Being at Yale over the past two years gives me an interesting perch. From here I can watch the capitulation of a once-great institution in real time. It gives me an inside view of what must have gone down at the law firms, tech companies and the other universities that have bent the knee to the orange menace.
And things are doubleplusgood at Yale these days. Earlier this month, Yale College scheduled a mandatory lecture (officially, a “conversation”) for all first-year students, on the university and democracy. Let’s set aside the curious nature of insisting that all who have just arrived on Yale’s campus must get the “official” story about this place and its role in the world as it is in 2026, even before they’ve set foot in a classroom.
Outside the university-sponsored event, a new coalition of students, faculty and alumni, called Democratize Yale, organized a teach-in on one of the campus’s large, grassy quadrangles. The teach-in focused on the disconnect between the Yale administration’s expressed commitment to a set of ideals and its present actions. It tackled issues around academic freedom, free speech and assembly, as well as the need for real shared governance and the folly of Yale’s potential settlement with the Trump administration. The teach-in was recorded for anyone who wants to see it, and the Democratize Yale coalition has a spiffy new website you can also check out.
As if on cue, to illustrate its own hypocrisy on the day of these two events, university leadership sent out an email to everyone at Yale, reiterating its restrictions on public gatherings on campus: Among them, no outdoor events without a permit, events only allowed during limited hours and no use of amplified sound or “other elevated noise” (and that includes chanting) without preapproval. In a rhetorical leap, the email also warned that “when free expression crosses the line into discrimination or harassment, the university will respond in accordance with its policies.”
While one can see this as a holdover from the Gaza protests from several years ago, the choice to reflexively reiterate the idea of harassment and discrimination as an ever-present intrinsic danger to public assembly seems like overkill, and like a warning: Public assembly comes with a price to pay.
When I got to the teach-in, I was approached by a free expression facilitator from the Office of the Assistant Vice President for University Life. Now, I don’t need someone to facilitate my free expression. But facilitation is not what is going on here. In the doublespeak nature of what is going on at Yale, these facilitators have been used to squelch protest in the past by handing out cards to students with a QR code linking to the “free expression” policies at Yale and offering a warning: “Please stop your current action immediately. If you do not, you may risk university disciplinary action and/or arrest.”
Their presence at the teach-in was meant to intimidate the students. In fact, it is this entire apparatus of control that has arisen around free speech and public assembly at Yale that was one of the issues we were tackling at the teach-in.
My personal free expression facilitator, a very nice young man, insisted that I sign a form requesting permission for the teach-in, as we had not sought it out in advance as a matter of principle. He asked for my name and my affiliation with the university, and I gave it to him, and he wrote it down, but I said that I couldn’t sign anything for him, leaving him crestfallen and sad. Sending out young staffers to do this work is such a craven and cowardly thing to do. The vice presidents for university life should do this dirty work themselves.
As the teach-in came to a close, we were told press had been escorted off campus at the start of the event by staffers from the Office of Public Affairs and Communications, an unusual enough occurrence that at least two reporters, Francie Diep from The Chronicle of Higher Education and Chris Polansky from Connecticut Public Radio, mentioned it in their stories.
This is strange for two reasons: First, the location of the teach-in, which was held in front of Yale’s main library, is open to the community—there are no gates, no signs or warnings that the space is private property and that trespassing is not allowed. Second, I’ve been at other Yale events with press in attendance, and OPAC didn’t send a team down to hustle journalists off university grounds. Clearly, someone high up in Yale’s administration wanted to curtail any coverage of the teach-in and remind students, faculty and staff about who has the power on campus. In the end, it looked panicky and weak, and again, staffers were sent out to do the heavy lifting while those in charge remained cloistered away from their own community.
Yale’s leaders are losing their quest to force this university to give in to an autocrat. Virtually no one except our president, Maurie McInnis, and the trustees thinks the ongoing settlement negotiations with Trump’s Department of Justice make any sense: Students barely in their 20s all the way to alumni from the Class of 1962 (including actor Sam Waterston, who spoke at the teach-in) all see the current restrictions on free speech and assembly, the university’s out-of-touch, unaccountable governance model and the current erosions of academic freedom at Yale as something to fight. It has brought together students, faculty and alumni in a way I haven’t seen in my close to 20 years in this place.
Any hope for Yale’s future lies with this movement. As Saul Austerlitz, another Yale grad, wrote in Liberal Currents in a piece called “Bending the Knee at Yale”:
“Powerful people will not save us. To reach a less dire future, we will actually have to fight all the Maurie McInnises of the world and her brethren, who insist on being sensible and cautious as the arsonists surround our homes and flick matches at the walls. I do not trust people with great power anymore because they have demonstrated, again and again and again, that very few of them have the will or the desire to hold the line against American tyranny.”
Join us on the line. And be sure to say hello to the nice young free expression facilitator when you get here.
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