Yale Daily News

Controversy has swirled surrounding a popular summer program for incoming first-generation, low-income students. 

Over the summer, two Yale administrators reprimanded students at the First-Year Scholars at Yale program for “trashing” the residential college they lived in. But some students said the deans’ language left them feeling targeted due to their socioeconomic and racial background, prompting an apology email from the deans. Afterwards, many students left happy with the program. But a Yale College Council statement released on August 30 reignited tensions around the incident, causing some FSY counselors and students to say that the YCC statement lacked context.

The News spoke to five students, one counselor and one residential director involved in FSY, as well as multiple Yale administrators and YCC representatives. Some students said the incident damaged their trust in Yale but also felt that the YCC’s statement oversimplified the situation.

First-years told the News that the program — a six-week summer program meant to give incoming students from first-generation, low-income backgrounds the opportunity to take summer courses at Yale provided a space to adjust to campus before entering “Big Yale”— a term used among some FGLI students that may cause feelings of displacement.

“I hope this event doesn’t give the program a bad reputation,” one FSY participant, who asked to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns, told the News. “I think it’s a program that should continue.”

Students, counselors and administrators maintained that the program should continue to be seen as a crucial part of the FGLI community and an opportunity to spur future progress on inclusion and belonging at Yale.

Students were hurt by a disciplinary meeting that caught them by surprise

First-Year Scholars at Yale, founded in 2013, was entirely remote in 2020 and 2021 and returned in-person for the first time in three years this summer. Participants lived in Trumbull College alongside a small number of students taking part in other summer programs. 

In the first weeks of FSY, a series of residential issues began to alarm the program’s residential directors, who notified the program’s associated adult faculty. According to counselors and students, problems included “trashing” physical spaces in the college, which counselors said created extra work for Yale’s facilities staff.

On July 6, a week after the program began, students were brought into Dunham Laboratory for a discussion of quantitative reasoning courses. Immediately after the event, two administrators — Yale Summer Session Dean Jeanne Follansbee and Timothy Dwight College Dean Sarah Mahurin — spoke to students about their behavior, emphasizing a need to respect the facilities and personnel and to take the program more seriously. 

Some students said that the approach, however, used language that was off-putting to them and left them feeling ambushed.

“All of a sudden, you have the deans, and they’re giving a speech,” Joseph Elsayyid ’26 said. “It just felt humiliating. My own counselor told me she was shocked by [what happened].”

This was also the first time the cohort had interacted with the deans, the students confirmed. 

Counselors and residential directors said they noticed negative reactions during the meeting and immediately began planning small group meetings for that night. Students, counselors and residential directors hoped to use the meetings to address students’ concerns over the nature of the meeting and language used. 

“We split up into separate rooms … and acknowledged the issue,” said Solomon Gonzalez ’23, one of the FSY counselors. “It was very serious, and people were able to speak their minds without much guidance. They were very honest with their opinions but also very respectful.”

Controversy hinged on interpretations of several key phrases

The News obtained a partial audio recording of the meeting, which captured comments from Mahurin and members of the FSY committee.

Follansbee’s comments are absent from the recording, but students present at the event said Follansbee repeated the word “privilege” several times when she addressed the group — emphasizing the “privilege” of attending FSY. According to the five students, that word choice struck some in the room as tone-deaf, considering FSY caters to underserved and underrepresented first-years.

When she addressed the group, Mahurin made a similar comment in the middle of a speech. 

“Please know, y’all don’t have to do this,” Mahurin said in the recording. “And by this I mean FSY. I’m not going to tell y’all anymore about what a privilege it is to be here.”

Mahurin added that the participants were not “matriculated Yale students yet,” though she emphasized that any student who chose to leave FSY would still be welcome back for the fall term.

Mahurin also gave the audience a piece of advice she said she repeats to incoming students every year: “Don’t be stupid. Don’t be tacky.”

Jorge Anaya — Assistant Director of Student Engagement at the Yale College Dean’s Office, who was in TD before he graduated in 2019 — confirmed that this is a catchphrase of Mahurin’s, which Anaya still tries to adhere to. The usage of the phrase was confirmed by three current TD students as well as previous FSY participants.

Mahurin declined to speak with the News but said that interested students can meet with her for a conversation.

But some students said that the meeting left them at a loss.

“It was very aggressive and kind of broke that sense of community that FSY was supposed to foster,” the anonymous FSY student said.

In a July 6 email to the FSY students, residential directors and members of the FSY committee, many of whom are senior administrators, both Follansbee and Mahurin apologized for their statements.

Not all students — not even all FGLI students — get to attend FSY, Follansbee wrote, and she apologized for the “unwanted implications” of the word “privilege.” 

Mahurin clarified that she used the word “matriculate” in an administrative sense. No one in the class of 2026, whether or not they participated in FSY, would be considered matriculated Yale students until the fall, she said. 

“You are absolutely Yale students,” Mahurin said in the email. “Your place here is not in question.”

In the email, the deans offered to meet in-person with students who wanted to discuss the event further. Paul McKinley, Yale’s senior associate dean of Strategic Initiatives and Communications, would not confirm how many students chose to meet with Follansbee and Mahurin. 

