Yale’s President Is Lucky He Didn’t Testify Before Congress

For those who have been watching the appalling state of free speech on campus for years, the Congressional testimony by the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT promised to be a watershed moment. But instead of turning its back on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) concepts that drive division on campus, Yale joined its peer institutions in doubling down, committing more resources to promote the DEI ideology that undermines free speech and bolsters antisemitism.

It is not surprising then that Yale President Peter Salovey made the same blunder as his DEI-supporting colleagues, though without the prime-time media attention. When asked by the Yale Daily News whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Yale’s code of conduct on the day after the headline-dominating hearing, Salovey said he “would first like to watch the entire testimony.”

When questioned if “a student openly calling for the genocide of Jews without directing such statements at a particular individual” would violate the student code of conduct, Salovey pointed to Yale’s free speech policies.

Again like his colleagues under fire, only the next day did Salovey clean up his answer, arguing that calls for genocide of Jews would be considered “harassing, intimidating, and discriminatory.”

Had he been in front of a Congressional committee, Salovey would likely be facing the same calls to resign as the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT have faced.

What put Yale and other top-tier institutions in this position was not their stated support for free speech on campus. Free speech should be respected even if the speech in question is disgusting. Rather, these universities’ years-long dedication to DEI at the expense of free speech undermined any credibility they had.

DEI programs place race, ethnicity, and gender front and center instead of treating people by the content of their character. Within this framework, immutable characteristics are determinative and a demographic group’s placement on a hierarchy of oppression decides its rights. Under this way of thinking, minority groups that fall on the wrong side of the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, like Jewish or Asian students, don’t merit the same hair-trigger defenses others do.

This mindset has led to plenty of free speech hypocrisy at Yale, just like at Harvard, Penn, and MIT. While it took 48 hours after the Congressional hearing for Salovey to condemn calls for genocide against Jews, the Yale administration was ready within hours to provide support to students called out for publicly sharing opinions considered antisemitic by some and condemn the billboard truck that highlighted certain students as “Yale’s Leading Antisemites.” Yale came to the defense of a professor who called the October 7th atrocities “extraordinary” in a matter of days but took weeks to defend free speech in 2015 when a faculty member humbly suggested Yale students could choose their own Halloween costumes. Back in 2021, Yale administrators even threatened a Native American student because of an invitation to a Federalist Society party.

Cleaning up after his misstep on the Jewish genocide question, Salovey has gone full steam ahead on DEI. In a statement to the Yale community, he committed to including Jewish students as part of the “Belonging at Yale” effort, “the university’s activities to enhance diversity, support equity, and promote an environment of welcome, inclusion, and respect.”

Under the Belonging effort, Yale has allocated at least $135 million to hire diverse faculty. Yale committed to doubling the budgets of Yale’s four cultural centers and launched the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. The university provides $2,000 grants for student events that advance “belonging,” like a monthly lunch “for trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people,” and the “Fempire Conference,” which commits to “challenging the status quo in gender parity across disciplines.” Seemingly every division in the school has a separate DEI plan.

But not all is truly about belonging for everyone. In April, the Belonging Initiative promoted an event with a speaker who cheered the murder of Jews and Israelis, celebrated “homophobia” as an act of “fierce resistance,” and said, “ideology that supports mixed race couples is rotten.” In September, Belonging invited Yalies to “celebrate the paperback release” of a book called “White Malice.” The Belonging effort also provides a monthly focus calendar that neglects Jewish American Heritage Month in favor of multiple months for other minority groups. Trusting Yale’s DEI administrators to combat antisemitism is like trusting arsonists to fight fires.

It is this approach to the world, where race is the most important characteristic and only some groups are favored, that led elite university leadership to fail so spectacularly in front of a national audience. Even with 24 hours of nonstop headlines as a warning, Yale’s leadership was unable to stand up for Jewish students in the same way they defended every other minority group in recent years.

Until Yale breaks from the other elite educational institutions and eliminates the DEI double standards on campus, Yale will continue to fail in the same way its peers do.