country’s best universities, where they had installed a “radical menu at the center of their humanities curriculum.” History books, he wrote, were being rewritten to “soothe wounded ethnic feelings,” and a “politics of victimhood” had sullied once-noble and intellectually rigorous academic fields, reorienting them to “cater to the demands of various politically approved ‘marginalized’ groups.” Suffusing his account with warlike language — he called the book a “report from the front” and accused new methods of literary criticism of being “weapons of subversion” — Kimball claimed to have discovered a left-wing “blueprint for a radical social transformation that would revolutionize every aspect of social and political life.” At stake, he argued, was a future of either “culture” or “barbarism.”

The charge of “barbarism” became a go-to arrow in the anti-PC rhetorical quiver. “The barbarians are not at the gate,” Allan Bloom told an audience at the U.S. Air Force Academy. “They, without our knowing it, have taken over the citadel.” “Visigoths in Tweed” read the title of one of Dinesh D’Souza’s articles attacking a “new barbarism” on college campuses. While the authors’ invidious and dehumanizing language might have scored them polemical points, it also revealed how little interest they took in engaging the objects of their criticism, which they routinely caricatured and distorted. 

“From the beginning, and particularly in recent years, people who fashion themselves as opponents of PC tend to say that they support free speech or debate,” said Moira Weigel GRD ’13 ’17, a professor at Northeastern University who is working on a book about the rise of anti-political correctness. But the accusation of being “PC” itself “serves to shut down debate,” she argued, partly by placing certain subjects beyond the pale and claiming to embody an unquestionable and objective “common sense.” The etymology of the word barbarian, after all, comes from the ancient Greek barbaros, or “babbler”: an outsider who doesn’t speak “our” language. 

Beyond any specific distortion, the anti-PC writers’ most tendentious claim was that only their opponents were political and self-interested, while they stood for capital-T Truth and what Kimball called “the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.” “The people out there making arguments about being scrappy underdogs trying to speak against the establishment — there’s almost always millions and millions of dollars behind them,” said Mary Anne Franks, a legal scholar at the University of Miami who studies free speech and discrimination and whose latest book, “The Cult of the Constitution,” studies campus speech controversies. “These people try to present their views as intellectually untainted, when in reality we’re talking about corporate sponsorship.” 

That corporate sponsorship served an undeniably political purpose. Complaining about “politically correct” intellectual elites, Weigel said, “allowed business elites and their spokespeople” to “brand themselves as populists.” As Weigel elaborated in a lengthy Guardian article that became the basis for her book project, anti-PC posturing “allowed conservatives to displace responsibility for the hardship that many of their constituents were facing. It was not the slashing of social services, lowered taxes, union busting or outsourcing that was the cause of their problems. It was those foreign ‘others.’” Directly fanning the flames of the campus culture wars, it turned out, was an even more effective strategy for protecting the interests of American business than the one Powell had laid out two decades earlier. 

By the mid-1990s, the belief that college campuses were overrun by a liberal thought police had leached into the American mainstream, thoroughly scrubbed of its highly partisan and deep-pocketed origins. Bloom, D’Souza and Kimball were regularly cited as neutral authorities, and mentions of “political correctness” in newspapers and magazines skyrocketed. Just over a decade after Kimball’s book hit shelves, the legal scholar and literary critic Stanley Fish GRD ’60 ’62 begrudgingly admitted that the right’s campaign against higher education had been an astonishing success. For much of the public, he argued, American colleges and universities were now considered places of “radicalism and pedagogical irresponsibility where dollars are wasted, nonsense is propagated, students are indoctrinated, religion is disrespected, and patriotism is scorned.” 

COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES DO NOT EXIST TO PROMOTE FREE SPEECH

In her Guardian piece, Weigel argued that “after 2001, debates about political correctness faded from public view, replaced by arguments about Islam and terrorism,” before resurfacing again at the tail end of the Obama years. But it’s perhaps more accurate to say that in the febrile atmosphere of post-9/11 America, the campus culture war metastasized. In the same way that conservative critics of “political correctness” aimed to shut down debate, so too did many of the same critics attack professors and students whose speech was deemed insufficiently patriotic or supportive of the War on Terror. Yale was no exception. 

In spring 2002, Donald Kagan, a prominent conservative professor and military historian at Yale who would later help found the Buckley Program, published an article entitled “Terrorism and the Intellectuals” in the Intercollegiate Review, a conservative magazine. In it, Kagan inveighed against the “majority of people designated as ‘intellectuals’” who, in the thrall of “leftist intellectual orthodoxy,” had deigned to try to examine the “underlying causes” of the terror attacks or question the headlong rush to war. Summoning the sober patriotism and Manichean gravitas of the Greatest Generation, Kagan quoted Winston Churchill, who in the lead-up to World War II argued that Britain’s “worst difficulties … come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.” In a thinly veiled reference to the previous decades’ curriculum debates, Kagan decried attempts “to replace our common culture with narrower and politically divisive programs that are certain to set one group of Americans against another.” 

Setting aside the article’s empirical accuracy — several Yale professors were central to building Bush’s case for going to war — the upshot of Kagan’s argument was clear: if the United States foundered in the War on Terror, the effete, pointy-headed academics and their unpatriotic, politically radical students were to blame for having sapped the nation of its martial resolve. 

One of the “brainy people” Kagan may have had in mind was Glenda Gilmore, Yale’s Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward professor of history and a vocal opponent of the Iraq War. In October 2002, as the Bush Administration readied to launch a preemptive invasion of Iraq, Gilmore wrote a column in the Yale Daily News warning that an unprovoked attack would transform the American character, turning the United States “into an aggressor nation that cannot tolerate opposition.” “How many Americans and innocent Iraqi civilians will die?” Gilmore asked. Two decades later, the answer: over 4,000 Americans and around 200,000 Iraqi civilians, according to one conservative estimate. 

While Gilmore was careful to couch her critique of American bellicosity in explicitly patriotic terms — she marshaled Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan and U.S. policy during World War II to support her case, while conspicuously omitting many of the unprovoked military attacks, invasions and coups that stud American history — she was inundated with rape and death threats. Her column put her in the crosshairs of Daniel Pipes, an infamous Islamophobe and the director of Campus Watch, an organization that encouraged students to spy on Middle East Studies professors and began publishing McCarthy-style dossiers on anti-war and left-wing intellectuals in the years after the terror attacks. “The time has come for adult supervision of the faculty and administrators at many American campuses,” Pipes wrote in an article attacking Gilmore and several other “Profs Who Hate America.” 

Six months later, on the evening the U.S. military moved into Baghdad, Gilmore spoke on a panel of professors that aimed to take stock of the chaos already unfolding throughout Iraq. The tenor of the panel so incensed two pro-war undergraduates, Jamie Kirchick ’06 and Eliana Johnson ’06, that they took to the pages of FrontPage magazine, a national publication that frequently published diatribes against supposedly traitorous professors throughout the post-9/11 era. The magazine was published by David Horowitz, a self-proclaimed “campus provocateur” and author of “The Professors: America’s 101 Most Dangerous Academics.” “Coming to a campus near you: terrorists, racists, and communists — you know them as The Professors,” read the dust jacket. 

Kirchick and Johnson didn’t mince words. They declared Gilmore’s speech a “smug” and “self-righteous” “spectacle of self-aggrandizement” in which she “found it difficult to discuss anything but herself.” “While pro-war students have been vindicated by the liberation of Iraq and were rightfully ebullient on Wednesday, a common trope of the professors and their sycophantic followers in the student body was that a quick and easy military operation in Iraq should not be equated with a victory in the war,” Kirchick and Johnson wrote. The war would go on for seven more years and cost over $2 trillion. “On one of the most momentous days for America since September 11,” they continued, “few positive comments about our military victory were heard from the faculty panel,” who refused to celebrate the “kisses from Iraqis on American soldiers’ cheeks.” A little over a week later, they went on MSNBC to discuss their article; the news ticker, Gilmore remembers, read “Traitor Professors at Yale.” 

For conservative individuals and organizations on the front lines of the campus culture wars, the post-9/11 national atmosphere of civilizational besiegement and revanchist bloodlust provided welcome ammunition. One such group was the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA, an organization founded in the 1990s by future Second Lady Lynne Cheney on explicit opposition to “political correctness.” Two months after the attacks, the organization issued a report titled “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.” The report called university faculty a “weak link in America’s response” to 9/11 and listed the names, institutional affiliations and anti-war statements of dozens of professors, which included lines such as “build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls,” “break the cycle of violence” and “there is a lot of skepticism about the administration’s policy of going to war.” 

“When a nation’s intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give aid and comfort to its adversaries,” charged the report’s authors, who sent copies to university boards of trustees across the country. The irony, of course, was that while ACTA moaned that “academe is the only sector of American society that is distinctly divided in its response” to the attacks, it had made its name as one of the most strident advocates for “intellectual diversity” on college campuses.

The ACTA report exemplified the post-9/11 moment, when criticisms of U.S. foreign policy were frequently attacked as anti-American and even treasonous. By intimidating anti-war voices into silence, such accusations served to stifle any substantive debate about Bush Administration’s decision to go to war and everything that followed, including torture, the mass surveillance and detention of Muslims and the hydra-like growth of terror networks in response to ongoing U.S. occupation. A decade into the war, Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham captured the zeitgeist: “Free speech is a great idea,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation, “but we’re in a war.”  

None of the post-9/11 attacks on anti-war voices at Yale and beyond make it into the Buckley Program’s account of speech and dissent on college campuses, though the connections are difficult to miss. After helping found the program, Kagan served on its board of directors until his death in 2021. The current president of ACTA, Michael Poliakoff ’75, spoke at the December conference, where Eliana Johnson was also scheduled to speak alongside Knowles and Burtka — she had to cancel due to a medical issue. And when Jamie Kirchick ran an abortive campaign for the Yale Board of Trustees in 2018 on a platform centered on protecting free speech, Noble worked as his campaign advisor, helping organize a national listening tour and boosting his campaign on Buckley social media accounts. “That’s not irony, that’s hypocrisy,” Gilmore said of Kirchick’s campaign. 

Even Kimball, whose every other word as the Buckley Program chairman is a lament for the death of free speech at the hands of campus mobs, joined in on the attacks. “Please do not launch into a sermon about ‘free speech,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘academic freedom,’” he wrote in 2005 after a panel discussion at Hamilton College on dissent in the post-9/11 era was canceled following threats of violence. “Colleges and universities do not exist to promote free speech.” 