Follansbee was unavailable for comment.

Though one student said they found the apology disingenuous, others said they appreciated the acknowledgement.

“[Mahurin’s] speech did cause a lot of divisions,” the anonymous student said. “She just wanted the best for the facilities staff. She made a mistake, she owned up to it, let’s move on.” 

The residential directors and counselors led sessions to discuss the issue, which four students said were helpful. They hosted what some students described as an “apology” ice cream social. By the time the program wrapped up on Aug. 10, students said they had forgotten about the incident.

FSY students feel that the Yale College Council overreacted in its statement

Discussion about what happened had died down by the end of the summer, and the five students say they left with warm feelings towards the residential directors and other students.

Several told the News they were surprised when the Yale College Council released a statement detailing an account of the events and calling for better administrative behavior and engagement with FGLI students. 

“We, the YCC, see these acts for what they truly are,” the statement read. “Yale perpetuates a problematic culture of gratitude from its FGLI and BIPOC students.”

This was the first statement made by the incoming slate of representatives that was elected last April. The statement was pitched, written and approved by select senators rather than by full vote, though YCC President Leleda Beraki ’24 explained that such statements are not required to be voted on, as per the YCC constitution.

The statement made several errors, several FSY students and counselors said. Most prominently, it claims that FSY students were not given access to events such as Broadway shows in New York City as other summer program students were, when in fact these opportunities were made available to FSY students as well. 

“(The statement) made it sound like we received no care and attention when in reality, we had counselors…” said Adam Brewster ’26. “In reality, we were better off.” 

Additionally, some students felt that the statement did not accurately reflect the program’s general positive effects, the degree to which non-FSY students contributed to residential issues, and the administration’s response to the disciplinary meeting’s aftermath.

Beraki defended the statement in an email to the News.

“I definitely think this statement has flaws, like most things, but it has already resulted in counselors and students reaching out to the YCC with ways they think the program can improve,” Beraki said. “The focus of this statement was not intended to be on administrators themselves, but rather to spark a larger conversation on how resources made for FGLI students need to be better, while also bringing a certain level of accountability to those who provide these resources.”

The statement was taken down and reposted on Instagram without Follansbee’s and Mahurin’s names.

The students who spoke to the News said they feared the YCC’s statement had opened the door to overly critical discourse of FSY itself and could potentially discourage future participants or lead to loss of funding.

Looking around the Trumbull Common Room, Evan Losey ’26 recalled sleeping in the air-conditioned space with fellow participants on particularly warm nights. It was here and in other Trumbull spaces, he said, that participants formed lifelong friendships that have continued to ease their transitions to life at Yale this semester.

“It was rough, but it was overall a very constructive experience,” Evan Losey ’26. “One of the best programs I’ve been to.”

Four different FSY participants told the News that they formed significant friendships and would do the program over again if given the chance. 

The incident has become part of an ongoing discussion around being FGLI at Yale

Between 2013 and 2021, the percentage of undergraduate students eligible for Pell grants has risen from less than 13 percent to 19 percent. The number of first-generation college students has also grown from below 13 percent to almost 18 percent over the same period, equating to 500 more Pell-eligible and 400 more first-generation students than there were nine years ago. 

Over the same period, the number of FSY participants has increased as well. This year’s cohort is almost three times the size of 2013’s inaugural class, according to dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan, who was not present at FSY events this summer.

FSY was also larger than it had been when the program last ran in person in 2019, growing from 72 to 91 students.

This expansion was one of several growing pains with this summer’s round of FSY, according to residential counselor Darnell Battle ’21.

The residential directors and administrators said that FSY was heavily impacted by the lack of a faculty coordinator who could liaise between students and the FSY Council, a group of administrators including Follansbee. No person had been nominated to replace the outgoing director, Michael Fitzpatrick, so the position went unfilled throughout the summer.

“There was a vacuum of administrative support,” Battle said. “It was really challenging to run the program, with recent graduates and Yale College students doing most of the work on the ground and building the community.”

Despite the incident, three students said that they found the residential directors and counselors to be helpful resources and gradually became closer to them each week. 

FSY’s enlargement slots into a broader effort to support FGLI students, though many report that there are still challenges to studying at an elite university like Yale.

McKinley said that the Offices of Student Affairs and Student Engagement will invite FSY students to talk about their experiences. Ezana Tedla ’25, a YCC Senator and FGLI student who was involved in crafting the YCC’s statement on the matter, told the News that she hopes all students will feel comfortable sharing their experiences with the YCC. 

Beraki, who identified herself as FGLI in her email, said that her plans for supporting FGLI students lies primarily in partnering with FGLI-focused student organizations.

“While FGLI students should have the loudest voices and be at the forefront of these conversations, the burden of improving structural issues and program failures should not always fall on those affected by them,” Beraki wrote to the News. 

FSY was founded in 2013.

Update, Sept. 30, An earlier version of the story named the first FSY participant quoted about their experience. The student has since asked to remain unnamed due to privacy concerns.