Rescuing Yale from Woke Tyranny

The board of trustees needs some true diversity — of the ideological and professional variety.

A t Yale University, where I went to school, the alumni are in open, exhilarating revolt. They’re exasperated by a climate of suppression, big budget and staff increases, a PC war on English classics and American history, and declining standards. Victor Ashe, the longtime mayor of Knoxville and former president of the National Conference of Mayors, is running as a challenge candidate for alumni trustee. It’s the first time in years that the official alumni office choice has faced an opponent. Voting started on April 14 and continues until May 23.

Nothing will change at America’s finest schools unless the trustees change first. They set standards for the president, and he sets them for the provost and the deans. Faculty’s faculty, but the administrators are hired hands and untenured in their leadership jobs.

“The cause is lost,” you say? I’m an optimist, and the stakes are too high. The poison at our universities is killing the country. The campus ethos of attacks on free speech, race-based quotas, and victimology is oozing into business, sports, science, medicine, and childhood education.

Who are the trustees at Yale? Do they have the capacity to see and hear what’s happening? At Yale, I’m worried they don’t.

I looked at a list of Yale’s trustees. They’re all fine people. I’m surprised, though, by how tiny a dot most of them occupy, right at the intersection of the D.C. Swamp, High Tech, Big Blab (my new name for news and entertainment media), Diversity, Inc., plus a Chinese billionaire. I can’t think of many cohorts less loved or less trusted by Americans.

A tiny dot that’s leading the country in an entirely wrong direction, in my opinion. A blinkered, rich, concentrated pellet of lefty groupthink and faddishness. I’m an art critic, so what do I know?

Catherine “Cappy” Hill is the senior trustee, or liaison between the board and Peter Salovey, the president since 2012. She was president of Vassar from 2006 to 2016. According to my Vassar friends, she was much faulted for throttling the school’s humanities departments and spending too much money. The former’s on her, the latter on her trustees. Still, no tears were shed when she left.

In the trustee election under way, the official Yale candidate is David Thomas, the president of Morehouse College, the historically black college in Atlanta. He got his Ph.D. and B.A. at Yale. I think it’s a good idea to have one college president on the board as a voice of reality in the face of crazy ideas. There’s no point in having two. If trustees try to push Peter Salovey, the president, to water-cannon the PC stable, his college-president friends will use every ploy to stop change.

According to Yale’s alumni-association rules, candidates for trustee can say nothing about reasons for running in the statement each candidate is allowed to make on the ballot. Ashe had to get over 4,400 signatures on a petition to run. During that drive and since then, he has said a great deal in separate outreach and in interviews about transparency at Yale and declining standards. Yale won’t cough up a list of alumni, so Ashe has to be entrepreneurial.

We know nothing about Thomas’s platform. His candidacy was a Yale-insider secret until the day ballots were mailed. I’d bet the family farm he’s a go-along guy.

The alumni office, which has delivered this Soviet-style election protocol, needs reform. The alumni director, who made $511,000 a year, according to Yale’s last tax return, needs to be sacked. She’s not even a Yale graduate.

Also on the current board is Michael Cavanagh, chief financial officer of Comcast, whose customers are so unhappy the company might as well be called &@#%ing Comcast, pardon my Sanskrit. Bad customer service aside, it’s a media conglomerate.

Joshua Bekenstein, another trustee, runs Bain Capital. According to Campaignmoney.com, he gave $3,563,000 last year to left-wing political campaigns and PACs. He gave over $6 million in 2018. Over the years, he seems to have given big bucks to every leftwing cause except Alger Hiss’s legal defense fund.

I checked Opensecrets.com. Almost all of Yale’s trustees gave to political causes. I’d say 99.9 percent of the money went to Democratic candidates or left-wing PACs. I found a few stray $1,000 gifts to Mitt Romney’s campaigns.