The conservative attacks on anti-war voices had more in common than a shared enemy. A few months after Gilmore published her Yale Daily News column, one researcher found that nearly all of the individuals and organizations orchestrating attacks on anti-war professors — including Daniel Pipes and Campus Watch, David Horowitz’s cluster of organizations and ACTA— could be traced back to a familiar set of deep pockets: the Bradley, Koch, Olin and Scaife foundations, among others. What Gilmore had originally taken to be “a broader trend among conservative commentators, who since September 11 have increasingly equated criticism of the Bush administration with lack of patriotism” was in fact, the researcher found, “only the tip of an iceberg of organizations, funded by a core group coordinating a right-wing agenda to put a chill on more than just academic speech.” At the time, Gilmore called it an “organized plot funded by right-wing foundations to shut down dissent.” 

A TROJAN HORSE OF A DARK DESIGN

As of December 2020, the Buckley Program boasted nearly $2 million in net assets and an annual budget of over $700,000. According to tax documents, the Bradley Foundation, which awarded Kimball a $250,000 prize in 2019, has given over $100,000 to the Buckley Program over the past decade. The Scaife Foundation, where Kimball sits on the board of trustees, donated $275,000 between 2017 and 2020. And the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, a relatively recent entrant into the right-wing donor network, gave over $150,000 from just 2016 to 2018. The program has also received $81,000 from DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund whose top contributors include the Koch brothers and DeVos family. 

The swelling tide of donations sponsored an ever-expanding menu of programming. It brought dozens of speakers to Yale every year and sponsored multi-day seminars over fall, winter, spring and summer breaks on topics including “The Morality of Capitalism” and “Free Market Fairness.” It funded group dinners at New Haven’s most expensive restaurants: wine and duck nachos at Kitchen Zinc with Amy Wax ’75, a law professor who has argued that America would “be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites”; tapas at Barcelona Wine Bar with the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez, author of “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Divides the Land of the Free”; dinner and drinks at the penthouse of The Study Hotel with Heather Mac Donald ’78, author of “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine our Culture.” 

Beginning in 2015, the Buckley Program’s most lavish expense became an annual black-tie ticket “Disinvitation Dinner” feting a public figure who’d had a campus speaking invitation rescinded. The most recent installment, held in the ballroom of the five-star Pierre Hotel on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, celebrated former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who, as Kimball wrote after the $1,000-per-ticket event, “devoted his long life to propagating the civilizing values of Western civilization around the world.” “A back-of-the-envelope count would attribute three, maybe four million deaths to Kissinger’s actions, but that number probably undercounts his victims,” Yale Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward professor of history and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of Latin America Greg Grandin GRD ’99 wrote in 2016. Kissinger is also a frequent donor to the Buckley Program. 

Yet the program still claims to serve a nonpartisan mission of promoting “intellectual diversity” on campus. “My work at the Buckley Program is about advancing the program’s mission, not my own views,” Noble told me. For decades, however, scholars have warned that conservative calls for “intellectual diversity” on college campuses can serve as cover for an explicitly partisan agenda. ​​As early as 2004, for example, Fish warned that those on the right calling for “intellectual diversity” were “taking a phrase that seems positively benign and even progressive (in a fuzzy-left way) — and employing it as the Trojan horse of a dark design.” 

Kimball perhaps best personifies the designs Fish feared. In a 2016 article, Kimball deemed the entire University of Colorado at Colorado Springs a “reeducation camp” after three of its professors had told a class of students that, for the purposes of their course, the science of anthropogenic climate change was not up for debate. At this “Indoctrination U,” he wrote, “only one perspective on this subject will be tolerated.” For a “dissenting” view, Kimball invited the students to read “The Climate Surprise: Why CO2 Is Good for the Earth,” a pamphlet he had produced with the CO2 Coalition, a denialist think-tank whose mission is to “educate the public that increased atmospheric levels of CO2 will benefit the world” and whose biggest donors include the Bradley, Scaife, Koch and Thomas W. Smith foundations. 

The Buckley Program seems to have taken its chairman’s criticisms to heart, at least when it comes to the programming it has hosted on the climate crisis. In a 2016 event on climate policy, the Stanford Hoover Institution’s Jeremy Carl ’95 hypothesized there was a “real chance that there will be no [damage]” from climate change. Two years later, the program hosted Oren Cass, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, which receives millions of dollars in fossil fuel industry funding, for a discussion titled “How (Not) to Worry About Climate Change.” Two years after that, the program invited Nicolas Loris — an energy policy researcher at the Heritage Foundation who has spent his entire career in the extended Koch network, and who a few years prior had written that “no consensus exists that man-made emissions are the primary driver of global warming” — for a debate on fossil fuel divestment. 

Kimball’s public pronouncements took an increasingly reactionary and conspiratorial turn toward the end of the Trump Administration, which he declared a “salubrious and morally uplifting enterprise.” During summer 2020, the Buckley Program chairman railed against the nationwide protests over, as he put it, “the death of George what’s-his-name” and called Black Lives Matter the “contemporary version of the KKK.” After the election, he constantly repeated Trump’s voter fraud lies, and, in a now-deleted article for the far-right Epoch Times, parroted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Biden’s victory was “a left-wing power grab, financed by people like George Soros.” More recently, he claimed that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “hoax” and endorsed the theory that it was an “intelligence set-up” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Noble told me she doesn’t share Kimball’s views on the 2020 election, and said she hadn’t spoken with him about them. “We live in a free country and those are his personal views,” she said. “We are focused on our mission, not regulating the personal views of board members which are not impacting our activities.” Yet, as with climate change, it’s difficult not to see Kimball’s recent fixations reflected in some of the organization’s latest programming. 

In July 2020, three months before the presidential election, the program hosted a virtual event on “election fraud” with Hans Von Spakovsky, an attorney at the Heritage Foundation. For two decades, Von Spakovsky has worked tirelessly to popularize widely discredited allegations of pervasive voter fraud in the U.S. electoral system, which have been wielded by Republican lawmakers to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. “It’s like he goes to bed dreaming about this, and gets up in the morning wondering, ‘What can I do today to make it more difficult for people to vote?’” the late senator and civil rights leader John Lewis once said of Von Spakovsky. More than perhaps anyone else in American politics, Von Spakovsky built the voter fraud tinderbox that Trump eventually set alight. 

Just over a year later, the program hosted Christopher Rufo, a right-wing activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Kimball is a trustee. For the last 16 months, Rufo has led the conservative campaign to demonize and censor critical accounts of racism and U.S. history in American schools. His crusade has centered around the accusation that students around the country are being indoctrinated with “critical race theory,” a decades-old and relatively marginal scholarly tradition with origins in the legal academy that examines how structural racism is perpetuated in law and society. Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law professor who has himself been a harsh critic of CRT — the academic discipline — wrote in September that figures on the right like Rufo had “repurposed ‘critical race theory’ and related thinking to demonize anyone who would challenge the right’s whitewashed fable of American exceptionalism.” 

The censorious campaign that Rufo has helped spark isn’t just about shoring up a sanitized version of U.S. history. Surveying the spate of Rufo-inspired educational gag orders in an article for The New York Times Magazine last summer, Yale’s Timothy Snyder observed the majority of those that made it into law were passed by state legislatures that had also passed laws restricting access to voting in the very same legislative session. These attempts to censor the teaching of U.S. history, Snyder concluded, help enable the voter suppression.

Just before the spring semester began, I reached out over email to Jasper Boers ’22, then the Buckley Program student president. I asked him whether he agreed with Knowles’ call for conservatives to wield the state to fire left-wing professors, and I asked him why he thought Von Spakovsky and Rufo, among others, were worthwhile additions to campus intellectual life and whether he felt they represented the Buckley Program’s values. “We do not endorse what our speakers say,” he replied, ignoring my questions about individual speakers. “We simply host interesting guests that draw a large audience.” 

The morning after I followed up on his response, Boers wrote an email to the editor in chief of the News and the editors in chief of the Yale Daily News Magazine pressuring them to drop the piece. He claimed to be speaking out of concern for the magazine’s journalistic standards, and “not because [he] was personally involved with the Buckley Program for over 3 years.” “I hope you will reflect on the way Jack is representing The Yale Daily News and the way in which his writing is affecting the perceptions of myself and others about the institution,” Boers wrote. When I reached out again to ask how he reconciled his email with the Buckley Program’s commitment to freedom of expression, he claimed he “intended to start a dialogue.” But over the next month, he declined or ignored multiple requests to sit down for an interview. 

HOTBEDS OF ANTI-AMERICANISM, LIBEL, AND CENSORSHIP

For decades, many conservatives and some liberals have portrayed William F. Buckley Jr. as an icon of what is often called “principled” or “reasonable” conservatism. According to this narrative, Buckley’s principal legacy was his putative ability to erect and maintain an ironclad boundary between a respectable conservative mainstream and the conspiracism, paranoia and racism that lurk, as the story goes, on the far-away fringes of the American right. According to Kimball, Buckley is best understood as a “beneficent apostle of limited government, ordered liberty, and the civilizing potential of democratic capitalism.” But this airbrushed story elides how much Buckley really shared with the far right, including his strident defenses of Jim Crow and McCarthyism and his long standing, open admiration for some of the 20th century’s most repressive and authoritarian right-wing regimes. Yet it is precisely those aspects of Buckley’s legacy that perhaps best explain the American right’s attacks on higher education. 

In 1973, with the backing of the CIA and Henry Kissinger’s State Department, Chilean right-wing military leader Augusto Pinochet overthrew democratically elected president Salvator Allende, plunging the country into two decades of military rule. Buckley was an early and vocal supporter of the new regime, which he saw as an opportunity for “instituting Catholicism and capitalism through authoritarian means,” according to Johns Hopkins professor Becquer Seguin. In 1975, Buckley helped set up the American-Chilean Council, a public relations group which received funding from Pinochet.  The money helped send reporters from the National Review, Buckley’s magazine and a major organ of modern conservatism, to Santiago, where they served up sunny dispatches while the military dictatorship killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands of others. Buckley himself was a frequent beneficiary of journalistic junkets to authoritarian countries, including apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia and Spain under Francisco Franco, whom Buckley called an “authentic national hero.”

Following the coup, one of Pinochet’s top targets was the country’s university system, then regarded as one of the best in Latin America. Philosophy and sociology departments were swiftly shut down for harboring independent voices of dissent. By 1975, 24,000 students, faculty and staff had been expelled from the University of Chile in Santiago alone. While Allende had expanded higher education to segments of Chilean society that had previously struggled to access it, Pinochet slashed state support for schooling, turning what had been one of the crown jewels of Chilean public life into a privatized and profit-driven system oriented around job training. Pinochet’s new education minister justified the purges by claiming that universities had become centers of “Marxist propaganda and indoctrination,” “violence and illegal armed conflict” and “the preaching of hatred.” 

