Yale Daily News

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Tennessee, country tunes and typical pleasantries were among the points of conversation in a four-minute phone call between Victor Ashe ’67 and University President Peter Salovey two springs ago. 

Ashe, the former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee and United States ambassador to Poland who was running for a coveted spot on the Yale Corporation, had qualified as one of the first petition candidates on the ballot in 18 years. Salovey had called to inform Ashe that he had lost the election and then had a short, polite conversation with him.

A mere four hours later, Catherine Bond Hill GRD ’85, then the senior trustee for the Yale Corporation, issued a public statement announcing that the petition process by which Ashe and other alumni pursued a seat on the board had been terminated — which meant that alumni could no longer vie for membership on the Board of Trustees without first receiving nomination from the Yale Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee. Salovey knew all about the decision, Ashe claimed, but didn’t have the “fortitude or the decency” to tell him during that call.

“When he called me that day to tell me that I did not win, he had at the same time orchestrated [the termination], and the Corporation met in secret without conferring with anyone,” Ashe said. 

Salovey did not respond to a request for comment on his interactions with Ashe.

Ashe would not have the chance to speak with the president again until last May, when he returned to campus for his 55th class year reunion. At a Timothy Dwight College dinner event, Ashe approached Salovey. The former mayor had a 10-minute conversation with Salovey, who told him that the effort to eliminate the alumni petition process came from the Corporation, not himself.

But Ashe believes “that sort of dodges the issue” since Salovey chairs the Corporation meetings. 

“He’s a leading member of the Corporation,” Ashe said. “That didn’t happen without his involvement. I mean, to suggest that somebody else on the board was behind it is duplicitous. It’s disingenuous.”

In December, Connecticut superior court judge John Burns Farley allowed a formal complaint that Ashe and Donald Glascoff ’67 filed against Yale to move forward. The complaint claimed breach of contract, arguing that the University had failed to uphold legal obligations to alumni. 

When Ashe and Glascoff refer to “Yale” in their lawsuit, they are referring to the Yale Corporation, the University’s board of trustees. But Yale and Harvard University are unique in that they are the only two American universities for whom the university president also serves as chair of the board. Both alumni admitted that they had no idea how much influence Salovey had in the actual decision making process, given the secrecy of the proceedings. 

“That’s the case here,” Glascoff, a legal attorney, said. “Certainly, President Salovey has to satisfy his boss. His boss is the trustees and [he has] to keep them advised and thoroughly involved in the process of running the institution.”

Salovey’s role is to serve as a conduit between the campus community and the trustees. On the other hand, Salovey’s fellow 16 trustees — who include corporate CEOs, government officials and presidents of other universities — advise him on most pressing decisions, from endowment investments to high budget developments. Their meetings, held behind closed doors, remain secret for 50 years. While Salovey is expected to make the final decisions, the trustees retain the ability to appoint — and fire — a sitting president.

In the last few years, the Yale Corporation has become a target of public criticism, especially by students and alumni. Ashe and Glascoff’s lawsuit, which will move forward this year, is joined by a January referendum put forth by the Yale College Council where an overwhelming majority of undergraduate students voted to democratize trustee elections. 

As students and alumni search for accountability at Yale’s highest ranks of leadership, many have expressed confusion over Salovey’s role behind the closed doors of Yale’s most powerful governing body. The News spoke to 20 alumni, students, faculty, administrators and trustees familiar with the University about the evolving dynamic between the Yale President and the Corporation. 

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No surprises

“I can’t think of a time in which the trustees took over in a sense, and told the President this is the way it’s going to be and then they announced it,” said Henry “Sam” Chauncey ’57, a longtime administrator at Yale who served as University Secretary from 1963 to 1977 under former Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr. “It’s just unique.”

The basic philosophy, Chauncey said, was that the person who runs an institution knows that institution best. He added that if a board initiated a proposal for a course of action that the president did not like, the president would quit.

Chauncey described a historical relationship between the president and the trustees that is very different from the one that exists today. Once in the 1960s, Brewster asked the board of trustees to review his performance for the previous several years of his presidency. Brewster wanted to confirm that the board had confidence in him, Chauncey said, even though the president already had popular support from the students and the faculty. 

“The board said, ‘No, we don’t do that’,” Chauncey told the News. “When you’re appointed the president of Yale, you have the job.”

But Brewster threatened to resign if the board did not follow his instruction — so the trustees folded, and set up a “really elaborate six month process of reviewing the president.” The results came back with a “stunningly positive review” from everyone except alumni, given his relatively progressive University policy at the time.

That good faith dynamic appeared to be University policy for several decades until the late 20th century.

Former University President Richard Levin, Salovey’s predecessor, told the News that the Corporation had a “lot of anxiety” when he took office in 1993. 

Faculty unhappiness over budget cuts, dated infrastructure and a precarious relationship between Yale and New Haven had intensified over the 1980s and 1990s before Levin took office. A murder on campus and high crime rates in the surrounding city, Levin added, all contributed to the sense that Yale’s leadership needed to make changes and needed to make them fast.

While Levin said the corporation had “taken a risk on a young president” when they selected him, they didn’t stop there. The trustees also made several large-scale reforms to their own role in University governance, many of which survive to this day. The Corporation began to develop policies that would make them more involved, Levin said. They wanted to make sure there were “no surprises” when it came to developments on campus, good or bad.  

“The motivation for this was that the Corporation had failed after my predecessor left,” Levin said. “That they had really not been aware of the magnitude of the problems on campus and that they wanted to be better informed.”

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Levin would organize an executive session during every Corporation meeting, when he would speak to the trustees and update them on campus developments. He looped them in during early stages of development, rather than presenting policies or initiatives that were already “fully worked out.” But as Levin grew into the role, Corporation members expressed their faith in his judgment and took a more hands-off approach to his decision-making.

“Rick had been there for many, many years when I came onto the Corporation,” Francisco Cigarroa, a former trustee who served in the last three years of Levin’s presidency and the first three years of Salovey’s tenure, said. “He certainly had formed a lot of experience underneath him and had established a lot of trust with the board and so, you know, the board gave him a lot of leeway.”

When University leadership discussed timing for the construction of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray Colleges, Levin said that many members of the corporation were “very eager to expand” and thus preferred for those schools to be built sooner than later.

Levin disagreed, and after a “push and pull” between him and the board, the project was delayed for several years. The University did not yet have the financial resources to “do it right,” Levin said, so he resisted moving forward.

Under Levin, the general consensus was that the trustees were not decision makers. To most, their job appeared to be counseling, shaping, advising and supporting the president, including on issues of governance. When Levin stepped down in 2013, the trustees expressed a desire to be more involved in difficult decisions when they considered Salovey as the university’s next president.

It’s difficult to succeed a highly successful president such as Levin, Cigarroa told the News. The presidential search committee, which included Cigarroa, saw two notable attributes in Salovey. First, he had heavy experience in administrative positions, including as Yale’s provost, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and dean of Yale College. 

Second, Cigarroa said, Salovey “brought in a different personality.” As a social psychologist in the classroom and a clinical psychologist in the field, Salovey’s “human leadership” caught the attention of the Board.

“Compared to the candidates that we were interviewing, certainly he was able to connect with the trustees and with people he met better than most,” Cigarroa said.

And indeed he did. After a unanimous Corporation vote, Salovey was inaugurated as the 23rd president of Yale in October 2013.

“I’m a first year, just like you!” newly appointed University President Peter Salovey proclaimed to a crowd of incoming Yale first-year students that same year, a grin on his face.

Salovey enters the scene

“Those first couple of years were difficult,” Nancy Better ’84, a longtime fundraising chair for the University and capital campaign co-chair, said.

She was referring to a string of campus controversies, many of which related to racial tensions, that began in 2015.

Two years into his presidency, Salovey became a polarizing figure. In 2015, former Head of Silliman College Nicholas Christakis and Associate Head Erika Christakis faced student backlaxsh after the latter sent out an email dismissing concern over cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes. Salovey received criticism first, for his handling of the incident, and then for siding with the Christakis. 

Roughly 200 undergraduate students marched to Salovey’s home on Hillhouse Avenue to protest institutional racism at Yale. They pointed out two things: one, that Salovey’s first campus wide email since the Christakis controversy outlined an initiative to tackle tobacco use on campus, and two, that Salovey’s later email addressing the scandal spoke about affirming students’ freedom of speech instead of racial tensions at Yale.

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But this was not the only criticism Yale faced at the time. That year, students demanded that Calhoun College be renamed — it is now known as Grace Hopper College — and that the title “master” be abolished — it has now been replaced as “head of college.”

In that same 2015 interview with the News, Salovey said that decisions about renaming and naming residential colleges fall under the domain of the Yale Corporation.

When it came to the Calhoun renaming, the News reported in 2015 that Salovey and the other 16 members of the Yale Corporation spent seven months deliberating over whether to rename Calhoun College and eliminate the title of master. In April 2016, Salovey announced that the college would not be renamed — only to reverse that decision 10 months later.

University stakeholders were unhappy with the extended process that was required to make a final decision. A  2019 News investigation found that major donors were doubtful of Salovey’s ability to effectively lead the University through a fundraising campaign because of his handling of the Calhoun renaming. 

Trustees who were in the room during the Calhoun deliberations described Salovey’s decision-making process as very collaborative. Hill told the News that when she became a trustee, Salovey was determined to engage the trustees in Corporation meetings when it came to large issues.

“He seemed very open and honest and engaged with the board,” Hill said.

Paul Joskow GRD ’72, who served as a trustee from 2008 to 2020, said that Salovey can recognize mistakes, and is willing to engage in consultation and collaboration to correct those mistakes.

“He recognizes that an autocratic leadership style is an unsuccessful approach,” Joskow said.

Salovey has prioritized collaboration in his dealings with the Corporation. The three trustees who spoke to the News for this story all independently attested to Salovey’s ability to listen empathetically. 

Chauncey said that during the Griswold and Brewster administrations, presidents typically tried to personally bond with the trustees to foster a good working dynamic.

“That makes for a really good relationship, because if you disagree with a friend, that can be usually done much more effectively than if you disagree with someone you don’t like,” Chauncey said.