Trustees David Sze and Ann Miura-Ko invest mostly in Big Tech. They’re young, and I don’t doubt they’re smart, wonderful people. Sze’s sister, Sarah, is a very fine artist. Miura-Ko was an early Twitter investor. Sze regrets not being an early Twitter investor. I think Twitter is poison. It’s trash talk’s four-pack-a-day cigarette habit. They live, work, and breathe Silicon Valley. That’s a social, political, and economic bubble.

Three or four other trustees are in financial services linked to Big Tech. Joshua Steiner is the one trustee I know. He works for Bloomberg LP and was in technology financing but still has common sense. Chip Goodyear was in the mining business. Praise the Lord, someone who knows something about real stuff like commodities, labor, hydraulics, and earth-moving equipment. A practical man. Surely Steiner and Goodyear could use Ashe as an ally.

Lei Zhang is a Chinese billionaire living in Hong Kong. Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index — don’t bother looking for my name there — said last year that he’s worth $5.5 billion. He went to Yale’s School of Management.

Zhang is described as an “enigma.” He supports Renmin University, which has impeccable links to the Chinese Communist Party. He went to college there. He made a $45 million gift to Renmin to establish an institute developing Artificial Intelligence. He sits on the board of Jingdong, an e-commerce company, and Qunar, China’s big travel agency, both based in Beijing. He was a board member of the China–United States Exchange Foundation.

Everything in China is getting the partification treatment. Repression, concentration camps, spying, disappearances, cybertheft, and cheating are all in the news, and what about the origins of COVID and China’s COVID cover-up?

When he was a student, Zhang was an intern in Yale’s investment office. Yale got his nascent money-management firm rolling with $40 million. It has pumped a lot more money into Hillhouse Capital, Zhang’s fund, and, according to David Swensen, who runs Yale’s endowment, he’s made $2.2 billion for the school.

Zhang is a self-made man. I admire that. He’s very generous to Yale, and that’s a good thing. How connected is he to the Chinese government, though?

Yale’s trustees announced a new policy on “ethical guidelines” for investment in fossil-fuel companies. Is there an ethics policy for investing in China? It’s a police state.

I wouldn’t want Yale’s leaders to strain their necks looking the other way.

Annette Thomas is the CEO of the company that owns the Guardian and the Observer, the UK’s two big left-wing newspapers. Michael Warren transitioned from the Obama administration, where he worked in the White House personnel office, to big-business consulting. Carlos Moreno “has spent his life dedicated to the pursuit of justice.” He’s a lawyer in California, and I’ll take his word for it.

John Rice is a headhunter specializing in minority recruitment. He worked for Disney and for the NBA. His sister, Susan Rice, was chin-deep in all the lies surrounding the Benghazi fiasco when she was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She was knee-deep in the unmasking scandal, in which she and a few other Nosy Nellies tried to use classified intelligence to juice the Trump-Russia Hoax.

Isn’t there any trustee who owns a big factory? Or a chain of restaurants? A rancher? Anyone who lives in a small town? Is there anyone who voted for Trump, or is rumored to have voted for Trump? An evangelical Christian? A conservative intellectual? Camille Paglia, Amity Shlaes, J. D. Vance, Ben Sasse, Sam Alito? They’d all add some diversity to a board that’s blinkered. Ashe will rock the boat in a courtly Tennessean way.

It’s not like I’m suggesting Glenn Beck. Yes, he went to Yale.

When I was reading Yale’s tax return, I saw what Yale pays the honchos running the place. My fainting sofa was nearby, lucky for me.

Bill Buckley nearly single-handedly tossed the far-right anti-Communist John Birchers out of the conservative movement. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, Ronald Reagan was part of a small group that tossed the Communists from the Screen Actors Guild and from Hollywood. At the same time, union boss Philip Murray purged the CIO and its affiliates of Communists. Margaret Chase Smith and Ralph Flanders, Republican senators from Maine and Vermont, respectively, led the charge to purge McCarthy. It took courage and leadership.

Yale’s leaders need to give the social-justice warriors a good stomp and the heave-ho before they wreck the place with their bullying, race-baiting, triggers, and Puritan conceit. Yalies everywhere are sick of their crazy crap.