Nearly half a century after Pinochet came to power, Donald Trump strutted to a podium in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., for a speech during the September 2020 “White House Conference on American History.” Though he dialed back his tone for the august setting, the content of the speech smacked of campaign-rally demagoguery. “Students in our universities,” Trump declared, “are inundated with critical race theory,” a “Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation.” Attributing “left-wing rioting and mayhem” — a reference to the previous summer’s protests, the overwhelming majority of which were peaceful — to “decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools” and their promulgation of “hateful lies,” Trump ended the press conference by signing an executive order establishing a commission to “promote patriotic education” and “the miracle of American history.” 

Two days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, the commission unveiled its work: the “1776 Report,” a slim, 45-page document that included no citations, bibliographies or scholarly references. “Universities in the United States are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel and censorship,” argued the report’s authors, three of whom have been Buckley Program guests and none of whom were credentialed U.S. historians. Echoing Trump’s claims, the report blamed “deliberately destructive scholarship” for “the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.” Yale Sterling Professor of American history David Blight called the document an “insult to the whole enterprise of education” that “may end up anthologized some day in a collection of fascist and authoritarian propaganda, if one is needed.” Kimball, who runs the publishing house that released a hard copy of the report in May, praised its “depth, authority and rhetorical power” and called it “an eloquent, closely argued exposition of the distinctively American principles of liberty.” 

For New York University professor and scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Trump’s actions and rhetoric followed in “a long, international tradition of how illiberal and authoritarian rule has managed universities.” But Trump’s attacks on universities didn’t emerge ex nihilo. As Ben-Ghiat observed in a 2020 piece in the New York Review of Books, Trump stood on the shoulders of a modern Republican Party that had “already shifted away from mutual tolerance and other values that underlie liberal-democratic models of learning.” In 2015, as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker set about gutting state financial support for the University of Wisconsin System, he proposed removing parts of the university’s mission statement devoted to “the search for truth,” “public service” and “improv[ing] the human condition” and replacing them with language concerned with meeting “the state’s workforce needs.” That same year, after North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory urged universities to focus on the “skills and subjects employers need,” the University of North Carolina Board of Directors voted to eliminate academic centers dedicated to the environment, poverty and voting. 

When Buckley published “God and Man at Yale” 70 years ago, Yale historian David Potter chided him for wanting “his college to do exactly the same thing which he wants his church to do — that it hand down to him a directive telling him what to believe.” Buckley essentially admitted as much in the book: he’d arrived at Yale with “profound respect for American institutions and traditions” and a steadfast belief in “limited government and free enterprise” — despite, he conceded, “only a scanty knowledge of economics” — and was so incensed at having those beliefs challenged that he called on his alma mater to “narrow the existing orthodoxy” on campus. On a rhetorical level, the Buckley Program’s commitments to “intellectual diversity” and free speech appear diametrically opposed to the arguments of its eponym. But on a spiritual level, the continuities run deeper. Though Kimball and Noble portray the Buckley Program as a “unique bulwark against the tyranny of groupthink that dominates so many institutions,” its history and recent actions, placed in the broader context of the modern conservative movement, offer a far less flattering picture of where the more alarming threats to vibrant and independent intellectual life on American college campuses lie.  

MEN'S BASKETBALL: March Madness coverage 2022

Yale is back in the Big Dance.

Reporting by William McCormack

Photography by Tim Tai

Published on March 14, 2022

By beating Princeton in the Ivy Madness championship, the Yale men’s basketball team advanced to the NCAA Tournament for the sixth time in school history and the third time since 2016.

Playing in Milwaukee, the No. 14 Bulldogs fell to No. 3 Purdue in the first round. Here is a compilation of the News’ coverage on Yale’s 2022 trip to the Big Dance.

(Courtesy of Dan Garcia/Yale Athletics)

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No. 14 Yale eliminated by No. 3 Purdue with 78–56 loss

No. 14 Yale (19–12, 11–3 Ivy) fell to No. 3 Purdue (28–7, 14–6 Big Ten) in its first-round March Madness matchup on Friday, 78–56.

The Bulldogs owned an early 16–15 lead seven minutes into the first half until Purdue’s size and post-play allowed it to build an advantage with free throws and points in the paint. Down 13 at halftime, Yale cut the deficit to single digits with two quick baskets after the break before a nine-minute scoring drought put the game out of reach.

Purdue guard Jaden Ivey, a projected top-five pick in the 2022 NBA Draft, led the Boilermakers with 22 points, while their 7-foot-4 center Zach Edey added 16 points, half of which came at the free-throw line. Yale guard Azar Swain ’22, who set a record in the modern era of program history by playing his 121st career game on Friday, started hot and scored 11 points in the first seven minutes. He ended the game with a team-high 18 points.

(Courtesy of Dan Garcia/Yale Athletics)

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At halftime, No. 3 Purdue leads No. 14 Yale, 46–33

No. 14 Yale trails No. 3 Purdue, 46–33, at halftime of their first-round NCAA Tournament matchup.

Purdue guard Jaden Ivey and center Zach Edey were the driving forces behind the Boilermakers’ play in the first, as the two combined for 31 of the team’s 46 points. Ivey scored 18 points, most of them early in the half, as Purdue leaned on its interior size advantage to draw fouls and outscore the Elis in the paint, 20–8.

Purdue attempted 19 free throws in the first, making 14. Yale attempted 0. The Bulldogs were led by 13 points from guard Azar Swain ’22 and efficient bursts of offense from forward Matt Knowling ’24 and guard August Mahoney ’24 later in the half.

(William McCormack, Contributing Photographer)

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Azar Swain will set another major program record at March Madness: career appearances

Yale men’s basketball guard Azar Swain ’22 enters March Madness as the Bulldogs’ all-time leading three-point scorer in the record books and their go-to offensive option on the court.

On Friday, when the No. 14 Bulldogs take on No. 3 Purdue, he will top another major statistical category with the most recorded appearances in a Yale career: 121 games.

Yale played its first game of basketball in December 1895 — it won on the road at the Waterbury, Connecticut YMCA — and never had anyone play 120 career games for the Blue and White until two-time Ivy League Player of the Year Justin Sears ’16. Two games at Ivy Madness last weekend tied Swain and Sears at 120 appearances. When the guard starts his 31st contest of the season Friday afternoon at the Fiserv Forum, he will hold the new program best.

(William McCormack, Contributing Photographer)

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No. 14 Yale set for No. 3 Purdue in first round of March Madness

MILWAUKEE — It all happens quickly in March. The Yale men’s basketball team learned its NCAA Tournament seed and opponent just a few hours after beating Princeton in the Ivy Madness championship last Sunday, made it back to New Haven for two days and then took a chartered flight from Hartford to Milwaukee on Wednesday.

The Bulldogs practiced in the Milwaukee Bucks training facility after landing, and on Thursday morning, they took to the real court — across the street at Fiserv Forum — where first-round March Madness action will tip off on Friday.

“In terms of the celebration, it was fast and furious,” Yale head coach James Jones told the media during a Thursday morning press conference at the arena. Bright stage lights shone as he sat on a makeshift stage in front of a backdrop dotted with the NCAA’s March Madness logo. “What’s great about the world now is everything’s on Instagram, so I got to relive some of the moments of my players,” Jones added. By Sunday night, he started watching film on Purdue.

(Tim Tai, Staff Photographer)

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A beginner’s guide to Yale

The Elis experienced an up-and-down start to the year during nonconference play. There were spurts of strong play — they notched a 20-point win over the University of Massachusetts during their first game against a Division I opponent, scoring over 54 percent from the field — interspersed with subpar performances. Slow starts in the first half, and particularly the few minutes following tipoff, emerged as an issue during some games. Yale came back to beat lesser-ranked Lehigh in early December but did not complete a similar comeback against Stony Brook earlier in the week, falling to the Seawolves at home in what the NCAA’s NET ranking metric considers Yale’s worst defeat of the season. After a mid-December loss to Monmouth, the thirteenth game of the season, Yale head coach James Jones and players expressed a similar sentiment: the Bulldogs, then 6–7, were not performing to their full potential.

(Tim Tai, Staff Photographer)

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What you need to know about Yale’s first-round opponent, Purdue

The Yale men’s basketball team is flying to Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Wednesday for March Madness. Making their third appearance in the NCAA Tournament since 2016, the No. 14 Bulldogs (19–11, 11–3 Ivy) will face No. 3 Purdue (27–7, 14–6 Big Ten) Friday afternoon at 2:00 p.m.

Purdue is making its seventh-straight appearance in the NCAA Tournament, the sixth longest active streak in the sport. Purdue head coach Matt Painter has been at the helm for the Boilermakers since 2005 and is making his 14th trip to the Big Dance.

Here is the rundown on Yale’s first-round opponent.

(Tim Tai, Staff Photographer)

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Yale receives No. 14 March Madness seed, will face No. 3 Purdue Friday in Milwaukee

After taking down Princeton in the Ivy Madness championship Sunday afternoon, Yale players did not have much time to sit around before the NCAA Tournament bracket was revealed.

By the time they left Harvard’s Lavietes Pavilion — after celebrating on the court, snipping down the net and greeting head coach James Jones in the locker room with a water shower — Yale only had a couple hours before learning their seed and first-round opponent.

But once CBS host Greg Gumbel began unveiling the bracket on the Selection Sunday show at 6 p.m., Yale waited and waited. The Bulldogs remained in Boston to tune into the bracket reveal before returning to New Haven, watching on a television hanging from the ceiling in a room at Del Frisco’s Steakhouse in Back Bay.

(Tim Tai, Staff Photographer)

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IN PHOTOS: Yale men’s basketball wins Ivy Madness, bid to NCAA Tournament

The Bulldogs were ahead by nine, 64–55, with 59 seconds to play. Three Princeton triples in the final minute — the first from guard Ethan Wright and the next two from guard Jaelin Llewellyn — and consecutive missed free throws for Yale suddenly gave the Tigers the ball down 66–64 with 14 seconds to play. The final-minute scare soon gave way to an extended on-court celebration, as Llewellyn turned it over in the final seconds and the Bulldogs, after taking two timeouts to solidify a plan, successfully inbounded the ball as time expired.

See more photos from the game here.

(Tim Tai, Staff Photographer)

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Off to the Big Dance: No. 2 Yale advances to March Madness after defeating No. 1 Princeton, 66–64

The Yale men’s basketball team is going dancing.

With a 66–64 win over first-seeded Princeton (23–6, 12–2) Sunday afternoon in the Ivy Madness final, second-seeded Yale (19–11, 11–3) claimed the Ivy League Tournament championship and punched its ticket to March Madness.

Yale has now won two consecutive Ivy Madness tournaments. The Bulldogs will compete in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2019, which is the last time an Ivy League team appeared in the bracket after the conference took a yearlong hiatus from competitive athletics during the pandemic in 2020–21.