In this respect, Salovey has conducted himself similarly to his predecessors. When Cigarroa was a trustee in the early years of his presidency, he would enjoy dinners with Salovey and his wife, Marta Moret. Cigarroa added that Salovey was easy to connect with on a human level, a sentiment shared by many of those who were interviewed by the News. 

“He has a way of making people very comfortable,” said Randy Nelson ’85, a co-chair of the Yale Development Council. “I think it’s just generally, people like to be understood and heard. They like to feel that they’re important and Peter has a way of making everybody feel important.”

In describing his dynamic with the Corporation, Salovey says that when it comes to managing the University’s day-to-day operations, he often reports a decision to the trustees “that has already been made.” But when it comes to governance, or processes by which issues will be decided or voted upon, he will tend to “lay out options” and “be receptive to their feedback.” 

“My experience as a psychologist … helps me try to understand the vantage point and perspective by which a trustee or a group of trustees might be coming [from], particularly if they disagree with me,” Salovey said.

One of the 17

By the time that Ashe vied for a Corporation seat in 2021, many former University leaders had already made note that, following Salovey’s inauguration, the dynamic between the president and the Corporation had appeared to have drastically changed.

The perception that Salovey was merely a voice at the table instead of the Corporation’s final decision-maker only became more prevalent among students and alumni in light of the trustees’ decision following Ashe’s failed election.

“I write on behalf of the Yale Board of Trustees to inform you of a change to the process for electing Alumni Fellows to the board,” Hill, the senior trustee at the time, wrote in a letter addressed to alumni in May 2021. 

She said that the petition process had recently been embraced by candidates who had particular issues or reforms in mind, which current trustees found incompatible with their goal. 

“It is because Yale’s fiduciaries must represent the interests of the university above their own or those of any backers that we find the prospect of cause-based elections so troubling,” Hill said.

Ashe was largely backed by the William F. Buckley program, a political group which claims to advocate for free speech on campus and receives financial support from high profile conservative donors. 

Hill added that there was concern that elections would “discourage many qualified and desirable candidates” from accepting a nomination, citing politicization and a costly campaigning process as barriers to entry. She acknowledged that there would be some who would “object to this decision” but felt confident the board was correct.

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Michael Poliakoff ’75, a Yale alumnus who also serves as president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told the News that he was “absolutely appalled” by the petition vote for two reasons. He said that it reflects what he calls the Board’s fear of diverse voices that have not been “vetted carefully” who could challenge the status quo.

“It’s as if the existing board is saying that we’re … just people who wave a handkerchief at reunions and sing ‘God, country and Yale’, and then start waving the checkbooks,” Poliakoff said of himself and other alumni.

Chauncey could not recall any announcement in which a senior trustee announced a decision to the Yale community ever being made in any presidency that he has been involved in at Yale since the 1950s.

Salovey defended the board’s decision, explaining that there was an important group within the board of trustees that “grapples with issues of governance” — the trusteeship committee. The president is not a voting member of that committee, but Salovey said that he attends those meetings as a “source of information,” noting that he votes in the final Corporation decision.

When it came to the decision to terminate the alumni petition process, Salovey said that he agreed with Hill’s concerns that she vocalized to the Yale community but that he had no special vote when it came to the final decision. He was only “one of the 17 [members]” when it came to that decision, Salovey said.

Salovey did not confirm how he himself voted.

Students call for change

It was Kyle Hovannesian ’25, a Berkeley College undergraduate senator, who first sparked the idea to advocate for change in the structure of the Yale Corporation through the undergraduate representative body. 

Hovannesian, with a group of other student senators, wrote a letter to the trustees raising concern over alleged lack of transparency and community input in its decision making process. It was unlikely the Corporation would support democratization of trustee elections, Hovannesian said, but he also included in the letter what he thought were some other less significant and “pretty reasonable requests” for reform which he believed would give the trustees greater access to student input.

The Yale College Council held their referendum in January. They asked two questions: “Should the board of trustees for Yale Corporation consist of democratically elected trustees?” and “Should students, professors, and staff be eligible to vote for candidates for the board of trustees for Yale Corporation?” 

The vote was overwhelmingly yes on both, with over 2,000 students voting in the affirmative — 90 percent of those who voted. As a result of the referendum results, the letter Hovannesian wrote was approved by the Senate on Feb. 5, and submitted to Salovey on Feb. 6.

Hovannesian told the News that he was disappointed with Salovey’s response to the letter. The president did not respond to any of the six recommendations, he said. 

Salovey also did not publicly address the concerns raised by the results of the referendum. 

“I feel like people didn’t really know what happened with the referendum,” Hovannesian said. “Like what was the point of it?”

But while the administration provided little response to students’ concerns, the referendum itself received wide media attention. A week after the referendum, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece entitled “Make Yale Democratic Again.”

“It seems the wealthier American universities get — Yale’s endowment is $41.4 billion — the less open they are to different voices,” the op-ed read. “At a time when it’s become fashionable to cast any political disagreement as a ‘threat to democracy,’ some of the institutions that trumpet democracy the loudest don’t mind undermining it in their own governance.”

Still, Hovannesian cautiously avoids putting the blame on Salovey for his response to the letter. 

“I don’t want to criticize his leadership because I don’t really know what else he could have done,” Hovannesian said. “Because his boss at the end of the day is the board of trustees. So he’s not going to anger them and lose his position, essentially.”

Salovey, now

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Salovey told the News that the culture among the Yale Corporation is to “try to support the decision that the leadership of the University wants to make,” backing him and the rest of his cabinet. But he also noted in interviews with the News that it can be difficult to make everyone at the University happy with every decision.

He added that the trustees are currently in discussion on how they can be more responsive to student input, which he believes will lead to “novel opportunities” for Yale students to interact with the Corporation. 

“I think over time, as a leader, I’ve become better at making sure that everyone at the table, whatever that table is… has an opportunity to weigh in, is listened to, and their ideas are taken seriously,” Salovey said.

However, only 16 people at that table have the ability to fire him.

2023 marks Salovey’s 10th year as president of Yale University.

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If anyone knows a scholarship success story, it is Rori Reiswig ’25. Starting in eighth grade, after being nominated as a scholar for the pre-college program, she knew that she would have a high chance of winning the Jack Kent Cooke College Scholarship later on in high school. And she did. 

A first-generation, low-income college student — and now a Cooke scholar — she earned $55,000 in annual scholarships for three years of undergraduate studies on top of the full financial aid package Yale provided her as a student whose family earns less than $75,000 annually.

This dual coverage comes with qualifications, though. The Cooke Scholarship only sends Reiswig $3,700 to pay her “student share,” a standardized University estimate for the cost of books and personal expenses and the number all Yale students on financial aid — even those receiving a 100 percent aid package — are expected to contribute to their education. This number does not appear in the term bill. Most large scholarship funds like Cooke are conscious about only providing funding for fees that the financial aid of colleges does not already cover. In Reiswig’s case, Yale would already pay for her tuition, room, board and activities expenses, so Cooke refrained from sending more than $3,700. 

If they were to give Reiswig the full $55,000, Yale would use the scholarship money instead of their own to fund Reiswig’s term bill, which would allow the University to grant more financial aid money to other students. 

This process by which a University replaces their own financial aid funding with outside scholarships is called scholarship displacement. Universities may displace scholarships for the same reason that outside scholarship funds limit their awards to students already receiving 100 percent financial aid packages from their schools — both want to cover tuition for the maximum number of students.

“What was surprising was that a lot of the scholarships, colleges and students we worked with did not know about these policies,” Sbeydeh Viveros-Walton, a leader in higher education policy and equity and a director at the nonprofit Public Advocates, said. “Financial aid is something that has a lot of digression, and educating everyone is an ongoing journey.” 

In recent decades, displacement has garnered national scrutiny for the impact it has on financial aid, particularly for first-generation, low-income students. While the overwhelming case is that colleges and scholarship funds share a vested interest in ensuring that first-generation and low-income students can afford an education, ignorance of the nuanced relationship between internal college awards and external grants on all fronts in the higher education system — as well as varying levels of privilege across the nation’s colleges — can prevent students from taking full advantage of the external aid they receive. 

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”Rori Reiswig ’25, a neuroscience major at Yale completing a certificate in education studies, is the recipient of the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship.” credit=”Tim Tai, Photography Editor” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/upclose_bz_TimTai_PhotoEditor_13.jpeg” link=”” ALIGN=”full”]

The refund

Mandated reporting of scholarships to colleges is a result of individual college policies, not federal law or regulations. The only legal requirement on the national level is reporting the taxable portion of an external scholarship, anything in excess of tuition and mandatory fees, to the Internal Revenue Service. 

At Yale, students may be required to complete a Family Information Supplement form after matriculation, which includes a section on outside awards, following matriculation — and for students receiving Yale financial aid, expected outside awards are either indicated in the Yale financial aid application or through a separate Outside Scholarship/Resource Information form. 

Full-aid students like Reiswig who receive outside grants equivalent to or above $3,700 may allocate excess scholarship funds for their $3,700 student share. Along with travel costs, the student share is one of the aspects of a student’s package that is not a direct payment to the University — and it is also the section that outside scholarships contribute to if a student is already on a Yale full ride. Comparatively, a higher-income student who is not receiving aid from the University but has outside awards will have that funding first go toward covering the total cost of attendance and the parent share — and only toward the student share if there is any amount from the award leftover.

For Reiswig, this allocation of scholarships to the student share produces an annual $3,700 refund that appears in the student’s personal accounts, if the option to refund “everything” is selected. Theoretically, the refund is supposed to be applied for those aforementioned indirect costs, but many put it toward travel or other means.

Some full aid students argue that the application of external scholarships, especially those that specifically accept applications from low-income students, should delve beyond the student share to yield a more considerable refund, therefore expanding coverage to accommodate expenses that are not as easily anticipated in a student’s internal aid package.

Lusangelis Ramos ’25, a QuestBridge student receiving multiple outside awards, has to plan out her finances so she can afford necessary medical care for her mental health and chronic conditions, something that she said her “full ride” from Yale does not take into consideration. 

“Disabled people like me are more likely to be low income than non-disabled people,” she said. “As someone that seems to have endless health problems, I am in contact with Yale Health a lot and I have to pay for my Yale Health copays out of pocket.”

