Tim Tai, Senior Photographer

Victor Ashe ’67 and Donald Glascoff ’67 appeared at the Superior Court in Hartford at 10 a.m. on Monday in a lawsuit against the Yale Corporation. At the hearing, lawyers traded arguments concerning the legality of the Yale Corporation’s abolition of the petition process for electing alumni to its ranks. 

The hearing stems from an ongoing tension among students and alumni with regard to how the Corporation’s members are selected. The Yale Corporation — the University’s Board of  Trustees, which is currently involved in the ongoing selection of the University’s 24th president — is composed of 10 “successor trustees” appointed by members of the Corporation and six “alumni fellows” voted on by eligible alumni from a pool of candidates selected by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee. Before its abolition in 2021, the petition process allowed alumni who acquired a certain percentage of eligible alumni voters’ signatures to have their names on the ballot for the alumni fellows election. 

Ashe and Glascoff’s lawsuit, filed in March 2022, claims that, by removing the petition process, Yale violated an 1872 amendment to its own charter. On Sept. 19, 2022, Ashe and Glascoff appeared in court to present their oral arguments, which Superior Court Judge John B. Farley, who oversaw Monday’s hearing, allowed to move forward on one count —  namely, that the University breached its 1872 amendment to its charter — despite the University’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Eric Henzy, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, relied primarily on the 1872 amendment to argue that alumni qualify for benefits of the contract as “third party beneficiaries,” and that the Yale Corporation violated the charter by placing restrictions on alumni and terminating the petition process. 

Henzy said that he was impressed by Farley’s preparation, noting that the hearing ran over time because of Farley’s questioning. 

“The judge was incredibly well prepared and gave an incredibly fair hearing,” Henzy said. “There’s a lot of interesting, difficult issues here and I look forward to hearing the result in January.”

The 1872 amendment, which forms the legal basis of Ashe and Glascoff’s case, was an addition to Yale’s charter granted by the Connecticut General Assembly. The amendment states that all graduates of Yale College who are five years removed from graduation may “cast their votes” for Yale Corporation candidates to be “chosen from among such graduates.”

These Corporation members, the amendment adds, shall have the same rights and responsibilities as all other members. Prior to the amendment, the six seats given to alumni were held by state senators. 

Henzy, through an analysis of the charter’s language, argued in the hearing that the intent of the University’s charter is to empower all eligible alumni to vote freely for alumni fellow trustees and to put themselves forward as candidates for the alumni fellow election. 

He argued that Yale has breached its charter not only through its termination of the petition process but also through the strict barriers it has created for potential candidates, including a growing signature requirement. In 1984, petitioners needed signatures from 1 percent of voter-eligible alumni. In 1984, the University raised the requirement to 3 percent before scrapping the petition process altogether in 2021. 

Now, alumni may appear on the election ballot if and only if they are first nominated by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee, a standing committee of the Yale Alumni Association.

“I was certainly pleased with the hearing,” Ashe told the News. “Judge Farley knows the case deeply and I thought it was fair, thoughtful and deeply inquiring. Now we’ll wait until December or January.”

Yale — represented by Jonathan Freiman LAW ’98, Joseph Merschman and Rachel Canna from Connecticut law firm Wiggin and Dana LLP — presented a three-fold argument that the plaintiffs lack standing and evidence that Yale breached the charter and that their contract claim is barred by the statute of limitations.

Cheng and Canna noted that both parties agree that the 1872 amendment is a contract between Yale and the state of Connecticut, but they argued that such a contract does not prevent Yale from exercising oversight of the alumni election process, and it does not give alumni the right to challenge that oversight.

Yale’s lawyers also allege that the charter was enacted to provide the current Yale Corporation with the authority to manage itself and administer its affairs in the name of Yale’s best interests. For this argument, they cited other historical documents, including language from the 1701 charter, which granted the Corporation “full and complete right, liberty, power and privilege” to oversee Yale’s affairs.

Another passage they cite from the document, formally known as the Charter of Yale College, states that the Yale Corporation members were encouraged to “at all times in all suitable ways for the future to encourage the said school in such convenient place or places, and in such form, manner, and under such orders and rules, as to them shall seem most conducive to the aforesaid end thereof.”

Yale also argues that its signature requirement and its limit on the number of petition candidates are legal because these changes occurred in 2002, and section 52-576 of the Connecticut General Statutes provides that “[n]o action … on any contract in writing, shall be brought but within six years after the right of action accrues.” 

Ashe told the News that it is possible that the court will not make a ruling, which would send the case to the Connecticut Supreme Court. 

He also noted that over 460 Yale alumni, spanning 42 classes and all 50 states, had donated to the legal defense fund for the plaintiffs.

“It’s not necessarily because they think we’ll win or lose,” he said. “They just believe in the cause.”

The University declined to provide a comment for this article.

Mounting student and alumni concern over petition removal

In May 2021, then-senior trustee of the Corporation Catharine Bond Hill GRD ’85 wrote in an announcement sent to alumni that the University would be scrapping the alumni fellow petition process. The announcement came on the day that the signature-collection period would open for the 2022 election in which three alumni had already declared their intention to run for an alumni fellow seat.  

In her 2021 statement, Hill wrote that the Corporation’s decision was made in part out of concern for the rise of “issues-based candidacies” by alumni in alignment with outside organizations.

“It is not hard to imagine a new normal in which every election saw vying groups with organized support competing to focus Yale on their chosen goals,” Hill wrote in the statement. “Such a state of affairs would do profound disservice to the university by distorting the very nature of what a Yale trustee must be: a fiduciary.”

Introduced in 1929, the process has rarely been used, with the last successful petition candidate to win election to the Corporation prior to the change being William Horowitz ’29, who became the University’s first Jewish trustee.

In a June 2021 memorandum, the plaintiffs argue that the unveiling of the petition process came after what seemed like 60 years of “direct solicitation of nominations to the ballot for the Alumni Fellow positions.”

Ashe, the former U.S. ambassador to Poland, successfully got onto the ballot through the alumni petition process in 2021 with financial support from the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. program at Yale but lost the election to Morehouse College president David Thomas ’78 GRD ’86. Along with Maggie Thomas ENV ’15, whose candidacy was backed by the climate activist organization Yale Forward, the two became the first successful petition candidates since 2003. However, Thomas withdrew her name from the alumni fellow election ballot upon being tapped to serve as the inaugural chief of staff of the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy.

Scott Gigante GRD ’21, co-founder of Yale Forward, a climate activist organization that backed Thomas, started a petition following Hill’s announcement which has amassed over 1,400 signatures to restore the “democratic lever.”

He added that, although he cannot speak to the technical aspects of the claim that Ashe and Glascoff raise in their lawsuit, he believes that they are backed by a “strong moral merit.”

“It was very disappointing to be cut out of the democratic process, at a time when democracy around the world is in somewhat of a state of crisis,” Gigante told the News. “The right thing to do in order to have true representation on the Board would be to have a truly democratic process, and that involves anyone having the opportunity to perform their case to be a member of that Board, and the petition process that was established nearly 100 years ago is exactly that opportunity.”

Students, too, have raised concerns about the Corporation’s election process. From Jan. 30 to Feb. 3, the Yale College Council held a referendum in which over 2,000 students, or more than 90 percent of participants, voted to reinstate the petition process.

On Sept. 1, the YCC, the Graduate and Professional Student Senate and the Graduate Student Assembly passed a resolution demanding greater student representation on the Presidential Search Committee. On Oct. 2, the Corporation announced the addition of the historic Student Advisory Council to inform the search for Salovey’s successor.

The governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut serve as ex-officio members of the Corporation.