Yale guard Azar Swain ’22 scored a game-high 23 points as the Bulldog defense held Princeton’s strong three-point shooters in check for most of the game. Swain, who took a leave of absence last year to preserve his final season of Ivy League eligibility, was named the Most Outstanding Player of Ivy Madness.

Tim Tai, Staff Photographer

(Tim Tai, Staff Photographer)

 

Finding Home

How BIPOC students navigate belonging within Yale’s queer community

Story by Suraj Singareddy

Photos by Regina Sung

Illustration by Sophie Henry

Published on February 24, 2022

On the evening of Dec. 1, 2021, a group of students began to gather in the upper level of the Native American Cultural Center. A sense of comfort infused the room, despite all of the end-of-semester stress. Coats were piled in one corner, puffers stacked higher than the couches. Some students chatted idly, while others eyed the coffee table at the center of the room. On the table was an assortment of herbs and spices: rooibos, lavender, cardamom, rose petals, dried hibiscus, jasmine and witch hazel.

These students weren’t brewing occult potions, despite what the gothic atmosphere of campus might suggest — they were using the exotic spices to brew tea at the inaugural tea and wellness night for queer students of color.

“Tea is something that’s very common in a lot of POC and immigrant communities,” said LGBTQ Office peer liaison Akweley Mazarae Lartey ’23, who created this event with fellow LGBTQ Office peer liaison Alex Chen ’23 and the support of peer liaisons from other cultural centers. Lartey thought the event “could also be a space of knowledge sharing, which is exactly what happened … People just started sharing like ‘this is good for this’ or ‘we should try this.’” The chit-chat helped to fulfill Lartey and Chen’s goal — creating a space where queer people of color could feel welcome, whether they wanted to make tea, socialize or just sit and relax. 

(Regina Sung)

 

Although this goal may seem simple, it is one that has not been accomplished by other groups on campus. Groups like Queer + Asian, Indigenous and Queer, De Colores and BlackOut cater to LGBTQ+ members of specific cultural communities. In addition, some of these spaces, such as Queer + Asian and De Colores, have been inactive during the pandemic. Until this tea making event, there has not been a place — at least, not one that has been widely publicized — where queer, Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) undergraduates can gather cross culturally. Chen hopes that this event may help in tackling this problem, and that it can live up to the promise of being “a recurring space for queer people of color to build community.” 

Uncomfortable Spaces

Many students feel the conditions on campus that make spaces like Lartey and Chen’s tea night necessary. Riley Macon ’25 explains that “being a Black, queer female [in itself is] already alienating … a lot of times on campus I had low self esteem.” For Macon, this feeling was compounded by not having a place to share these feelings with others who might understand. 

Many other queer, BIPOC students experienced this feeling as well. Chen said that one of the motivations for starting this gathering space for queer, BIPOC students was “a general feeling of discomfort in white-dominated spaces,” which is what the Office of LGBTQ Resources has felt like according to Chen, Lartey, and others. 

In addition to this “general feeling” of whiteness described by Chen, some students say they have witnessed racist incidents on campus as well. Nolan Arkansas ’23, co-president of the student group Indigenous and Queer, remembers being part of a groupchat in which members of Yale’s queer community made racist remarks. “That’s another thing that I think made me feel a bit out of place or a bit just not welcomed,” Arkansas said. “It’s just seeing how within the queer community there exists so much racism and there’s just so much complacency by our white, queer peers.”

Discrimination is one reason why demand for events like tea and wellness night is so high. However, there are also more pervasive factors causing students to seek out queer, BIPOC spaces. According to a 2014 article for the Yale Daily News about the University’s reputation as the “Gay Ivy,” many students feel that “cisgender gay men — and, more specifically, white cisgender gay men” receive elevated visibility on campus. This often leads to other groups in the queer community being overshadowed and ignored. 

“If you’re not white, if you’re poor, if you don’t look like a certain body type, if you don’t fit all these socially-constructed norms … your queerness can almost feel less valid.”

The elevated visibility of whiteness pervades the dating and hookup scene as well, with people with eurocentric body standards seen as more desirable. This causes BIPOC students to choose between conforming to whiteness or having their gender or sexuality invalidated. “A lot of growing up and queerness was like ‘If you’re not white, if you’re poor, if you don’t look like a certain body type, if you don’t fit all these socially-constructed norms … your queerness can almost feel less valid,” said Gabby Montuori ’24. “Things like race, sexuality, body image, social status, financial status and ableness compound each other in ways that can be really damaging for queer and gender nonconforming people of color.”

Montuori said that, often, people within the queer community talk about tackling internal biases relating to social norms, such as whiteness and thinness; for example, saying they’re open to dating people of all body types. However, “putting those things into practice and also unlearning their own biases is much harder for them,” he said.

It may not be possible to completely destroy the pressure to conform to ideal body standards on campus. However, recent events suggest that change, or at least increased discussion about the place that BIPOC individuals occupy within Yale’s queer community, is on the horizon. The closure of Voke last spring was one such event.

Voke was a queer spoken word group based in the Office of LGBTQ Resources. A March 10, 2021 open letter explained that the group had chosen to shut down due to “the overwhelming whiteness and lack of BIPOC in Voke and in Voke’s leadership in particular.” It went on to apologize for “the ways Voke [had] failed [its] BIPOC members’’ and for creating “a culture of normative whiteness & uncomfortable silence around issues of race.”

Sasha Carney ’23, a board member of Voke at the time of its closure, explained that in addition to a “nebulous sense that [the lack of diversity] was something that had been lingering around the edges of Voke for such a long time,” there were also some specific incidents that lead to the closing. For instance, when the conversation around Voke’s whiteness began, Voke’s only non-white board member explained to others that “they often felt kind of tokenized or overwhelmed being one of very few queer people of color involved in Voke.”

(Regina Sung)

 

This lack of diversity was also felt by Voke attendees, such as Arkansas, who remembers attending one event pre-pandemic. “It was just a lot of non-BIPOC people there,” they said. “I think I was probably the only person of color in that event … So I just felt not super uncomfortable, but just a little bit out of place.” 

Carney believes that this problem isn’t recent, but rather something that goes back to the group’s founding. The group was founded on the “idea of ‘Oh, there’s not a space for queer spoken word and there’s not a space for nonaudition spoken word,’” they said. “The premise of ‘Oh, we need spoken word for queer people’ kind of just automatically becomes ‘Oh, we need spoken word for white, queer people’ because it’s not like [other spoken word groups] aren’t already incredibly queer, it’s just that they don’t center whiteness.”

The Problem with Institutional Support

It is often difficult for BIPOC, queer students to receive institutional support due to their intersectional identities, which raises the question: Who should be responsible for providing support? Asian students, for example, know that the Asian American Cultural Center is able to provide culture-based support. White, queer students know to access identity-based support at the Office of LGBTQ Resources. However, when a student holds multiple cultural, gender and sexual identities — backgrounds that are often deeply entangled — this question becomes much more difficult to answer. 

Some students feel that the answer is in Yale’s cultural centers. Arkansas, for example, feels most comfortable at the NACC. “There’s a lot of queer Natives, there’s a lot of women that I trust … I’ve felt generally pretty comfortable in my identity at the NACC,” they said.

This is a sentiment echoed by many other BIPOC, queer students, especially those who come from hometowns with large BIPOC communities. “I’m from Miami,” Mela Johnson ’25 said. “I’m very used to being surrounded by other Latino people constantly, and it’s really weird being at school here and not having that all the time. So, going to La Casa is very important to me, just culturally … It feels a little bit more like home.”

This sense of community has been important, with Chen noting that places like the AACC have been more effective at creating this communal atmosphere due to how established they are on campus. 

For others, though, the cultural centers haven’t provided the comfort they seek. Lartey, who visited the Afro-American Cultural Center often in his first year, remembers that “there were not very many openly Black, genderqueer folks. And, especially, there were not a lot of dark-skinned, Black, genderqueer folks. In particular, there was [him] and this one other person, who very often carried the burden of being the ‘token queers.’” This tokenization caused him to feel “rejected by ‘organized’ Black spaces that were run through the House or through student groups.” However, Lartey also noted that queer inclusivity at the Afro-American Cultural Center seems to have improved since.

So, Lartey instead turned to the Office of LGBTQ Resources, where he found that “there was more of a raw understanding of being marginalized in those spaces [and] a lot more inclusivity about talking about differences.” He said that he felt like he could talk about his immigrant family, disability and other intersections of identity with people at the LGBTQ office.

Some students who come from more conservative countries or conservative areas of the U.S. have also been able to find solace in Yale’s queer community, whether that just be in the general student body or organized spaces like the Office of LGBTQ Resources. 

That is the case for Nawal Naz Tareque ’25. However, part of this is due to the support their peer liaison, Lartey, has provided. “I lucked out, in the sense that my [peer liaison] is a person of color,” said Nawal Naz. “A lot of what I feel … that experience of racial discrimination and discrimination as a gender minority … that intersection is something that I get to address, and I get to discuss that with Akweley.”

(Regina Sung)

 

Still others prefer the cultural centers over the Office of LGBTQ Resources. 

Whiteness is felt, by some, as an unspoken rule in queer spaces. Johnson’s experience has been that these spaces “default to whiteness as the expectation … it feels less culture blind, and more like they’re just approaching it without considering anybody outside of their own realm of experience … because the organizers are usually white.”

That expectation of whiteness can lead many to feel excluded for a variety of reasons. Montuori explains that his “racial and ethnic backgrounds fully inform how [he] operates as a queer individual” and “how [he’s] perceived as a queer individual” and how people assess him, “as far as gender and sexuality is concerned.”

Arkansas’ Cherokee background has influenced them in similar ways. They explained that “in the Cherokee language, there are over 24 pronouns, but none of them are gendered pronouns … There’s no real way to say ‘him’ or ‘her.’” This “explicitly nonbinary way of speaking” is the reason why they identify with all pronouns in English.  

Cultural backgrounds also impact how many students experience queerness due to the multifaceted discrimination that their intersectional identity is subject to. Ale Campillo, the organizer of a Trans/Non-binary BIPOC panel for Transgender Awareness Week 2020 — an annual, national event which the Office hosts on-campus programming for — elaborated in an article for The Yale Herald that “Black trans women and Indigenous trans folks, trans folks of color in general, are at the forefront of a lot of the violence and a lot of the problems that are happening within that community, because we are the most vulnerable.”

These factors, as well as the lack of discussion surrounding them in the majority-white Office of LGBTQ Resources, can lead many students to feel as if queer spaces at Yale are geared towards those who aren’t affected by such matters, thereby upholding an expectation of whiteness. “I think about how my status as someone who is brown, as someone who is poor, as someone who — as far as Yale, the institution, goes — maybe does not belong here … I see that feeling of not belonging at Yale very much transposed onto my experience iterating within the queer community,” said Montuori. 