In the United States, adults with disabilities live in poverty at over twice the rate of adults without disabilities — 27 percent versus 12 percent. A 2018 article in “Inquiry: the Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing” also found that the average annual health cost for a person with a disability is almost five times that of a person without a disability, and that out-of-pocket costs are more than double, at $1,053 versus $486. 

As a student receiving several outside scholarships, Ramos emphasized that there is the added layer of challenge that comes with communicating between all her organizations to ensure that only the necessary amount is sent to Yale to avoid displacement.

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”Lusangelis Ramos ’25, a QuestBridge scholar, explained that her financial aid package from Yale does not provide ample coverage for her chronic health challenges.” credit=”Gavin Guerrette, Photography Editor” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Up_Close_BZ___Gavin_Guerrette___Photo_Editor-08-scaled.jpeg” link=”” ALIGN=”full”]

For example, if a low-income student on a full ride from Yale also receives two outside scholarships of $5,000 each per year — for a total of $10,000 — the student will receive an expected refund of $3,700, and the remaining difference of $6,300 goes into reducing or “displacing” a student’s existing financial aid package, which is paid for through internal grants, institutional endowment and alumni donations. The same student would receive the same amount of money if they had asked only one of their scholarship organizations to send Yale $3,700. In the second scenario, however, the scholarship organizations themselves would not lose any money and may then allocate those excess funds to another student. 

Many scholarship distributors, such as the Asian Pacific Islander American Scholarship, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, send out surveys that request their students’ academic and financial standing for every year that the scholarship could be viably renewed. The questions on these surveys intend to assess what recipients need covered. For Yale students, this may amount to the student share and any additional costs that students have to pay out of pocket. 

The colleges’ perspective

As scholarship organizers defend students who they believe are being undermined in their educational efforts and intensive scholarship searches, colleges argue that displacement permits reallocation of resources to students with greater need and who did not receive external aid. At Yale, the average aid package for students on aid exceeds $67,000, and the number of admitted students receiving Pell Grants has climbed steadily over the years. 

“Our policy is that outside scholarships may replace the standard student share, which is $3,700 for all undergraduate students,” Alexander Muro, the interim director of the Yale Office of Undergraduate Financial Aid, wrote in a statement to the News.

At Yale, students on full aid who receive large external scholarships may apply up to $2,500 toward a one-time technology grant after their scholarships cover the $3,700 student share, he added. 

Referencing the previous example of the college student receiving two outside scholarships, each for $5,000 annually, they may at one point apply $2,500 in outside aid toward a new computer, pair of headphones or tablet, using $6,200 of the total $10,000. The remaining difference of $3,800 would still go toward reducing the student’s aid package from Yale if the student reported the scholarships to Yale.

It is important to note that the technology grant and student share coverage from external scholarships is liable to taxation. According to Muro, all grants and scholarships “in excess of tuition and mandatory fees are considered taxable income.” While students do not have to pay taxes on scholarships that cover tuition, costs such as the student share and room and board do not fall under the “mandatory fees” category, so external scholarships used to pay for those expenses are taxable. 

The University offers limited support for students navigating taxation. Muro said that he is not a tax professional and is thus unable to provide in-depth tax advice. 

When Reiswig asked representatives from the Financial Aid Office about what parts of her financial aid were taxable, she was told to speak to a professional in the area. The Yale Student Employment website affirms that while there is no personal assistance at Yale for students filing taxes, the local IRS office located at 150 Court Street can assist students in preparing returns. 

“I don’t understand exactly what we’re supposed to pay taxes on and what we’re not, so I will be submitting my documents and hoping for the best,” Reiswig wrote in an email to the News. “I understand if they’re not legally allowed to give tax advice, as was the implication of their comments, but it would be really helpful if they gave students a [more comprehensive] list of resources … to help us navigate.”

Safety Net

University policy requires students submit a receipt to receive the $2,500 technology award. Other financial aid supports such as the winter clothing grant offered at the Yale College Dean’s Office and Safety Net, an emergency funding option through the Yale College Dean’s Office, follow a similar model. Students must first pay for an item out of pocket and then submit an official receipt for reimbursement. For students who cannot immediately afford the overhead cost, this is a burden. 

Reiswig explained that this delayed reimbursement usually isn’t an issue, but that more time-sensitive expenditures can exceed what a student can afford, especially for individuals who lack the capacity to pay for large costs. The process has created difficulty, for example, for low-income students moving off-campus — since refunds can arrive much later than deadlines for security deposits.

“I’m lucky to be in a position where I don’t have to worry about navigating many different scholarship sources and how they come together, but I would say that my greatest challenge has been with the timing of the refund,” Reiswig added. “Yale’s estimated travel cost doesn’t include getting to college in the fall, and I don’t usually receive my [$3,700] refund until a few weeks into the school year. It can be difficult getting what I need at the beginning of the year before it comes in.”

Reiswig is not alone. For students like Harvey Lloyd Picar ’25, a roundtrip airline ticket to his home in Hawaii runs up to hundreds of dollars and can cost close to a thousand when booked at the last minute. When his sister, Harlene, suddenly passed away in October 2022, Picar had to travel back and forth from Hawaii several times while fall semester was still in session. 

Picar, who receives both full aid and a Gates Scholarship, turned to a representative from the Yale Financial Aid Office to see whether his scholarship could fund his travel home. The official told Picar that while he could request coverage, he would not receive the funding until the following year. 

But Picar needed the money right away. 

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”After the unexpected loss of his sister, Harvey Lloyd Picar ’25 encountered difficulty receiving immediate support from his external scholarship.” credit=”Tim Tai, Photography Editor” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/upclose_bz_TimTai_PhotoEditor_08.jpeg” link=”” ALIGN=”full”]

Ultimately asking a cousin to cover his first round trip between New Haven and Hawaii. Then he learned about the University’s Safety Net program, which covered the full cost of his second trip home — this time, to attend Harlene’s funeral. For “emergency” requests, Safety Net reimburses funds within 24 hours. Between 2018 and 2019, around half of all requests were resolved with funding or a loan of equipment. 

The funding arrived at a critical moment for Picar, who suggested that outside scholarships should consider a similar model for supporting first-generation, low-income students through unexpected expenses, especially if scholarship displacement prevents students from otherwise taking full advantage of their resources. 

Some students have not had nearly as successful of an experience with Safety Net, but agree that its support is a fast solution to immediate problems confronting low-income students whose financial backgrounds lack the stability of higher-income households. As an individual with chronic health conditions, Ramos wished that either her “full ride” from the University or the Safety Net could cover her medical visits. 

“Essentially a situation that I have encountered is being denied Safety Net funding and being explicitly told that it’s because I had already received significant funding via Gates or outside scholarships,” Gates scholar and first-generation, low-income student Kimberly Wenceslao ’23 wrote to the News, recalling a time when she requested funding after her laptop had broken down. “Definitely understand their stance … [but] my expected family contribution was zero and I’m from California, so a big part of my refund was already used for flights.”

Safety Net’s email to Wenceslao revealed that its assessment of her situation was completed in conjunction with Undergraduate Financial Aid — and that her financial standing, though “indeed challenging,” was stronger than her peers who were being considered for this limited fund. The document then stated that the “limited fund” would be subsequently used for students who have “lesser access to university funds or personal resources.” 

Senior Associate Dean of Yale College Burgwell Howard reiterated this position in a February interview with the News. 

“In general, there are no hard criteria for which requests receive Safety Net support, as the details of each request and each student’s situation are different,” Howard said. “The driving factor in these requests is generally demonstrated financial need, and even among FGLI and non-low income students there is great variance in people’s financial situation. So, we seek to address the most critical and unanticipatable issues and expenses as quickly as we can, with input from Undergraduate Financial Aid and other key stakeholders who may have information or input.”

Muro affirmed that the Financial Aid considers outside scholarships — and the refunds derived from them — when determining Safety Net requests. However, he explained that the “mere presence” of outside scholarships is not an immediate disqualifier for Safety Net funding, due to the “holistic” nature of the evaluation. 

He added that the team makes a distinction between outside scholarship monies already received by the University versus those in a pending status, “since the former is immediately available and [the FA office] only mentions refunds if one is available.” This difference can cause students to not be aware of a credit balance on their account or the means to access a refund, but it is something that the office can guide students through, Muro said. 

While grateful for the refunds that Gates provides, Wenceslao agreed with Ramos that the perception of outside scholarships conferring “significant funding” for low-income students with a full Yale scholarship can be a distorted one. She suggested that heightened communication between students and donor organizations may open other avenues of use for excess outside aid — and looked back on a point when her family’s expected family contribution had exceeded $0, resulting in an unexpected and significantly reduced refund from Yale. 

For Wenceslao, the first-generation, low-income experience is continuous and fluctuating — and these moments have only attested to that. As a second-term senior reflecting on her time here at the University, she has found a way to see value in everything from the frequently difficult communications with administration to the hours spent pouring over family finances thousands of miles away from her California home. 

The struggle against displacement, and the consideration of privilege 

The road to maximizing the utility of external awards is far from over, but efforts have been promising. As a result of displacement, some scholarship organizations allow students who will already have their education subsidized by their universities to withhold accepting their scholarship funds until that money is useful. 

Oscar Sweeten-Lopez, the leader of the Dell Scholars Program, announced in 2017 that its scholarships will give students experiencing scholarship displacement the choice to defer their funds until they graduate, when they can collect all their funds at once and pay off loans or attend graduate school. 

“One piece of advice that I give students who will likely experience displacement is to ask their outside scholarship provider if they could defer their scholarship to a later year in undergrad — as freshmen tend to have more generous packages — or [to] graduate school,” agreed Senior Financial Programs and Scholarship Director Nadja Jepsen of College Track, an education nonprofit that supports underserved students through college scholarships and mentorship.

According to Jepsen, who credited her own ability to obtain a graduate degree to an outside grant, the decision of whether to permit fund deferral is largely based on a scholarship’s mission statement. For example, she said that if a scholarship supports first-generation students earning a bachelor’s degree, they would likely be less receptive to deferring funds to graduate school education. Nonetheless, she urges students to research scholarship providers and the specific colleges that they plan on attending.

