Yale Daily News

With the search for Yale’s 24th president in full motion, student leaders hope the University will prioritize diversity in its search for Peter Salovey’s successor.

Six of the eight Ivy League universities — all but Yale and Princeton — currently have female presidents. Most recently, Harvard University inaugurated its first Black and second female president, Claudine Gay, this past Friday. Nemat “Minouche” Shafik began her term as president of Columbia University on July 1, making her the first woman and person of color to hold the position in the institution’s 269-year history. Sian Leah Beilock began her term as Dartmouth College’s first female president on June 12.

These recent changes in the Ivy League come amid high rates of leadership turnover at colleges and universities across the country. Now, among the list of Forbes’ top 20 colleges in the United States, 11 are currently led by a woman or person of color.

But in Yale’s 322-year history, all of its presidents have been white. All have also been men, with the exception of interim president Hanna Holborn Gray, who served in the role from 1977 to 1978,

Neither the University nor Joshua Bekenstein ’80, the chair of the Presidential Search Committee and the senior trustee of the Yale Corporation, responded to requests for comment about how racial and gendered considerations will factor into the current presidential search. . 

“Yale’s mission statement speaks to creating leaders who serve all sectors of society and doing this through a diverse community of staff, students, and alumni, ” Yale College Council president Julian Suh-Toma ’25 wrote in an email to the News. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion in our leadership are the linchpins to the pursuit of this goal, and we strongly encourage the Presidential Search Committee to not only consider the strength of diversity in their search but to also seek a leader who will guide this institution with a focus on prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the next decade.”

Graduate and Professional Student Senate president Chrishan Fernando GRD ’25 noted Yale’s long list of “many white men” as presidents.

He added that he would like to see the University follow the lead of peer institutions in diversifying the pool of people who hold or have held its highest ranking position.

“A lot of older, major universities are really reflecting and realizing that this is really not okay,” Fernando said. “They’re looking toward a more diverse pool of candidates to make sure that they’re finding candidates that aren’t just kind of like the same types of candidates that they’ve been looking at in the past.”

Suh-Toma added that he and YCC vice president Maya Fonkeu ’25 “urge” the University to join its peer institutions in diversifying leadership.

He continued that a focus on diversity and inclusion is critical not only to the current presidential search but also to the University’s future at large.

“The hope to see this change also is intensified by the fact that Yale has never had a female president who has served beyond an interim role, ” Suh-Toma wrote. “It’s high time for Yale to meet the moment and prioritize diversity, both in the replacement of President Salovey and in the direction of the university looking forward.”

Laura Wexler, a professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and of American Studies, wrote to the News in an email that diversity, equity and inclusion are critical to the University’s success going forward.

She added that Yale’s responsibility toward DEI is not merely internal; she believes it affects the world at large.

“Thoughtful, continuing and broadly and creatively conceived DEI initiatives are crucially important to a thriving future for Yale as an institution,” she wrote. “For teaching and research generally, and for our society as a whole.”

Following former president Kingam Brewster’s ’41 1977 resignation from office to become ambassador to Britain, Hanna Holborn Gray became Yale’s first female president but only in an interim position, which she held concurrently to that of University provost.

Correction, Oct. 4: A previous version of this article listed Dartmouth as a university instead of a college; it has now been fixed.