One anonymous queer, BIPOC student believes that this problem has worsened recently with the passing of Andrew Dowe, assistant director of the Office of LGBTQ Resources, last January. “The Office kind of fell apart,” said the student. “[Dowe] was a Black man from the Caribbean, who was then replaced by a white person from the U.S. South. The Office has a lot more white faces, I mean it’s always been white, but has a lot more white faces, which feels very alienating for queer students of color.” 

Comfort from that alienation is something students are likely to seek out, as evidenced by the success of past programming. Johnson remembers that for the tea and wellness night, she “went out of [her] way to go to that … [She] was like ‘I’m gonna rearrange my evening cause I want to be there.’’’ Johnson’s experience suggests that if the Office creates places where people feel comfortable, students will naturally be inclined to populate those spaces and thereby feel more comfortable in the Office as a whole. 

In the meantime, until more of that type of programming exists, students are relying on groups such as BlackOut, Indigenous and Queer and student-organized programming such as the tea and wellness night. However, Chen thinks this student-led programming isn’t a permanent solution. 

“In 1997, Yale alum Larry Kramer ’57… offered Yale a multi-million dollar gift to create either an endowed chair in gay and lesbian studies or a student center for gay students … Yale said no to his millions.”

“I think that quite a lot of the existing efforts to help queer people of color feel more welcome on campus are more reliant on individual, student effort and are not yet institutionalized. For example, the tea and wellness night was literally just because Akweley Mazarae and I decided ‘yeah, let’s do it!’… Like, that’s not a sustainable solution. In two or so years, when we’re both gone, there’s no guarantee that this will continue,” said Chen. 

In many ways, the lack of university-led spaces is a result of Yale’s past inadequacies in supporting both the BIPOC and queer communities. For example, the Middle Eastern and North African Cultural Center was not established until 2021. According to a 2009 article in the News, “by 2006, Yale was the only Ivy League institution without a dedicated staff member for LGBT student issues.” This lack of institutional support extended to academics as well. That same article explains how “In 1997, Yale alum Larry Kramer ’57… offered Yale a multi-million dollar gift to create either an endowed chair in gay and lesbian studies or a student center for gay students … Yale said no to his millions.” More recently, in 2019, thirteen faculty members in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Department went on strike, “citing lack of university support.”

The problems facing both of these communities individually have compounded upon each other to produce the issues that queer, BIPOC students currently face. These problems aren’t new, it’s just the intersection they are occurring at that’s new, or at least newly visible.

Solutions on the Horizon

According to Samuel Byrd, newly-appointed director of the Office of LGBTQ Resources, culturally-inclusive programming is high on their list of priorities. One of the first steps will be expanding “collaborations and partnerships locally and nationally to help support [the Office’s] work,” said Byrd. “This includes collaboration and partnership with other cultural and community centers and organizations that specialize in supporting/engaging queer and trans people of color.”

Due to their own lack of experience in the Yale community, Byrd will also begin by “setting up a process by which [they] will be able to hear from the experiences of students, faculty, and staff across the university—with queer and trans people of color central to that listening.” This listening will contribute to “the Office’s collective visioning process: Who do we want to be together? What do we want to do together?” As of right now, many of the Office’s future plans, in this realm, seem to be abstract. However, this lack of definition could also mean an opportunity for the Office’s future programming to be truly shaped by the students it serves. 

Ultimately, though, the heterogeneity of queer people makes building this community much more difficult. “I think, just culturally, we are such a heterogenous community … If you look at queer folks of different socioeconomic backgrounds and genders and sexualities and races, ethnicities, nationalities it’s just — it’s a lot,” said Oscar Lopez ’22.

(Regina Sung)

 

As to how that community building has progressed in recent years, people have varying opinions. Chen notes that the problem has been something he’s noticed since arriving at Yale. Unfortunately, “it doesn’t seem like there’s been quite a lot of progress. Although, [he doesn’t] know whether that’s because of the nature of the problem … cultural shift takes a lot of time,” said Chen.

Lartey, on the other hand, feels like “the queer of color community, queer community at Yale — things have improved a lot since [his] first year. There’s a lot more connectedness, and [he sees] that especially with first years and sophomores.” He added that “there will always be, unfortunately, people who don’t feel like they fit in or takes a longer time, but [he feels] like it’s less of a common narrative.”

Whether or not the situation is improving, students have been able to find community in other, unorganized ways in the meantime.  

“I wouldn’t say I’m involved in Yale’s queer community,” said Montuori. “But do I have queer friends? Yes. Do I have people who are queer who I really love? Yes. Would I say I’m involved in Yale’s queer community? No.” Lartey echoes this sentiment, saying that he relies on his individual and group relationships to reaffirm his queerness. 

Calista Krass ’25, a white student, also doesn’t feel the need to seek out organized, queer community. ”Yes, I’m not that involved in the ‘community,’ but I don’t really feel like I’m missing out,” said Krass. Instead, she relies on her friends, nearly all of whom are queer.

“Do I have queer friends? Yes. Do I have people who are queer who I really love? Yes. Would I say I’m involved in Yale’s queer community? No.”

Krass also notes that she doesn’t “really care about [organized] events” because “they feel so forced, so [her] social anxiety jumps ahead.” She finds such spaces uncomfortable because she’s “used to [her] own friend group. So [she feels] like it would be weird for [her] to go to an event that is specifically like ‘Oh, this is a queer event.’” 

“[The event] is not about the people,” she said. “It’s about the fact that we are all going there because of this one thing.”

Krass’ choice to avoid organized spaces is based on her social preferences. However, for many BIPOC students, this choice is made based on both social preferences and on how they feel their culture or background is treated in queer spaces. While Krass raises a valid critique of the way queer spaces are organized, her critiques might also be inherent to the very concept of a queer space. Meanwhile, cultural-inclusivity — or the lack thereof — is a treatable issue that only affects a subset of the queer population. This issue is an obstacle to students having equal access to queer spaces and consequently being able to feel equally comfortable in their queerness on campus. 

Home

Perhaps the benefits of Yale’s queer community are best described by former Samuel Knight professor of history and American studies George Chauncey ’77 GRD ’89 in an article for the Yale Alumni Magazine, as he recounts what one first year wrote in his class: “Whereas the majority of students at my high school regarded gays and lesbians as outsiders, people fundamentally unlike themselves, Yale undergraduates seem to regard gays and lesbians as perfectly normal.” 

While this understanding of queerness may seem rudimentary today, the basic idea still resonates. The ability to feel normal, to feel accepted, to be your whole self — that’s what Yale’s queer community can offer when it’s functioning at its best. 

Perhaps, one day, Yale can live up to this ideal. For now, however, it falls unfortunately short for many queer, BIPOC students. 

“I want Yale to be my place. I want to feel like that is my second home, and in order to do that it needs to be more than just a place where I can be successful academically and find a career path,” said Macon. “I need to find my family there, I need to find a place where I feel comfortable, a place where I feel safe.” 

"I had to choose between my education and my safety"

How Yale's withdrawal and readmission policies leave students no choice but to stay.

Story by Serena Puang, Investigations Editor

Cover illustration by Zoe Berg, Photo Editor

Published on January 31, 2022

Content warning: This article contains references to suicide and self-harm.

***

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 1-800-273-8255.

Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To speak with a trained listener, text HELLO to 741741. It is free, available 24/7 and confidential.

To talk with a counselor from Yale Mental Health and Counseling, schedule a session here. On-call counselors are available at any time: call (203) 432-0290. 

Students who are interested in taking a medical withdrawal should reach out to their residential college dean.

Additional resources are available in a guide compiled by the Yale College Council here.

***

As is explored in the following story, Yale’s systems for withdrawal and reinstatement are surrounded by misconceptions and confusion. For clarity, much of the policy for Yale College — which differs from policies across the University, is included at the bottom of this story.

***

Before the start of the spring semester in 2o21, Serena Riddle ’21 and her therapist were at an impasse. Riddle had been living with depression since her sophomore fall, and she wasn’t doing well. Her therapist voiced concerns about her wellbeing and laid out her options: do an intensive outpatient program, start medication or go to the hospital.

“She said that preferably, more than one of these things would need to be true,” Riddle recounted.

If she chose none, her therapist said she would hospitalize her involuntarily. So, Riddle looked into her options. Could she do the intensive outpatient program while being enrolled? Absolutely not — it is impossible to do both, she realized. What if she started new medication? Her therapist felt she was too unstable to gamble on the possibility of side effects. Several people recommended that she withdraw from school, but that didn’t seem like an option for financial reasons. Riddle decided to enroll and spend the first few days of the spring semester in the hospital, hoping that she would be okay afterward to power through her last semester at Yale. 

Had she known that she would later have to completely withdraw from the semester, and navigate the murky waters that would come with that decision, she may have chosen differently, she said.

Last semester, I spoke to six students about their experiences with Yale’s withdrawal policy and spent over two months retracing their steps, searching for answers to their lingering questions about what Yale’s policy actually is. Whether because of specific University policies, failure to communicate these policies to students or longstanding rumors, many feel they have no choice but to remain enrolled, even when it might not be in their best interest. As a reporter, I’m trained to find and sift through documents, to comprehend and explain them to people. Still, despite  hours spent on policy websites, calls and long email exchanges, I was constantly redirected and confused by the contradictory information I was finding. 

At one point I was attempting to determine whether students can receive financial assistance for funds spent on community college classes necessary for reinstatement — Riddle is still unsure if she can get reimbursed for the $1,200 she said she spent on Gateway Community College classes. 

But when I called the financial aid office to clarify their policy, the representative who answered the phone redirected me to the withdrawal policy website. She said that the financial aid office could not answer questions about how students would be billed in case of a withdrawal or if their aid would cover those bills. According to her, that is a question that would involve contacting the registrar’s office, bursar’s office, Yale hospitality and a student’s residential college dean. When asked how a student could find out what specifically would happen with their financial aid if they withdrew, she said, “you wouldn’t know that until you withdraw.” When I sought to clarify further, she hung up on me. Alexander Muro, the associate director of financial aid, declined to comment about the lack of information. 

The hoops I jumped through seeking information about Yale’s policies are just one element of the issue, though. Because once someone does come to understand the policies, they are often more intimidated. 

A 2018 paper for the Ruderman Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on disability advocacy and inclusion, graded schools’ leave of absence policies with the help of national college mental health experts. No school received above a D+, and Yale received an F, which was one of the worst grades in the report.

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

“This is a problem that’s plaguing higher education in general,” explained Miriam Heyman, one of the coauthors of the paper and senior research associate at Brandeis University’s Lurie Institute for Disability Policy. Heyman and her coauthor concentrated on the Ivy League hoping that as leaders in higher education, if they started making strides on this issue, other institutions would follow.