During her time working with students as a scholarship provider, Jepsen observed that private colleges tend to be more flexible with their institutional aid than public universities. 

The full tuition coverage that low-income students receive at many of the nation’s top colleges is rare; schools like Yale and Dartmouth College have eliminated loans from their financial aid award packages, guaranteeing students whose families fall under a certain income threshold a debt-free college education. 

The same does not hold true for financially disadvantaged students at public, state or even private colleges with smaller endowments. In fact, over the past decade, many schools have raised tuition prices for families on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum at a higher rate than those on the higher end, even though low-income students generally receive larger financial aid. 

For low-income students who find themselves in these situations, private outside scholarships can reduce loans and push them toward a more debt-free future. At least, that is what students might expect. It turns out that Yale’s own scholarship displacement policies, which only apply when a student has excess outside aid, is in itself a privilege. 

For some colleges today, scholarship displacement is more extensive and occurs for students whose awards do not exceed their need. Instead of using outside aid to reduce a student’s loans or issue a refund, a college might reduce the amount of financial aid its internal system had awarded the student. This practice incited a two-year long anti-scholarship displacement campaign from Central Scholarship, a scholarship and mentorship organization for Maryland students, whose staffers were frustrated that any scholarship money a student received would cause their college to simply reduce their financial aid by the same amount.

“It totally undermines our very existence,” Jan Wagner, president of Central Scholarship, said in a 2017 interview with Baltimore Sun. “For someone who went out and beat the bushes and pounded the pavement and submitted applications to try and get additional grants and make college affordable, the net result of their efforts is zero. That’s unfair. Especially when we’re talking about low-income and middle-income students.”

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”Connecticut is among the 45 states without active legislation banning scholarship displacement.” credit=”Tim Tai, Photography Editor” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/upclose_bz_TimTai_PhotoEditor_01.jpeg” link=”” ALIGN=”full”]

Until summer 2017, nowhere in the United States had officially banned this kind of displacement. Today, colleges in five states — California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington and New Jersey — have passed some requirements forcing schools to reduce a student’s loan packages, if they have any, before decreasing internal scholarship allocations. For instance, California’s AB-288, an anti-displacement bill passed in September 2022, prohibits both public and private institutions from cutting down Pell-eligible “students’ institution-based gift aid offers below their financial need.” 

Connecticut is among the 45 states without active legislation banning scholarship displacement. Title IV of the Higher Education Amendments of 1965 outlines policies underlying the management of financial aid programs. It dictates that a student’s awards — whether they consist of university grants or outside scholarships — may not exceed one’s financial need. The law defines need as the difference between a college’s standard cost of attendance and the amount that the financial aid office believes a student’s family can pay. Essentially, Title IV prohibits students from pocketing scholarships or grant money that exceeds their need for a college education — which some argue is an issue that is nuanced and requires more consideration of the real-world challenges confronting FGLI students. 

“The real cost of attendance is different from the formula provided in the FAFSA or college financial aid award letters,” Viveros-Walton, one of the writers and thinkers behind AB-288, said. “And in California, that gap can be anywhere from $9,000 to $30,000.”

Viveros-Walton called attention to off-campus housing for California students, which in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco can drain most of a student’s refunds and financial awards. Similar to Yale, many colleges in her state do not guarantee housing for all four years of their undergraduate education — except in California, many are thrown into a more voracious open market with external adult renters. 

However, some scholarships have restrictions dictating what their funds may be used for. Some scholarships may not cover off-campus housing, presenting a challenge for students who are not guaranteed on-campus lodging. Viveros-Walton hopes that by urging scholarships to expand their latitude of coverage or disperse funds directly to recipients, students would be able to put their hard-earned awards to better use. 

Nonetheless, these are only recommendations — and private scholarship organizations ultimately decide what they wish to dedicate scholarship dollars. The struggle to make financial aid and scholarship processes equitable, transparent and accessible is one of many moving parts and perspectives, requiring as much empathy as education from all sides of the equation, she continued. It remains, now more relevant than ever. 

Starting the 2023-2024 academic year, Yale University’s overall cost of attendance, otherwise known as its term bill, will increase by nearly 4 percent from $80,700 to $83,880. 

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In its public statements, Yale’s Office of the President often celebrates diversity. A quick look through recent statements turns up titles like, “Yale’s Steadfast Commitment to Diversity,” “Yale Will Continue to Foster a Diverse and Vibrant Educational Environment” and “An Excellent Faculty is a Diverse Faculty.” 

“By bringing people of different backgrounds, talents, and perspectives together, we best prepare our students for a complex and dynamic world,” one statement reads.

Yale was quick to take up rallying cries in support of race-conscious admissions when a nonprofit challenged the practice in lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014.

Since then, Yale has joined 14 peer universities — including all six remaining members of the Ivy League — in a joint amicus curiae brief defending the use of affirmative action in college admissions. The brief, filed with the Supreme Court in August 2022, justifies ethnicity- and race-conscious admissions practices on the grounds that they are “crucial to achieving a richly diverse academic environment that enhances students’ educational experiences and maximizes their future success.”

But for all of Yale’s fervent advocacy in the public sphere, the University has been notably less enthusiastic about diversity in the private management of its $41.4 billion endowment. Despite ongoing calls for transparency, Yale and other elite universities continue to withhold data on the diversity of the managers who oversee their endowments. Although these universities often claim that they are working to improve asset manager diversity, experts in the field argue that data secrecy hinders institutional accountability.

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”The Yale Investment Office building at 55 Whitney Ave.” credit=”Tim Tai, Photography Editor” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/investments_upclose_eg_TimTai_PhotographyEditor.jpg” link=”” ALIGN=”full”]

These policies of nondisclosure come even as research finds that white- and male-owned firms continue to dominate the asset management industry.

Endowments and asset manager diversity

Most elite universities follow the so-called “Yale Model” when investing to grow their endowments. The Yale Model is a framework for institutional investing developed by long-time Yale Chief Investment Officer David Swensen, who managed the University’s endowment for 35 years until his death in 2021.

The Yale Model instructs broad asset diversification, allocating fewer assets to traditional U.S. equities and bonds and more to alternative investments like private equity, venture capital, hedge funds and real estate.

Because endowment offices are limited in staff capacity — and because alternative assets require specialized expertise — universities outsource much of their investing to third-party asset managers.

These external management firms oversee designated pieces of their clients’ portfolios. They are contracted by university endowment offices as fiduciaries, financial agents legally compelled to act in their clients’ best interests.

Minority- and women-owned asset management firms manage just 1.4 percent of U.S.-based assets, according to a 2021 study by the Knight Foundation, which funds journalism, arts and research in the areas of media and democracy. The Knight Foundation defines minority- and women-owned firms, also known as “diverse-owned firms,” as those whose ownership is held by at least 50 percent women or “racial/ethnic minorities.”

Nevertheless, these firms represent approximately 12.2 percent of U.S.-based asset managers. Evidently, such firms are grossly underrepresented in allocators’ portfolios; if they were perfectly represented, we would expect them to control the equivalent 12.2 percent, rather than a mere 1.4 percent, of assets under management. 

The Knight Foundation’s ongoing research series on asset manager diversity follows its decade-long effort to employ more diverse-owned firms in the management of its own multi-billion dollar endowment. Today, over a third of the Knight Foundation’s endowment, or approximately $1.07 billion, is overseen by diverse-owned managers, a list of which the Foundation publishes on its website.

There are two common, albeit debunked, arguments that asset allocators use to justify their disproportionate reliance on white- and male-owned firms: the performance justification and the pipeline justification.

Perceived performance tradeoff

The first line of reasoning boils down to performance. While asset allocators generally agree that diversity is important, most investment professionals — especially white ones — perceive a negative financial trade-off that comes with prioritizing diversity.

In a 2021 Morgan Stanley survey, 56 percent of asset owners agreed that “they must choose between financial gains and incorporating diversity into their investment decisions.” And there is a sizable opinion gap by race — 70 percent of white asset owners agreed, compared to just 35 percent of non-white owners.

“The survey … does not take long to point out that this is a perception issue,” Daniel Villao, CEO of Intelligent Partnerships, Inc. and former chair of the National Board of Directors for the Association of Latino Professionals for America, told the News. “The fact that the existing cadre of leading minds is uncomfortable with change really drives the status quo and means that the lack of opportunity to demonstrate otherwise continues to ensure the 1.4 percent does not change.”

The preponderance of research — including by the Knight Foundation — continues to find, however, that diverse-owned firms perform at a level comparable to or exceeding that of their predominantly white- and male-owned peer companies.

A recent meta-analysis of 56 performance studies using 50 years of data arrived at a “clear consensus” that there is no trade-off between diversity and investment performance.

Jason Lamin, the founder and CEO of Lenox Park Solutions, a financial technology company specializing in DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — data aggregation, thinks we have begun “to overstudy the problem.”

“The research that comes out of any major academic institution or think tank is pretty empirical at this point: diverse teams outperform,” Lamin said. “They mitigate risk, they are more innovative and creative. … There’s a part of me that is candidly tired of talking about it.”

Pipeline issues 

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”Robert Raben, executive director of the Diverse Asset Managers Initiative and president of the Raben Group.” credit=”Courtesy of The Raben Group” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Robert_Raben_courtesyOfTheRabenGroup-scaled.jpg” ALIGN=”right”]

The second rationale is a pipeline argument; some allocators say there just aren’t enough diverse-owned firms out there to muster a diverse portfolio. Considering that only 12.2 percent of management firms are diverse-owned, this justification may initially seem compelling.

But some industry leaders, including Robert Raben, consider the pipeline argument unpersuasive. Raben serves as executive director of the Diverse Asset Managers Initiative and president of the Raben Group, a progressive public policy firm. He also served as Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice under former President Bill Clinton.

Raben thinks that asset allocators claim there are too few diverse-owned management firms to conceal their deep-seated hesitations about allocating assets away from white- and male-owned firms.

While Raben says that he would like to see more women and people of color enter the asset management industry, there are already “plenty” of diverse-owned firms for any single institution — like Yale — to improve its managerial diversity.

“[Many asset allocators say] that there aren’t enough minority asset managers,” Raben said. “We believe that’s a smoke screen. We don’t have a supply problem. We have a demand problem.”