Taking a break from Yale

At Yale, students can take time off in two ways: through a leave of absence or withdrawal. Students “in academic good standing” can petition to take a leave of absence for any reason on or before the fifteenth day of each semester. According to the Yale College Programs of Study, students who opt for a leave of absence may return at the beginning of the next semester without further application and have the right to stay on the Yale Health Plan during their time away. But after the 15th day of each semester, students who need to take time off must withdraw, and they’re permitted to do so for disciplinary, financial, personal, medical or academic reasons.

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

As soon as the withdrawal is in effect, students have 72 hours to move out and are barred from reentering campus during their time away unless they have explicit permission from their residential college dean. According to the Programs of Study, students are required to remain away for at least one semester, not including the semester during which they withdrew. When a withdrawn student wishes to return, they are subject to a reinstatement process which involves taking two courses at another college or university as well as submitting an application, a personal statement, letters of support and a letter from a clinician in the case of medical withdrawal. They must also be interviewed by the Committee on Reinstatement.

A wide variety of unforeseen circumstances can leave students with less emotional or physical capacity to do the work needed to continue their studies. Death in one’s family, accidents, sexual misconduct/stalking, mental health symptoms and chronic illness diagnoses don’t operate on the academic calendar. For many students, the circumstances which make it hard for them to stay in school happen in the middle of the semester, so they can’t choose to take a leave of absence. These students have to navigate a complicated process to take time off.

Choosing between Yale and your life

“It totally freaked me out,” Griffin Wilson ’24 said of the reinstatement process. As an international student from Canada, he worried that he wouldn’t make the grades he needed during his time away to be reinstated. Grades of B or higher are required for reinstatement.

“I felt like I had to choose between my Yale education and my safety — my Yale education and my life,” Wilson said. After he was hospitalized following a panic attack, his father flew to New Haven to stay with him. At this point, he was severely depressed.

“I was self-harming and suicidal,” he said. “I felt like if I was going to keep going with school, then there was a good to fair chance that I would end up dead.” 

“I felt like I had to choose between my Yale education and my safety — my Yale education and my life.”

But after looking into his options, he realized that he’d missed the leave of absence deadline, and he didn’t want to withdraw. On top of the reinstatement process, he would be required to remain away for an entire year, which was longer than he thought he needed. “I couldn’t do what was in my best interest without risking something that I had worked so hard for,” he recalled.

Last March, after a first-year student died by suicide, many students expressed grievances with Yale’s medical withdrawal policy. Students shared their fears about involuntary withdrawal and how that impacted the ways they sought treatment, the financial barriers created by Yale’s policies, their worries about not being able to return and their experiences of having their reinstatement applications denied.

Melanie Boyd, dean of student affairs, declined to comment for this article, but she wrote in an email to the News last semester that involuntary withdrawals are “exceedingly rare.”

“Stepping away from college to focus on mental health is the right decision more often than not, even if it may not seem so at the time,” Risa Sodi, assistant dean of academic affairs and chair of the Committee of Reinstatement, wrote in an email to me. “Yale College wants all withdrawn students to return to Yale when they are ready.”

But students can only return from withdrawal once. Yale’s policy stipulates that “A student is eligible to be reinstated only once; a second reinstatement may be considered only under unusual circumstances, ordinarily of a medical nature.”

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

Authors of the Ruderman Foundation’s white paper criticized minimum leave time policies and the capped number of withdrawals and reinstatement. “Trajectories of mental illness vary from one person to the next,” said Heyman, the paper’s co-author. Many students, she said, “get their sense of identity and purpose from being students. If that’s taken away, then it will take away a guiding structure in how you see yourself…. Any sort of finite number of three leaves or three months is completely arbitrary. And it’s counter to what we know about the individualized trajectory of mental illness.”

Tweaks but not comprehensive reform

Yale College Dean Marvin Chun oversees withdrawal policy. He isn’t directly involved with setting reinstatement policy, but major policy changes for both withdrawal and reinstatement are only made with the help of college-wide input in the form of a committee appointed by the dean.

When asked if there were any inconsistencies or problems he saw with the current policy, Chun said that he worries that “there’s this perception out there that withdrawal is scary and that reinstatement is scary, and I think students feel discouraged from taking a withdrawal because of these perceptions.”  Chun asserted that over 90 percent of students who apply for reinstatement are reinstated. I was unable to independently verify this statistic, but in an email, Sodi put the figure at approximately 80-90 percent. 

“I’m very willing to keep thinking about improving our policy so that students don’t feel that,” Chun continued. 

In his time as Dean, Chun has never made major changes to withdrawal policy — though there were some tweaks due to COVID-19 — nor appointed a committee to review the current policies.

The last committee formed to review the policy was appointed by Jonathan Holloway, Chun’s predecessor, in the fall of 2014. After meeting 11 times, the committee produced a 4,300-word report with recommendations to clarify and refine the process, including changing the name of the “readmittance process” to the “reinstatement process” to clarify that temporarily withdrawing does not nullify one’s initial acceptance. 

But the committee didn’t address the root of current student complaints. For example, the committee proposed “a clarification of the time such students have to leave campus, which is no more than 72 hours” but didn’t address the more fundamental requirement that gives students three days to pack, move out, arrange travel — in some cases internationally — and leave.

When asked for the reasoning behind this 72 hour policy, Mark Schenker, dean of academic affairs and member of the committee, declined to comment. 

“I don’t think we would extend the time,” said Chun. “It’s just good to have deadlines, so that students can know what to expect, and so that we know what to expect.” Extending the time, Chun said, “just drags on the move out process.”

According to a 2018 article about Yale’s reinstatement policies, Holloway endorsed all the 2015 recommendations, which means they could be enacted as policy, but while some changes were put in place immediately, others are still to be implemented. For example, the committee recommended that withdrawn students be given the right to petition for the use of the University library. But in 2021, this is still absent from the withdrawal policy website. The committee also recommended that all materials for the reinstatement application be made available on the Yale College website. As of January 2022, the application form is only available upon email request. 

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

When asked about further implementation of the now six-year-old recommendations, Chun pointed to the progress that had already been made. In response to the committee’s findings, Yale College extended the last day to take a leave of absence from ten to 15 days, eliminated the $50 reinstatement application fee, offered a teleconference option for reinstatement interviews (which students previously had to fly to New Haven for), and altered the role of the residential college deans in the reinstatement process. He said, “If there were to be further changes to be made, I think we would appoint a new committee.”

The need for transparency

“Regardless of how fantastic or horrible things are on the ground, knowledge is power,” Heyman said. In response to the white paper, many administrators told her about specific support they have for students, like a point person who could answer questions about the withdrawal process. “If that stuff isn’t written out in a transparent way, then students don’t know that they have the right to access those things,” Heyman continued. “And then [the universities are] not doing all they could to empower students.”

“Regardless of how fantastic or horrible things are on the ground, knowledge is power.”

At Yale, the policies are anything but clear. Before starting to report this piece, I spoke to friends, three professors, a dean, and Amelia Davidson ’24, who wrote the News’ piece on medical withdrawal in March 2021, just to see where I should start looking. In ten separate attempts to get answers from administrators, I was repeatedly referred to either the reinstatement FAQs or the leave of absence, deferral, withdrawal, and reinstatement policy webpage. These are considered the authoritative and current documents for what taking time off from Yale will look like. However, they conflict — both internally and with each other — and don’t contain some vital information.

For example, several changes made due to COVID-19 are displayed at the top of the reinstatement FAQs, but those changes are not reflected on the policy website. The website says that online courses “do not fulfill” the reinstatement requirements even if they’re taken at Yale Summer Session. However, the FAQs say that synchronous online classes do count. According to the FAQs, students seeking reinstatement for Spring 2022 whose withdrawals were processed through Yale Mental Health & Counseling should have their clinicians submit a clinician’s letter to Amy Perry of MH&C. The next section in the FAQs directs those same students to have their clinicians submit letters to Paul Hoffman, director of MH&C.

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

According to Chun, withdrawal is primarily processed through the residential college dean’s offices. Their role, according to Chun, is to be a “portal” to connect students with campus resources and help them find the answers if they don’t know it themselves. 

For Riddle, the student who opted to spend the first week of what was supposed to be her last semester in the hospital, the lack of clear information was a deterrent to even considering withdrawal in the first place. From the time she was diagnosed with depression as a sophomore, she’d heard from other students that she wouldn’t have financial aid when she came back, or that she would be required to pay for the time she spent at Yale before withdrawing for the semester. As a student on full aid, that was not feasible.

Riddle’s health insurance, therapy and psychiatric care were covered through Yale. But could she stay on the Yale Health Plan if she withdrew? That information is nowhere to be found on the Programs of Study website or in either of the documents I was referred to. 

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

After returning from the hospital, Riddle felt worse, not better, so she looked into medical withdrawal just a few days too late to take a leave of absence. After meeting with her residential college dean and spending over three hours with her housemates reading the policy online, she still didn’t have answers.

“If I could have gone to my dean and asked all my questions or got them all answered, I could have had all the information I needed to make my decision in one day,” Riddle said. “But instead it was dragged out over like two weeks or three weeks.”

When asked about how deans might help students find answers to the questions like the ones Riddle was asking, Chun said, “To make it easier for students, deans usually have all that information.” I emailed Riddle’s dean twice and called the residential college office multiple times and never got a response. 

Riddle started calling and emailing around. Yale Health Insurance Member Services told Riddle she could stay on her insurance plan provided that she purchased it for “some thousands of dollars” but she doesn’t recall the exact amount. And after many redirections and incomplete or inaccurate information, she was told in an email by Muro, the associate director of undergraduate financial aid, that she would have financial aid when she got back and wouldn’t have to pay for the semester she withdrew from.

“I was misled at literally every step,” Riddle said. After filling out all the paperwork and not doing her school work in anticipation of withdrawing, Riddle had a meeting with Paul Hoffman to make sure she understood what withdrawal would entail. He informed her that she couldn’t stay on Yale insurance after all, contrary to the information she had received when she called.

When I called Yale Health Member Services to inquire about students’ ability to stay on the health plan during a withdrawal, I was told that once students have withdrawn, “their plan ends at the end of the term.” This is not only different from what Riddle says she was told, but it’s also not what happened. Instead, Riddle lost her therapist and psychiatrist almost immediately — she saw them each one last time — and spent two months without insurance or treatment during the pandemic.  

After digging around online, two phone calls and an email exchange with Ariel Perez, assistant manager at Yale Health Member Services, I found the policy laid out online, but it’s not easy to find. 

When asked about the discrepancy in information, Perez wrote in an email that he “could not speak to specific instances” but explained that while “the process for petitioning for a leave or withdrawal are similar…the coverage pathways and termination periods are significantly different.”

“When my office receives call [sic] from students we find that at times a student presents with questions about a leave, but it is really a withdrawal or vice versa.”

‘Horror stories’ deter students from even asking questions about withdrawal

Gaps in written policy which necessitate these phone calls sometimes act as a deterrent to students who are not ready or able to dedicate time and energy to call around in the first place. 

When a student, who is currently a junior, was in her first year at Yale, she went to a cast party for a play and drank for the first time. She doesn’t know what happened after that, but she woke up in the hospital with abrasions on her chin. Her doctor told her she might have fallen and ordered a CT scan to make sure she didn’t have a concussion.

 She didn’t. She had an unusual growth in her brain.

The student, who has been granted anonymity due to fear of professional repercussions for her health issues, took a week to process and grieve before telling her parents. They wanted her to come home for treatment immediately. She looked into the policy online and felt intimidated about asking her dean for help or taking time off.

“My hope was just that I could take a leave until Christmas break and then come back in January,” she explained. But under the withdrawal policy, that wasn’t possible. “I was worried about coming back. I’ve heard so many horror stories of people that had issues that were even worse than mine and then being asked not to come back.”

Concerns about her financial aid, the reinstatement process, and not being able to live with her suitemates in the next year swirled in her mind as she went through a month of MRIs and doctor’s visits to try to diagnose what she now knows to be a cyst in her brain. At the time, she didn’t know if it was malignant or benign, how big it was, if she’d need surgery, or what signals to look for to indicate that her situation was serious.

“Every time I had a headache or brain fog or anything, I would get really worried,” she said. 

Bureaucracy and change

As the chair of the reinstatement committee, Sodi does not handle or influence withdrawal policy. These are separate processes. Yale University also doesn’t have a unified policy. Yale College, the graduate school, and each of the professional schools have their own individual policies. 

The representative from the financial aid office who hung up on me said she couldn’t speak to how withdrawal would impact what a student pays because billing doesn’t happen there. Financial aid only determines how much aid students receive to help with the bill.

According to Heyman, the researcher at Brandeis, needed changes include removing the prohibition on visiting campus during students’ time away and allowing withdrawn students to access campus resources.

Students and alumni are pushing for change. And according to Jasmine E. Harris, a professor and expert on disability and antidiscrimination law at the University of Pennsylvania, the changes that have been made were student-driven.

“The reason we’re doing much better is because students have made it a priority,” she explained. Students, she said, are “best positioned” to understand their needs and know if proposed modifications would be helpful, so solutions should start with them and keep the lines of communication as direct as possible. Playing a “game of telephone” with administrators to change or even just clarify policy can be a huge disincentive for students to seek help and is “completely inefficient,” she said.

“By the end of that game of telephone,” she said, “you’ve wasted time that the student may not have.”

Editor’s Note: Here is the information we could find to clarify Yale’s withdrawal and reinstatement policies.

When a student withdraws from Yale College, their financial aid is adjusted proportionately to the adjustment of their tuition. These adjustments are determined based on the time in the semester when the student withdraws, and more information can be found in Section D. on the Financial Services page of the online publication of the Yale College Undergraduate Regulations. This may or may not result in a balance due to Yale depending on their financial aid package and the point in the semester they withdraw. 

Once a student has withdrawn, they have 72 hours to leave campus. Withdrawn students cannot visit campus without permission from their residential college dean. 

Withdrawn students cannot stay on the Yale Healthcare plan. According to Yale Health’s website, students who withdraw from the University after the fifteenth day of the semester will be covered by Yale Health for 30 days after their withdrawal date or through the last day of the term, whichever comes first. 

“Fees will not be prorated or refunded. Students who withdraw are not eligible to enroll in Student Affiliate Coverage.” the website continues, “Regardless of enrollment in Yale Health Hospitalization/Specialty Coverage, a student who withdraws from the University will have access to services available under Yale Health Basic Coverage (including Student Health, Athletic Medicine, Mental Health & Counseling, and Care Management) during these thirty days to the extent necessary for a coordinated transition of care.”

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Protest and Progress

A History of Student Activism at Yale

Story by Lazo Gitchos

Illustration by Sophie Henry

Images Courtesy of Elizabeth Juviler

Published on January 27, 2022

The Yale Bowl does not have stadium lights – even the rare games that go into double overtime have ended before sundown. But the extended halftime of the 2019 Yale Harvard game left players on the field well into the dark. Immediately after the second period of the 2019 Yale Harvard football game, hundreds of students from both schools entered and occupied the field, holding banners reading “Yale and Harvard are complicit in climate injustice,” “this is an emergency” and “Nobody Wins.” Many Yale and Harvard students remember the Game protest as one of the most visible and forceful actions for fossil fuel divestment either school had ever seen.

As some of the media attention on the Yale-Harvard Divestment Protest would suggest, activism at Yale draws on a long and complicated history. In a collection titled “Student Unrest at Yale” at Sterling Memorial Library’s Yale Archive, there are dog-eared and yellowed petitions, letters to faculty and hand-written copies of student demands. With archive headings such as “Conic Section Rebellion of 1830” and “Bread and Butter Rebellion of 1828,” it’s easy to imagine early campus protests as little more than the petty airings of entitled student grievances. During the Conic Sections Rebellion, Yalies protested against a change to instructional policy that would force them to draw their own geometric shapes on exams, rather than refer to those printed in their textbooks. In response to petitions and walkouts, nearly 50 students were expelled from the University. The Bread and Butter Rebellion, marginally better received, was a response to a perceived drop in the quality of dining hall food.

In 1952, students took sides when two ice cream vendors’ disagreement over a prime vending location in front of the Yale Station post office reached a stalemate. More than 1,000 students flooded Elm Street, smashing car windows and throwing rocks and paper bags full of water. The two vendors were arrested, as were four students. According to a New York Times article, the New Haven Fire Department dispersed the riotous crowd using fire hoses.

Though events like these populate Yale’s archives on unrest from the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the first half of the 20th, Jay Gitlin ’71, a senior professor of history and prominent Yale historian commented, “in general, the Yale campus has not been a particularly radical one.” 

While Gitlin says that many protests in the 19th and early 20th century “were about food and the lack of quality,” this began to change in the late 1950s. The Ice Cream Riot of 1952, a disturbance that thrust Yalies into the national news, signalled the end of the old paradigm of protest at Yale. Soon, the chaos of entitlement would give way toward a culture of more earnest organizing. 

 

Protests at Yale have shaped university policy and, to some extent, public opinion on issues from free speech to racial justice. Yale’s administration has, in the manner of a firmly-established institution, resisted, inspired and ultimately accepted the existence of student protests. However, students say that this acceptance is qualified and incomplete. While Yale readily grants the right of protest to its students, many activists see the encouragement of polite action as a way to side-step the institution’s responsibility to address student grievances.

A New Paradigm of Protest 

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the hippie movement, a nationwide counterculture movement ranging from hardline anti-establishment to frustrated middle-class characteristics, inspired a series of nationwide youth movements with clear demands, factions and increasing demonstrations. In May of 1970,  thousands of students, community members and spectators from across the country packed Yale’s courtyards, dorms and dining halls to listen to speakers, attend teach-ins and follow the murder trials of Bobby Seale and three other Black Panthers. Seale, chairman of the National Black Panther Party, was accused of ordering the executions of a party member and suspected informant while visiting the New Haven Panthers in May of 1969. 

The end of the trial — which left Seale unindicted after a deadlocked jury failed to return a verdict — came during a spring that saw many university campuses in turmoil. Harvard’s April 15 protest-turned-riot was also partly in response to the Black Panther Trials (with one group in attendance calling themselves the Bobby Seale Contingent); Kent State saw a May 4 National Guard killing of four students protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War. 

The student movements came at a time of particularly strong resistance to protest by the establishment. The height of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the police murder of Fred Hampton and many universities’ refusal to acknowledge students’ demands threatened the demands and lives of activists. Yale’s administration under president Kingman Brewster faced a high-stakes test of their flexibility: Would they repeat Harvard’s locked-gate antagonism, precede Kent State’s violent martyring or avoid tumult altogether?

The tense atmosphere that spring forced Brewster to think outside the box, responding quickly to protest on Yale’s steps. Finals were postponed, classes changed to universal pass-fail, student activists invited speakers to courtyards and lecture halls and Yale Hospitality provided food for attendees, according to Yale Daily News articles from the time. This reception was enough to turn the event into a community gathering and largely peaceful protest action, avoiding the chaos faced by other universities. Brewster brought the May Day protests under the tent of the university, paving the way for the institutionalization of protest more concretely in the coming decades.

Yale’s South Africa Problem

Towards the end of the 20th century, Yale would face a new dilemma: the University’s complicity in injustice abroad. 

Elizabeth Juviler ’89 has visited Yale several times since she graduated. Aside from a few reunions and a family member’s graduation, a few years ago she accepted an invitation to attend an event with the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project and Fossil Free Yale. The groups, active in their respective campaigns for social and environmental justice, looked to past activists like Juviler for guidance, support and knowledge. Juviler said she engaged in campus activism to join the “tradition of calling to account this marvelously powerful institution to our values.” In 1986, her sophomore year, the rallying cry for campus activists would sound familiar today: divest.

Juviler remembers the 1986 scene between Woodbridge Hall and the Beinecke Library vividly. The plaza was home to an occupied protest known as “The Shanty Town” for nearly two years. Students and New Haven residents lived in makeshift buildings to avoid their removal. A sign posted near the shanties read “welcome to Winnie Mandela City,” named for the wife of Nelson Mandela. Tents and plywood-and-tarp structures surrounded the sunken courtyard, signs and posters displayed solidarity with Black South Africans under Apartheid and with Mandela, then imprisoned in South Africa. 

“On the day the suspensions were announced, the United States Senate voted to levy sanctions against South Africa. Yale, Juviler felt, had failed its test.”

At the time, Yale’s endowment owned more than $300 million in stock in companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. “We were looking for a clear financial statement that would support the advancement of democracy,” Juviler said. But first, the students wanted to be acknowledged by the University. On Sept. 22, 1986, dozens of students occupied the Yale Investments Office at 451 College St. The sit-in ended the same day with the arrest of 21 students, including Juviler. She, along with four other students, were suspended. “It stung,” Juliver said, “to be excommunicated from this institution” that she felt had promised her a forum for free expression. In an interview with the News days after her suspension she said of the Executive Committee decision: “They saw their job as to enforce the rules and regulations without any kind of contextual consideration of the action.” On the day the suspensions were announced, the United States Senate voted to levy sanctions against South Africa. Yale, Juviler felt, had failed its test.