[pullquote credit=”Robert Raben” align=”full”][Many asset allocators say] that there aren’t enough minority asset managers. We believe that’s a smoke screen. We don’t have a supply problem. We have a demand problem.[/pullquote]

Raben said that for every financial institution to significantly improve its manager diversity, “we’d need a lot more managers of color, yes.” But Raben emphasized that the industry is not yet close to a point where individual firms aiming to improve their diversity will run into a capacity problem.

Raben used Yale as an example. 

“I don’t know how many managers Yale has on contract — let’s say 70 firms at a time,” Raben said. “There are hundreds and hundreds of Black- and Latino-owned asset management firms.” 

The National Association of Investment Companies, or NAIC, is the country’s largest network of diverse-owned alternative asset managers, consisting of over 180 firms representing over $325 billion in assets under management.

Raben argues that the “best proof” for the strength of the existing pipeline is actually the other allocators, including the Knight Foundation and academic institutions like Duke University and the University of California system, which Raben says have “easily achieved extremely significant women/minority representation in their management numbers with the current supply.” 

In 2022 alone, UC Investments’ allocation to diverse-owned partners increased by roughly 10 percent, from 36 to 40 percent of its managers. In 2022, Duke’s share of diverse-owned managers reached a record-high 44 percent.

University transparency

How does Yale compare? 

Frankly, nobody knows. Duke and the University of California are in the small minority of universities that make their manager diversity numbers public.

Yale, by contrast, is in the majority that chooses not to release these statistics.   

“By being transparent, we hold ourselves accountable,” UC Investments CIO Jagdeep Bachher told the News. “Compiling reliable data gives us a way to easily track our own progress and that of our partners.”

[pullquote credit=”Jagdeep Bachher” align=”right”]By being transparent, we hold ourselves accountable.Compiling reliable data gives us a way to easily track our own progress and that of our partners.[/pullquote]

When the Knight Foundation asked the nation’s 50 wealthiest colleges and universities to participate in its research in 2022, 34 institutions, including Yale, declined to share data.

However, some of Yale’s peers with large endowments — including Duke, Harvard University, Stanford University and Princeton University — did choose to share data for the study.

“We’ve done this research, for one, to ensure that this is a part of the conversation,” said Ashley Zohn, vice president of the Knight Foundation’s Learning and Impact program. “We hope that more foundations and universities will be transparent. And ultimately, we hope that this will lead to more use of diverse-owned firms.”

The Knight Foundation is performing its higher education research in partnership with the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

The researchers have only published an interim release so far and are waiting on more schools to share data before publishing a final report.

“Universities are promoting DEI in how they present their institutional values, in the admissions process and in various other aspects of campus life,” Center for Business and Human Rights Senior Associate Director Kerin McCauley told the News. “We saw these initiatives around DEI, but we weren’t seeing the same kind of urgency related to where they were investing.”

The News contacted the Yale Investments Office in November for comment on its non-participation in the study. When the News initially reached out for comment, the Investment Office’s team page displayed the names and photographs of 22 upper-level financial staff, a group that appeared to skew white and male.

Within two hours of the request, the page was updated to display the names and photographs of 39 staff members, including administrative assistants and legal staff whose names or photographs did not appear before. On the new page, white men no longer appeared to make up a majority of depicted staffers.

Although these were internal office staff members and not external asset managers, the website change prompted some, including Raben, to wonder what the incident revealed about the Office’s general approach to matters of diversity.

“In other areas of university life — student enrollment, faculty composition — the universities are clear and sometimes assertive with granular detail about the presence or absence of women and people of color,” Raben said. “But what must be going on in the management of $40 billion for very, very talented and bright people to go through Herculean gymnastics to avoid answering the basic questions: Do you work with women or not? Do you work with Black people or not?”

Raben thinks Yale probably does care about the issue, but he said this episode is “Exhibit A” of the University’s lack of “internal skills, tools and experiences” to address it appropriately. 

In response to the News’s November article regarding Yale’s decision not to participate in the Knight Foundation study, Raben and the Diverse Asset Manager Initiative — or DAMI — sent a public letter to University President Peter Salovey and CIO Matthew Mendelsohn urging Yale “to avail itself of the transparency that has so benefited the rest of the institution.” 

Raben told the News that Yale’s leadership should seek help from expert groups like DAMI that have the proper toolset and experience to address these issues. He has met several times with University leaders to discuss manager diversity and said that the Yale Investments Office initially delegated the diversity issue to one white woman, Lisa Howie, who served as a YIO director.

When Howie left Yale to become CIO of Smith College in April 2021, Yale redelegated diversity, equity and inclusion work to Sohail Ramirez. Ramirez’s profile on the YIO website says that he “is a member of YIO’s legal team and focuses on the venture capital portfolio, regulatory matters, and YIO’s DEI efforts.”

Across all 41 current YIO staff profiles, only Ramirez’s mentions DEI responsibilities.

“A classic example of doing this poorly is to put the burden of diversity on the shoulders of the few diverse people in your office, who have day jobs,” Raben said. “They’re there to manage money.”

Samantha Katz, a board member of IDiF — the Center of Innovation for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Finance — told the News that institutional transparency is a critical first step for driving change. 

IDiF aims to bring together trustees, donors, CIOs, public pensions, allocators, asset owners and entrepreneurs from across the industry to source solutions for the underrepresentation of diverse-owned firms in asset management.

“Silence and opacity around this data allows for the perpetuation of the status quo,” Katz told the News. “Transparency will help investors identify what leadership in this market looks like and enable accountability.”

The Endowment Transparency Act

In the wake of lackluster university participation in the Knight Foundation’s study of America’s largest university endowments, Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II introduced the Endowment Transparency Act of 2022. 

The Endowment Transparency Act would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to mandate annual reporting on the ownership of asset management firms contracted by university endowments. The act would also require the data to be disaggregated by race and gender.

“In the year 2022, it is simply unacceptable that nearly 99 percent of assets controlled by the $82 trillion asset management industry … are overseen by White men, when we know that there are qualified women- and minority-owned firms that can fulfill these duties to the same, or even better, degree,” Representative Cleaver wrote in a press release.

University endowments currently have no legal obligation to report data on their use of diverse-owned management firms, and, as Cleaver writes, “anecdotal reporting has been less than favorable.”

The act, which has not yet made it onto the congressional docket, builds on Cleaver’s prior work requesting diversity disclosures from elite universities, including Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford. 

On July 10, 2020, Cleaver and then-Massachusetts Rep. Joseph Kennedy III sent a letter to 25 colleges and universities requesting information about the diversity of the asset management firms overseeing their endowments. The letter cited the most recent Knight Foundation report at the time, which found that firms owned by women and minorities managed just 1.3 percent of U.S.-based assets under management.

“Some colleges and universities have resisted repeated calls to be more transparent with such information,” Cleaver and Kennedy wrote in the letter. “The response of colleges and universities has only heightened suspicions.” 

They also pointed out that most university endowments “have never spent a dollar with a minority [asset management] firm in the history of their institution,” a fact first described in a June 2019 hearing of the House Financial Services Committee. 

Of the 25 audited institutions, 24 submitted responses. Very few, however, broke down the data by race or gender ownership; instead, each institution provided an aggregate share of “diverse” or “diverse-owned” managers. Raben said that only Duke, the University of California and Georgetown University provided “meaningful data.”

In a reply letter to Cleaver and Kennedy, Yale wrote that “a preliminary assessment indicates that 50 percent of Yale’s assets that are managed by U.S.-based managers are managed by diverse-led firms.” 

In a footnote at the bottom of the page, Yale defines diverse-led firms as “those [firms] where women or people of color make a material contribution to a firm’s investment leadership and decision-making.” 

The letter does not explain what constitutes a “material contribution.” 

“‘Diverse’ is not a term of art,” Raben said. “It can mean veterans, it can mean LGBTQ, it can mean managers in Hong Kong. You have no idea what is behind that number. … They gave a number to Congress that is absurdly large. They imply that 50 percent of their domestically managed money is diverse. That’s not happening.”

To complement its asset manager diversity work, the Investments Office, according to the letter, “has stepped up efforts to focus on diversity and inclusion among its own staff.” At the time of the letter’s writing, women and people of color made up 38 percent of YIO staff and 30 percent of senior staff.

Nevertheless, YIO’s demographic diversity falls short of the diversity of Yale’s student body. According to Yale’s 2022-23 Common Data Set, which provides student demographics by race and gender, approximately 50 percent of Yale College students are female and 60 percent are people of color. If one assumes that approximately 50 percent of people of color in Yale College are women, women and people of color together represent about 80 percent of Yale’s undergraduate student body — more than double both of the YIO figures.

A stubborn status quo

There are some legitimate obstacles that universities face in hiring diverse-owned managers and reporting manager diversity statistics.

For one, these changes take time. 

On its website, the Yale Investments Office writes, “Our team actively searches for partners who are focused on establishing long-term partnerships and building sustainable organizations. We have partnered with many of our managers for more than ten years, and several partnerships span more than 20 years.” 

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”” credit=”Tim Tai, Photography Editor” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/eg_upclose_TimTai_PhotographyEditor.jpg” ALIGN=”center”]

Yale has spent decades building strong, long-term partnerships with its managers, and, according to Raben, University leaders probably don’t want to sever those partnerships overnight.

And because Yale’s investment returns over the past several years have been best-in-class, switching managers might not improve performance. Amid this year’s turbulent markets, Yale was the only school in the Ivy League to report a positive return on its endowment holdings.

Although diverse-owned firms generally perform as well as or better than white- and male-owned firms, some individual white- or male-owned firms are inevitably still capable of outperforming their peers.

Even UC Investments, which leads the endowment space in manager diversity and transparency, maintains unequivocally that performance is its number one criterion in choosing managers. 

“We hire very few external managers, but when we do we look for the best people, potential long-term partners whose values are aligned with our own and who have a record of high performance,” UC Investments CIO Jagdeep Bachher told the News. “We are in the business of making money for the University of California, so we will not sacrifice returns for anybody. We are not a charity.”

Just as asset managers act as fiduciaries for endowments, endowment offices act as fiduciaries for their respective institutions. 