In 1986, David Swensen began his role as head of Yale’s Investments Office. Reporting from that year tracks Yale’s response to Winnie Mandela City, as well as the Investments Office sit-ins and other related protests. While Swensen himself opposed apartheid divestment, the Investments office announced that the endowment would cut ties with one company that did not submit to Yale’s oversight of operations in South Africa. The office declined to name the company, but assured the Yale Daily News that it did in fact exist. That year, Yale committed to the Sullivan Principles of Equal Rights, a set of guidelines that companies in which Yale owned stock were to follow when doing business in South Africa. Among the Principles was the provision of fair pay regardless of race, unsegregated work and eating and increasing the number of non-whites in supervisory positions. Despite Yale’s commitment to these principles, in the mid-1980s one-third of Yale’s South African-involved investments were companies “whose practices violated the Sullivan Principles … one-fourth of which was located in banks that loaned money directly to the South African government” according to Swarthmore College’s Nonviolent Action Database. 

 

As Apartheid continued, Philadelphia civil rights leader and Sullivan Principles author Leon H. Sullivan grew uncertain of the efficacy of constructive engagement. According to the Philadelphia Encyclopedia, a decade after publishing his Principles and without change in law or policy by the South African government, Sullivan called for a “worldwide boycott” of businesses engaged in production in the country. While Yale reduced its investment in companies doing business in South Africa through the early 1990s, it is unclear whether this is due to the ethical implications of continued investment or the companies’ decreased profit returns. Large scale boycotts, international pressure and capital withdrawal are partially credited with bringing about the end of Apartheid. But Yale still owned shares in companies doing business in South Africa when Apartheid ended in 1994. 

Contemporary Protest Issues

On April 16, 2019, New Haven community members Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon were attacked and shot by a Hamden Police Officer and a Yale Police Officer while sitting in a parked car. The incident prompted protests on campus and in New Haven, and the formation of Black Students for Disarmament at Yale, or BSDY. Since 2019, BSDY has worked toward its goal of disarming and abolishing the Yale Police Department, a police force whose officers do not respond to any elected body but carry the authority to arrest members of the New Haven community. This authority, according to a public letter from BSDY to senior members of Yale’s administration, leads to the racialized violence that is “endemic to [police] departments nationwide.” 

After months of protest and community action, the Yale Police Department reassigned officer Terrance Pollock to an unarmed position. Officer Pollock was not charged with a crime. On Jan. 20, 2022, Hamden officer and instigator of the 2019 shooting Devin Eaton pleaded guilty to First Degree Assault and resigned his position with the Hamden Police Department. The charge, a Class B Felony, was brought by the New Haven State’s Attorney after months of community protest.

Now a junior, Callie Benson-Williams ’23 is the executive director of BSDY. Her first year at Yale, interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, ended with a summer of protests for racial justice and police accountability across the country. In the fall of 2020, after nationwide attention and news coverage on racism and police violence, as well as a widely-shared open letter to the University, BSDY received their first response, a letter from a University spokesperson asking to set up a meeting. But in the three years since their formation, BSDY has had just three meetings with University officials. Benson-Williams describes these meetings as “mostly them explaining their plans behind closed doors,” a frustrating lack of receptiveness. So far, the plans in question have included the formation of the Committee on Policing and the engagement of consulting firm 21st Century Policing to conduct an analysis of the Yale Police Department, which BSDY says is grossly inadequate.

Yale Taking Action?

Yale touts activism as an expected mode of existence, almost a prerequisite for attendance. Senior Assistant Director of Admissions Hannah Mendlowitz wrote in a University-affiliated admissions blog, “We expect [students who come to Yale] to be versed in issues of social justice. We encourage them to be vocal when they see an opportunity for change in our institution and in the world. We value student voices on campus and we encourage discourse and action.” 

Yale’s admissions website touts a similar, though less direct position: “Civic engagement on issues of public concern is consistent with attributes the Office of Undergraduate Admissions seeks in the high school students it admits.” But Benson-Williams said it can feel as though the University, by institutionalizing political action, “treats activism as another class … instead of real-world issues that are important to our lives.”

On one hand, “protest is exactly what [administrators] want from students at a university,” said Yale history professor Beverly Gage ’94. On the other hand, Gage explained, “administrators get pretty anxious about student protest. They’re also concerned about the ways that student protests can put pressure on the University to make decisions that they’re not necessarily interested in making.” Decisions like changes to endowment investment policy, undergraduate financial aid and the Yale Police Department, said Gage. Universities are “soft power” institutions, Gage said, “so [they] tend to be responsive to protest and media coverage in a way that other institutions would not be.” 

 

Yale redefined the institutional investor’s role in 1972 with their adoption of “The Ethical Investor,” a 200-page pamphlet written by Yale economists and professors. The adoption of an ethical framework was a radical policy shift from the passive, solely profit-oriented position accepted among institutional investors to what the New York Times called an “activist role,” a move that redefined the position of endowment fund managers and trustees. The primary consideration put forth in the guidelines is that of avoiding “social injury,” a loosely-defined term that the Yale Corporation would go on to refine, amend and dilute with regard to Apartheid and eventually fossil fuel investments by way of the Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility. 

After opening campus to protestors in the spring of 1970, this abandonment of financial passivity was the next step in bringing activism into the fold of the University, where it could be sanctioned, controlled and institutionalized. Though it was unclear at the time how the power granted to the Yale Corporation to leverage endowment investments to make political statements would affect activists, today it is clear that the move brought Yale into the political-economic sphere and offered the opportunity for the University to define what was, and wasn’t, acceptable activism.

“Universities are “soft power” institutions, so [they] tend to be responsive to protest and media coverage in a way that other institutions would not be.”

Professor Gage describes protest movements as responding to one of three types of issues: internal, hybrid or external — beyond the University. Internal issues, like Universal Pass/Fail as an equitable step in the University’s COVID-19 response in the spring of 2020, exist as interchanges between students and administrators. She described Pass/Fail as a rare issue where students were passionate and engaged, but it was “an easy choice for the University” to make the decision. Even then, she said, “there was a lot of back and forth” between organizers and faculty. 

While internal issues concern student life and well-being exclusively, hybrid issues attempt to align the University as a role model for other institutions through its own policy. Movements like divestment and abolition, while directed at Yale, seek to make the University a “model of environmental or racial justice,” said Professor Gage. Hybrid demands put the University in a harder position than internal ones due, again, to it’s soft-power response to optics and media coverage. 

Issues beyond the University and in areas where Yale has little sway, such as the Vietnam War era anti-war protests, are easier for the University to manage. Gage says these are instances where “if you’re an administrator, you might champion students going off into the world, changing the world, and speaking truth to power.” 

To this end, Yale began to embrace Dwight Hall, an undergraduate organization dedicated to “social change” and to “shaping those who one day will shape the world” as well as the Yale College Council, which serves as the primary liaison between the student body and the administration. Much of the student activism occuring on campus today occurs through these same channels that were established after the 1960s. 

Of note, since the adoption of “The Ethical Investor,” Yale has periodically tasked committees with defining and redefining the limits and liberties to speech on campus. “Beware the committee,” said Benson-Williams. “It’s another tool Yale uses to “support voicing our concerns without addressing the concerns themselves.” 

The most notable of these committees, chaired by prominent historian and Yale professor C. Vann Woodward, published the Woodward Report in 1975. This report would be the first to define the limits of activism in the context of Yale’s own role in the world, interpreting student action and university responsibility, as well as “social injury.” Published in response to protests and in recognition of the need for concrete policy, the report affirmed Yale’s role as an institution founded on “research and teaching,” “the free interchange of ideas” and “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” At the time, the report was seen as a practical pamphlet to guide Yale through a period of social unrest, protest and change. It also proposed harsh penalties, including suspension or expulsion, for students who engaged in “disruptive” protest or expression outside of the University’s accepted scope and scale, like Juviler’s sit-in.

Since Yale has had the power to define social injury caused by their investments, their definition has almost never included that which would reduce the profits of the endowment or compromise the standing of the University. The Yale Corporation has vigorously resisted these difficult hybrid decisions, Professor Gage told me, in the manner of a “conservative and slow-moving force.”

Concerning student protest in the present day, University Spokesperson Karent Peart did not respond to my emails between when I first reached out to her on Nov. 7 2021 and the time of publication. I also reached out to Hannah Mendehlson, whose blog post supported high school students engaged in action against systemic gun violence, an issue beyond the power of schools or universities to address, but she declined to comment for this story. 

“If you don’t have a building named after you, it’s very difficult to make change [at the University],” Benson-Williams said.

 

The Long Game

On the other hand, some students also see what Professor Gage describes as a “flowering” of student protest activity on campus in the last two decades. “We’ve seen a real resurgence” of protest action, Craig Birckhead-Morton ’24 said. Birckhead-Morton is a member of the Yale Democratic Socialists of America and Fossil Free Yale. He is also a volunteer for Students Unite Now, or SUN, a coalition of Yale students advocating for financial aid and mental health care reform. SUN, Birckhead-Morton says, is well positioned to leverage its ties to union labor, longevity at Yale; SUN has been advocating for financial aid reform on campus since 2012 and popularity of their demands among students to push the administration to change policies that the organization considers unfair and harmful.

“The press release carried no mention of nine years of organizing by students, but for the university to acknowledge students’ action would be to admit an inconvenient truth: Yale responds to protest and likely would not have made the policy change without sustained student organizing.”

For nearly a decade, SUN has been advocating for a change to Yale’s financial aid policy: the removal of the Student Income Contribution, or SIC. Student lobbying has consistently preceded changes to Yale’s financial aid policy, on issues from need-blind admissions to international student aid. The SIC, which SUN considered regressive and unnecessary, spent years in the crosshairs. During this time SUN, like BSDY, found scheduling a meeting with administrators to be nearly impossible.

In October 2021, Yale announced the end of the billed portion of the Student Income Contribution. The press release carried no mention of nine years of organizing by students, but for the University to acknowledge students’ action would be to admit an inconvenient truth: Yale responds to protest and likely would not have made the policy change without sustained student organizing. That the slow-moving institutional force would appear to function without the confrontational input of undergraduate students makes perfect sense: the University would like to appear to be able to make these decisions on its own. 

Still, for institutions of higher education, especially those thick with tradition and history, progress happens slowly and quietly. With one-fourth of the student body leaving every year, undergraduates rarely see results of their activism while still on campus. As Birkhead-Morton pointed out, students see “from a moment in time,” while the University sees students come and go on a centuries-long scale: a structural difference in ability to sustain agendas. With a short institutional memory, a lack of university action can be discouraging. 

But in the last 60 years, student protest at Yale has moved from untenable, to accepted, to encouraged when polite. Moreover, in the age of softer power and ubiquitous media coverage, Yale is becoming more responsive to not only internal issues but “hybrid” issues of policy and behavior modeling. 

The reality of Yale’s long-term malleability is no less relevant today. As Birkhead-Morton said, SUN’s success in advocating against the Student Income Contribution demonstrates that “the administration must move on basic things, or students will make them.”