Lenox Park Solutions CEO Jason Lamin, whose firm supports DEI benchmarking and reporting for 1,800 organizations managing over $4 trillion in assets, says that diversity for its own sake can be a tough sell.

“Are my fiduciary responsibilities to make money or to employ a social agenda?” Lamin said. “I want to be clear. My view personally, at my firm, is that it’s the right thing to do. But as you know, there will be those that say, ‘It’s not my responsibility. I’m here to make returns.’” 

Nevertheless, every endowment — including a top-tier performer like Yale — must have managers performing in its bottom quartile.

According to Katz, it is much easier to renew a contract with an underperforming manager “than risk your job bringing new talent into the portfolio.” 

Raben argues, though, that “an important client can say to the manager, ‘I need to see women and people of color in senior positions on my team within two years.’” Yale is a large and important enough allocator, Raben says, that it can use its leverage to improve diversity without ditching its existing managers.

Reporting challenges

Even if an asset allocator has every intention of making its diversity data public, transparency can be difficult in practice.

For an asset allocator to report on the diversity of its asset managers, it must first ask each of its asset managers to report its own diversity numbers. 

“For those that are surveying managers, some of the asset managers choose to report and others simply don’t, even when the allocator requests the information,” Katz told the News. “Without fund managers reporting, the allocator has no way of knowing what demographics are represented in their portfolio.”

Katz says that enacting laws or policies — like the Endowment Transparency Act — could help. But real change, she says, might require a commitment from allocators to pull capital from managers that do not report or to allocate additional capital to those that do.

[pullquote credit=”Jason Lamin” align=”right”]If every allocator sends out a different DEI survey with different definitions of what it means to be diverse, then what can they really do with it?The managers are tired; they’re getting 50 or 60 surveys a year.[/pullquote]

Because asset allocators generally conduct their own diversity surveys, managers can easily become overwhelmed when allocators want to report. At any given time, some asset managers are managing funds from dozens of allocators.

“If every allocator sends out a different DEI survey with different definitions of what it means to be diverse, then what can they really do with it?” Lamin said. “The managers are tired; they’re getting 50 or 60 surveys a year.”

This is the very issue that Lamin’s company, Lenox Park Solutions, aims to solve.

Lamin describes his platform as the “Common App” of manager diversity reporting. When allocators — which include pension funds, endowments, foundations and more — join the platform, they can use it to send standardized surveys to all their managers.

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”Jason Lamin, founder and CEO of Lenox Park Solutions, a financial technology company specializing in DEI data aggregation.” credit=”Courtesy of Lenox Park Solutions” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Jason_Lamin_courtesyOfLenoxParkSolutions.jpg” ALIGN=”right”]

The platform then receives, aggregates and benchmarks data for the allocator.

“What we’ve done with our technology is continue to build and refine tools that just make it easier for people to report … [and] to measure and monitor over time how their asset managers are doing,” Lamin said.

Because the platform is so large — its thousands of users collectively manage over $4 trillion — the benchmarks it generates “actually mean something.”

Though reporting is far from perfect, Lamin says that there is “no question” that transparency and disclosure is improving across the industry. In 2019, just 59.9 percent of the managers that received surveys from Lamin’s platform responded with full, complete information. By 2022, that number had jumped to 81.1 percent. 

“There’s a feeling from the asset owners that, you know, ‘I don’t want to be troublesome for managers, and maybe I’m asking for information that’s too invasive in some way,’” Lamin said “And we remind them … just on our platform, there’s another $4 trillion of asset owners that are asking the same thing.” 

Diversity initiatives

Despite these constraints, the universities that have made concerted efforts to report on diversity  — like UC and Duke — have generally been able to do so. 

UC began reporting diversity numbers in 2019, and, in that first year, achieved a 92 percent manager response rate, representing 98 percent of assets surveyed. By 2022, the response rate had risen to 94 percent.

If Yale has also been regularly surveying its managers for diversity information, it has not said so openly.

In October 2020, however, Yale’s then-CIO David Swensen publicly instructed the firms that manage the University’s endowment to diversify their ranks.

Swensen asked managers to complete a diversity survey, writing that Yale is “interested in the numbers of diverse professionals on the investment team and in … support functions, at various levels of seniority.” Swensen asked Howie — who had not yet left for Smith — to coordinate the survey.

Yale has stayed almost completely silent on its progress since. Although Swensen told managers in the initial letter that he intended to ask for annual updates, it is unclear whether the efforts have been ongoing.

Rather than simply asking managers to improve their diversity, UC Investments has been intentional about “search[ing] widely” for diverse-owned firms with which to build new partnerships.

“To find the best people, we intentionally search widely, often looking for firms we may have overlooked or who, for some reason, haven’t been on our radar,” Bachher told the News. “That was the impetus behind our recent initiative during which we met more than 100 firms who were new to us … But to be clear, that initiative was merely an accelerant. We routinely meet with many diverse firms throughout the year.”

UC Investments has partnered with trade organizations like NAIC to help source diverse-owned firms. 

In 2022, UC Investments met with approximately 333 diverse-owned managers, including 101 managers sourced through the NAIC partnership; these meetings increased in number by 43 percent compared to 2021.

Bachher said that the meetings allow UC Investments to “expand [its] networks, explore new opportunities, and in some cases, form new investment partnerships.” In 2022, six of UC Investments’ seven first-time investment partners were owned by women and people of color.

UC has effectively created its own pipeline for diverse-owned firms. 

And others have been doing the same thing. Crewcial Partners is a consulting firm that works with allocators to build effective portfolios and, for almost a decade, has been intentional about finding diverse talent for its clients.

“We’ve been investing with diverse managers since back in 2013 … and it’s really allowed us to build smarter portfolios,” said Angela Outlaw-Matheny, director of investment staff and diverse manager equity at Crewcial Partners. “You need to think about diversification in various ways; not just asset classes. What about geography, different life journeys, and backgrounds — ethnicity, gender, age? All of these things are risk-controlling factors when you’re building smart portfolios.” 

Outlaw-Matheny said that when she started in her role, she thought she could be a kind of “civil rights leader” in the field of asset management. 

Her mentor — Crewcial’s CIO Michael Miller — advised her that she needed to lead with performance, and social impact would follow.

“So it started with our need to exercise our fiduciary duty to build smart portfolios,” Outlaw-Matheny said. “That was, I think, the impetus for our work, and then it trickled over [to social impact].” 

Since starting to build its diverse manager pipeline in 2013, Outlaw-Matheny said that Crewcial has been able to avoid resorting to manager diversity quotas.

The pipeline of diverse-led firms has allowed Crewcial to improve returns and focus on “what’s the best fit in terms of portfolio construction.”

Looking forward

Yale’s endowment is overseen by the Investment Committee of the Yale Corporation, the University’s 16-member board of trustees.

The committee, which oversees the endowment in the review of asset allocation policies, endowment performance and strategies proposed by YIO staff, is almost entirely white and male. 

Raben argues that the root of higher education’s manager diversity issue is culture — especially at the level of institutional leadership.

“There’s a basic resentment of outsiders asking questions,” Raben said. “It is likely that Mr. Mendelsohn makes three to five times more than Mr. Salovey. So that tells you a lot. It’s like Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama: ‘Yeah, I’ve got this. And I really don’t want lots and lots of people questioning my strategy. My success allows you to have need-blind admissions.’”

[pullquote credit=”Robert Raben” align=”full”]There’s a basic resentment of outsiders asking questions.[/pullquote]

Yale’s then-CIO Swensen received a salary of $4.7 million in 2017, making him the University’s highest paid employee. That same year, Salovey made $1.7 million.

Katz told the News that the attitude of an allocator’s leadership team, “which includes trustees, board members and chief investment officers,” greatly influences whether and to what extent that allocator invests with diverse-owned managers. 

Efforts to improve diversity benefit substantially when leadership “has a process internally that incentivizes change, such as emerging manager programs, the broadening of networks for sourcing, and setting concrete goals in portfolio construction.”

Raben believes that University leadership is probably trying to figure out how to improve manager diversity “as we speak.” However, he told the News that he “can’t think of another area of life where, when you want to try to solve a problem, you refuse to speak to the experts.”

The University has not responded to DAMI’s public letter and has denied Raben’s recent requests to meet with Yale officials.

When the News reached out to the Yale Investments Office for comment, they provided the statement below. 

“The Yale Investments Office is firmly committed to building a diverse team and increasing the diversity of our roster of investment partners by adding diverse new partners and supporting efforts by our existing partners to increase diversity within their organizations,” the Investments Office told the News. “Efforts are underway to advance toward these goals, and we plan to provide periodic updates via our website.”

In 2008, Yale alumni mounted an unsuccessful campaign to name one of the University’s new residential colleges “Swensen College” in honor of David Swensen.

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Nicolette Mantica saw a therapist for the first time in 2017, during her junior year at Yale. 

Mantica, who was slated to graduate in 2019, was depressed. She struggled with self-harm and abused over-the-counter medication. When she opened up to her close friends, they insisted she see a therapist — a step that Mantica by that point knew she needed to take. On her friends’ advice, she signed up for therapy through Yale Mental Health and Counseling.

“I was like, ‘I’m going to sign up. It’ll get better. I won’t have to worry about this anymore,’” Mantica recalled. “I started seeing a therapist who I really didn’t like that much, but because I’d never done it before and this was my first time ever seeing a therapist, I thought, ‘Well, this is just me. This is what therapy is like, and this is just me.’” 

The treatment Mantica received from Yale Mental Health and Counseling, or MHC, continued to disappoint her. She pointed specifically to one incident, when she described the anxiety she felt about never being in a relationship and her therapist told her to “try harder.” That therapist referred her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed a medication that Mantica could not afford. 

“I definitely felt like neither of them were ever listening to me,” Mantica said. “And because I didn’t think they were helping, I didn’t always tell the truth. I would lie about self-harming. Like, ‘They’re not doing anything for me, why would I tell them when I feel this way?’” 

The emotions Mantica associated with MHC — feelings of betrayal, anger and shame — resonated with six other alumni who spoke to the News, who graduated between 1988 and 2019. The past year has seen renewed conversations surrounding the structural failings of Yale’s mental health resources, but Yale students have long felt underserved by the services and policies ingrained within YMHC. Concerns about the ability of MHC services to meet student needs are particularly pressing given a recent demand for counseling services  — this year, MHC director Paul Hoffman said, saw the largest single-year utilization increase in the department’s near-century of operation. 

The collective memories of alumni reflect that the critical student perception of MHC has remained virtually unchanged over the past 30 years. Paul Mange Johansen ’88 is an organizer for Elis for Rachael, a mental health advocacy group composed of alumni, current students and many of those who knew Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum ’24, who died by suicide last year. One of the group’s first initiatives was conducting a survey of alumni encounters with MHC, which Johansen, a statistician, analyzed. 

“The results are incredibly consistent over time,” Johansen said. “The complaints that people had when I was a student in the 80s … are almost identical to the problems that people are having today.” 

The treatment Mantica received from Yale in 2017 continued to prove unsatisfying. Her mental health worsened to the point where her dean intervened, and she was involuntarily hospitalized. She spent ten days at various wings of Yale New Haven Hospital, taking three finals as she completed the semester. During that time, she received no communication from her therapist or psychiatrist, but she did receive a visit from a MHC representative, who stood in her doorway and told her she would need to take a medical withdrawal from Yale. 

Withdrawals can occur for academic, medical, personal, disciplinary or financial reasons, and withdrawn students are barred from campus without permission from either their residential college dean or the dean of student affairs. Withdrawals are unique from leaves of absences in that those who withdraw are not automatically granted a place at the University upon their return and must instead meet certain requirements for reinstatement.  

This month, Yale relaxed numerous reinstatement requirements. However, in Mantica’s time, requirements for reinstatement included an application form, two letters of support, a personal statement, interviews with members of the reinstatement committee, the equivalent of two term courses at an accredited four-year university or Yale-sanctioned community college and, in the case of students on medical withdrawal, documented treatment from a clinician. 

“I felt so betrayed, because this message was, ‘We’re a family,’” Mantica said. “This constant message of, ‘We’re here to take care of you, if there’s anything that you need, come to us.’ And yet, every step of the way, every person that I tried to rely on for help just told me, ‘Well, we can’t have you here. We don’t want you here. We’re not going to help you.’” 

[pullquote credit=”Nicolette Mantica” align=”full”]Every step of the way, every person that I tried to rely on for help just told me, ‘Well, we can’t have you here. We don’t want you here. We’re not going to help you.’[/pullquote]

Mantica never returned to Yale. She began the reinstatement application but felt so alienated by the process that she decided to transfer to Northwestern University, in part because she felt the mental health care offered there was more comprehensive than at Yale. 

Currently, MHC offers individual, group and couples therapy with licensed clinicians. After attending an initial intake session, the department provides students with clinicians to determine the length and regularity of their treatment. 

The department was founded in 1925, and in its near-century of operation, has been headed by six people — Arthur Ruggles, Clements Fry, Bryant Wedge, Robert Arnstein, Lorraine Siggins and Hoffman. When Hoffman took over in 2020, Siggins had been in the position for 30 years. Siggins did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”” credit=”Yale School of Medicine” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/acd1ee39-21d6-4c3c-9387-b4c661d88371.jpg” ALIGN=”right”]

“I think that I have the same goals as my predecessors as far as providing exceptional mental health treatment, but I think that the pandemic along with the large surge in mental health utilization have created an urgency to solve some of the challenges that have existed in the department for a number of years,” Hoffman wrote in an email to the News. “This has led to a period of significant change in the department.”  

Last year has seen reforms such as the relaxing of reinstatement requirements, the creation of the Yale College Community Care program and additions to MHC clinical staff. But as student demand for mental healthcare grows, a culture of student mistrust lingers around MHC. In interviews with the News, experts, alumni and administrators recalled the fraught history of mental health care at Yale and looked ahead to avenues for change. 

Shared experiences 

Similar experiences and emotions recur throughout alumni recollections of MHC, regardless of the year they graduated. 

Johansen never used MHC services during his time at Yale  — other students, he said, warned him away. 

“I heard rumors about, ‘Oh, don’t go to Yale psychiatric service, they’re terrible,’” Johansen said. “I was there ’84 to ’88, and that was sort of the word on the street.” 

Lisa Marie Bronson ’88, who was on campus during the same window as Johansen, was one of the students who made use of MHC counseling. The experience left her unsatisfied. 

Mental health was rarely discussed on campus, Bronson explained, but it was something that she talked about often with her parents. When she felt her mental health deteriorating during her time at Yale, she sought out therapy on her own, without guidance or intervention from anyone else at the University.

“I didn’t have any type of internalized stigma about it coming in that I brought with me, but I think if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have received any messaging or information to make me think differently,” Bronson said. “I also didn’t have anyone who would have been aware of or in touch with my mental state. I went to find counseling because I was concerned about how depressed and nonfunctional I was.” 

When Bronson began the process of finding a therapist through University services, she asked to be assigned to someone with whom she shared experiences, specifically requesting a therapist who was young, a woman and, if possible, a person of color. 

At the time, Bronson said, she had never heard of a non-white therapist, but she wanted to be able to talk to somebody about her experiences in the predominantly white environment of the University, where she often felt particularly targeted as a Black woman and an activist. 

But the therapist Bronson was assigned to, she said, was a “very, very old, very, very white man,” with whom she did not feel comfortable talking about many of her experiences. When she was reassigned to another counselor, this time a middle-aged woman, the experience was not much better. 

The new therapist referred her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed her medication. When the medication did not initially have an effect, the psychiatrist accused her of lying about taking it. 

“Outraged,” Bronson returned to tell her therapist about what had happened in the hopes that she could help find a resolution to the situation and get her the medication she needed. But apart from asking her how she felt about being accused of lying, Bronson said that her therapist had almost “no reaction” when she described the interaction with the psychiatrist. 

“When she did not advocate for me in that instance, I just said, ‘Okay, this isn’t going to work,’” Bronson said. “So, I stopped seeing her, but I was very depressed, and I definitely needed to be under care. It absolutely impacted my academic performance.”

Bronson was ultimately forced to take a withdrawal — not for mental health reasons but for academic ones. 

She fulfilled the necessary requirements for reinstatement and eventually returned to Yale. But throughout the process, she recalled, no one from the University expressed concern for how she was, or if she had the necessary support to facilitate her return.

“I wanted to finish and graduate from Yale, but my support was not coming from there,” Bronson said.

Alicia Floyd ’03 graduated almost two decades later, but her experience applying for reinstatement to Yale left her with a similar sense of detachment from the mental health resources in place to support her. 

Floyd struggled with depression throughout her time at Yale but did not initially pursue therapy. She said her first meaningful interaction with MHC came after an attempted overdose — “calm, but kind of bewildered,” she was taken from Yale Health to the emergency room and finally to a psychiatric institute. Like Mantica, she was asked by the University to take a medical withdrawal a week into her stay there.

As she went through the motions of withdrawing and completing reinstatement requirements, Floyd said the University’s handling of the process felt “harsh and liability-driven.” Although Floyd said that while the immediate aftermath of her overdose was traumatic in its own right, it was the reinstatement process that has stayed with her — it gave her nightmares, she said, for eight years after that. She felt “very betrayed” by a University she thought would support her regardless of her mental health.

“I think if I had perceived Yale as being a cold, institutional, transactional sort of place to begin with, my expectations and the reality would have matched up a lot better,” Floyd said. 

Although Mantica’s interaction with MHC came another decade after Floyd’s, she described a similar feeling of betrayal. 

“I did feel such a betrayal, and it made me feel like a criminal, too,” Mantica said. “When I got that reinstatement letter, for a long time, I wanted to go back because I loved my communities. I was involved with Glee Club; I was involved with some other clubs; I loved my friends; I loved Silliman. I wanted to be there. But the more I thought about it, I was like, ‘These people did not care about me when I was at my most vulnerable state. They didn’t want to take care of me because it was easier for me to just leave.’”

More than 30 years after graduating from Yale, Bronson has come to find fault with how her mental health crisis was handled by the University. She now provides professional wellness coaching to medical students. If she saw a student in the state that she was in at Yale, she explained, it would raise immediate alarms — “just kind of letting it ride” would not be an option. 

But when she was a student, Bronson said that it did not occur to her to blame the University for the inadequate care she received. 

“I internalized it, and I felt ashamed,” Bronson said. “I felt like it was my fault. I didn’t put that at the feet of the institution at the time at all. I felt like I had this wonderful opportunity and experience and I messed it up.” 

[pullquote credit=”Lisa Marie Bronson ’88″ align=”full”]I internalized it, and I felt ashamed. I felt like it was my fault. I didn’t put that at the feet of the institution at the time at all. I felt like I had this wonderful opportunity and experience and I messed it up.[/pullquote]

“Incremental changes”

Recent changes to the University’s mental health care resources have come slowly, often in gradual policy amendments rather than sweeping reforms. 

A buzz of dissatisfaction with Yale’s policies on mental health — and with its reinstatement and readmission practices in particular — has pervaded campus throughout the past two decades. 

The News reported on the limitations of the University’s therapy offerings in 2002, quoting students who raised the same issues, like long wait times and underwhelming treatment, that are often brought up in discussions of MHC today. In 2007, students spoke against withdrawal and reinstatement policies, specifically criticizing Yale’s practice of sending students on involuntary withdrawals.  

In January 2015, campus dissatisfaction with the University’s policies on mental health rose to a fever pitch after Luchang Wang ’17 died by suicide, citing Yale’s policies on readmission in a Facebook status posted hours before her death.  

The next month, members of the Yale College Withdrawal and Readmission Review Committee, which had been commissioned by then-Dean Jonathan Holloway in fall 2014, attended a town hall meeting with students and administrators, where students aired their grievances with the policies as they stood. 

In April 2014, the committee published a report including a series of recommendations to Holloway on how to improve the withdrawal process, all of which he accepted. The reforms, which Holloway committed to enacting for all students applying for reinstatement in 2016 and beyond, included the change of the term “readmission” to “reinstatement,” as well as changes to reinstatement application deadlines, an elimination of the application fee for reinstatement and changes to financial aid for students who take medical withdrawals. 

Since then, the requirements for reinstatement remained the same — despite renewed criticism of the policies in the wake of Shaw-Rosenbaum’s passing — until a host of reforms were announced this April. 

Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun, who will conclude his term at the end of June, told the News that student mental health had been a “priority area” during his time as dean and that he thought Yale had made important progress on this issue. 

“The Yale College Community Care program is something I’m very proud of, and I really love my colleagues who are serving with it, and I’m very proud that they’re affiliated with the Yale College Dean’s Office,” Chun told the News. “That’s a program that did not exist, and it now exists. I think it’s going to continue to have a great impact on campus.”

Chun announced the establishment of Yale College Community Care, or YC3, in April last year. The program provides short-term clinical care and wellness advising, intended to help students work through short-term issues and ease the strain on the central branch of MHC. 

Through YC3 in particular, Hoffman said, he has seen increased student engagement with mental health services over the past year.

“The major priority has been to add staff and find space, to modernize our department, to increase the diversity of staff and to increase the outreach to students,” Hoffman said. “All these efforts are aimed at decreasing the wait time for treatment, providing students with high quality treatment and decreasing barriers for students.” 

Among the other developments that Hoffman recalled from his term as chief of MHC were new partnerships with the Yale Law School, the Yale School of the Environment and the Medical School, and the addition of a second location at 205 Whitney Avenue to accommodate the addition of “a significant number of clinicians.” 

MHC, Hoffman added, has also adapted to a hybrid treatment model developed during the pandemic, the flexibility of which he said has received positive student feedback. 

“We have changed our policy so that students can utilize both individual therapy and group therapy simultaneously to allow students access to more intensive treatment,” Hoffman explained. “In the next few months, we will be allowing students to use MyChart to communicate with their clinicians at MHC. We expect that the staff additions will begin to decrease wait times next year.”

But some advocates — including groups like Elis for Rachael — have argued that a meaningful overhaul of Yale’s mental health structures can only be achieved with the counsel of an outside perspective. In particular, Elis for Rachael has suggested that the University employ the services of the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on suicide prevention and mental health care. 

The Jed Foundation offers a four-year program that assesses mental health policies in place on college campuses and guides administrators through the process of policy development with the help of a dedicated campus advisor.  

Nance Roy, the Jed Foundation’s chief clinical officer, told the News that she often proactively makes contact with university administrators. In 2020, she said, she met with Yale administrators to discuss a potential involvement with the four-year program. 

“We met to talk about Jed campus and them joining and, you know, they never did,” Roy said. “I don’t know what factored into their decision. They are positive about Jed — they always applaud our work and think we do great work, but for whatever reason have chosen not to join the Jed campus program. I will say that Yale and Brown are the only two Ivies so far that are not part of our program. So of course, we’d love to have them, but I can’t tell you what the obstacle is.”

Hoffman told the News that the meeting with the Jed Foundation took place in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was not “the right time to take on a project of that nature.” At the time, he explained, MHC was focused on the pivot to online counseling as the broader University responded to the pandemic. 

“Everyone’s effort was being diverted to the pandemic response,” Hoffman said. “I would not say that partnering with either Jed or a different third-party consultant is a closed question.”

Even as change comes to Yale’s mental health policies, Floyd said, it can feel insignificant when compared to student calls for more major reform. 

“Over and over and over again, you see these little incremental changes being made in response to pretty large outcries,” Floyd said. “You see what came out of that and it’s like, ‘Well, we created an FAQ page,’ or ‘We changed the name from readmission to reinstatement’ … It doesn’t add up.”

[photo headline=”” description=”” caption=”” credit=”Lily Colby” src=”https://features.yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Screen-Shot-2022-04-03-at-8.13.27-PM.png” ALIGN=”center”]

Hoffman, for his part, noted that the University has made more significant changes in the last year, but recognized that these may take some time to have a tangible and widespread effect. 

“We have made an enormous number of changes in a short period of time, but it may take some time for students to feel the full effects of the changes,” Hoffman said. “We are always looking for different ways to meet the needs of students and to evolve as we see generational shifts in mental health trends.” 

Demand for treatment

Amid the push for reforms to the department, an increased demand for counseling services has placed a unique strain on MHC.

.

“I think that many students who receive treatment in our clinic have a very positive relationship with MHC, but I do think that the public perception of our clinic is often shaped by our wait times and limits on our clinicians’ availability due to the extraordinary demand,” Hoffman explained.

Hoffman noted the positive “significant decrease in stigma around mental health” that is in part driving up demand for mental health care. But at Yale and across the country, he added, students are also facing more significant mental health challenges than they have in the past.  

On Dec. 3, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy MED ’02 SOM ’02 released a public health advisory which warned of the “devastating” effect that modern challenges have on the mental health of youth in the United States. In particular, Murthy warned of issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, income inequality, racial injustice and the adverse effects of social media.

“These past few years, we’ve seen a lot of really major stressors at the community level,” Sarah Lowe, a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, told the News. 

Lowe made specific reference to “the COVID-19 pandemic and all that comes with that in terms of bereavement, disruptions to routines, social isolation and so on.” Like Murthy, she also pointed to political tensions, the severity of climate change and an increased awareness of race-based violence as contributors to an “undercurrent of stress.”

But at Yale in particular, alumni have described a pervasive unhealthy student culture as yet another cause of mental health challenges — one that not only exerts pressure on students to succeed but casts shame on them for admitting to vulnerability. 

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During their time at Yale, Sean Moundas ’03 said, the culture among the student body was one that rewarded engagement, encouraging students to be as involved with as many activities as possible.

“The downsides were that there was this pressure to be quite busy,” Moundas said. “I think there was a culture with the academic rigor and the work volume of, like, ‘I stayed up x-number of hours just to get this done,’ and pushing through and pushing through.” 

The effect of this culture on student mental health, Moundas said, was not broadly acknowledged by students or the University’s faculty and staff. 

“It seemed like mental health was something to be managed more privately, and that there wasn’t a ton of space to talk about experiences with mental health and seeking support,” Moundas said. 

Mantica recalled a similar culture among the student body during her time at Yale, over a decade after Moundas. The attitude towards mental health on campus, Mantica said, could be exemplified by a Facebook meme page that took off while she was on campus, where much of the humor relied on playing student unhappiness and exhaustion for laughs. 

Party culture on campus is similarly demonstrative of a cultural unwillingness among the student body to confront their mental health challenges head-on, Mantica added.

“The culture at Yale was very much work hard, play hard,” Mantica said. “Like, ‘You can’t show any weakness. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re sad or struggling because everyone’s struggling.’” 

The force of this culture, Mantica explained, delayed her decision to seek mental health care from the University. Students talked so casually about the pressures they were under, she explained, that she wrote off her own concerns about her mental health when she began to lose a sense of stability. 

“The thought process during my time was, ‘I’m not bad enough,’” Mantica said. “Like, ‘I’m not actually having suicidal thoughts, so I’m not bad enough.’ But at the same time, I’m saying that and really, really  needing help and not recognizing that, because I just thought, ‘Oh, everybody does that.’”

“Cautiously optimistic”: Moving forward

Looking ahead, Bronson hopes the University will continue to treat the gap between student demand for mental health care and the services currently available with the urgency it deserves. 

The current approach to mental health reform at Yale, she said, seems to prioritize institutional preservation above the immediate needs of students. But when the University has existed for over 300 years, she said, concern for the institution itself should pale in comparison to concern for the students within it. 

“I think the institution is going to be alright,” Bronson said. “Are the kids alright? That’s what I want to know.” 

Hoffman emphasized that MHC is always open to student feedback as the department continues to develop, lauding the “extremely dedicated and diverse” teams of clinicians within the department, which he said was one of the most talented groups in any university mental health department. 

As he prepares to depart his deanship, Chun said that he has been pleased to see the stigma surrounding mental health on campus decrease during his time at Yale.

“I think there’s a better understanding that we need to manage our expectations,” Chun said. “It’s not healthy for oneself, and it’s not healthy for others, if someone drives themselves so hard for superficial reasons. What’s most important is that students learn and enjoy learning here. To work against that defeats the purpose of their time here.”

Floyd recognized some of the recent progress made but said that the historical pervasiveness of Yale’s inadequate mental health resources means that even if administrators seem to be moving in the right direction, there is far more that can be done.

“Regardless of whether they’re moving in the right direction or not, I think this is a long enough-standing problem that has been so chronically under-addressed,” Floyd said. “I think extra pressure is a good idea to keep them on the right track … I hope that they’re sincere. I do see some good movements.”

[pullquote credit=”Alicia Floyd ’03″ align=”full”]Regardless of whether they’re moving in the right direction or not, I think this is a long enough-standing problem that has been so chronically under-addressed. I think extra pressure is a good idea to keep them on the right track… I hope that they’re sincere. I do see some good movements.[/pullquote]

Floyd added that she was “cautiously optimistic” that the attitude of the current administration could be conducive to making substantive changes to some of the University’s current policies surrounding mental health — particularly regarding access to affordable mental health care.

In November 2021, Elis for Rachael circulated a petition demanding specific changes to the University’s current mental health care resources. In particular, they called on administrators to enact additional reforms to the reinstatement process — some of which were reflected in the changes announced in April — to add an affordable Preferred Provider Organization, or PPO, option to University health insurance that would allow students to see providers outside Yale and to allow withdrawn students access to campus.

“It boggles my mind [that] these changes haven’t been made, because some of them are free,” Johansen said. “There’s some things that they could do immediately. These reinstatement policies — just change your policy. That’s free. You can design what you need.” 

Until these changes occur, Johansen, like Floyd, emphasized the importance of keeping up pressure on the University. Alumni advocacy, he suggested, could be uniquely powerful in its ability to sustain a movement, even if the turnover of current students every four years limits the broader memory of the student body.  

Since Johansen and Bronson graduated in 1988, the University has increased the size of its student body, with the class of 2025 setting new records for the largest class size in history. That expansion could be a positive development, Bronson said, but only if the University has structures in place to make sure none of those students fall through the cracks. 

“It shouldn’t be possible for a student to be in a state of extreme distress or having a mental health crisis, and have that be a complete surprise to the people around them,” Bronson said. “There needs to be a structure within which people are known.”

MHC was founded in 1925.