Last week, President Maurie McInnis empaneled a “committee on institutional voice” to hold a handful of listening sessions and, almost surely, come to the same conclusion as similar committees nationwide. Following the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia and numerous other institutions, Yale’s leadership seems eager to embrace a policy of so-called “institutional neutrality” on issues that, in their view, do not directly affect the university, believing that silence will shield the university from controversy. Perhaps, but Yale is not merely a megaphone or a public relations machine. What Yale does with its $41 billion endowment, massive armed police force and swaths of land speaks far louder than what Yale says on “matters of public significance.”
Yale’s policy and financial decisions are not neutral, nor does the public view them as such. What exacts great reputational cost to the university is when Yale’s backroom decisions and the values that underpin them are revealed on the global stage. When Argentinians last saw Yale on the front page of the national newspaper Página 12, it wasn’t for Peter Salovey’s mass emails or crackdown on pro-divestment protests — it was for quietly profiteering off of the country’s mid-2000s debt crisis, under the 2017 headline “Buitres con título universitario”: “Vultures with a university degree.”
In 2018, Yale’s investment managers held millions of dollars in Puerto Rico’s debt as repayments forced austerity on the colonized island, made acute after the climate devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria. Holding that debt was not a neutral investment: through its investment policies, Yale chose to profit off of Puerto Ricans’ neo-colonial plight rather than slash debt obligations that made it impossible to adequately fund public services.
Today, as Yale’s preferred investment managers like Farallon Capital and JLL Partners maintain significant ties to war profiteers, Yale’s refusal to divest from military weapons manufacturers makes another explicit value judgment clear. For the Yale Corporation, the potential for profit outweighs violations of life, human rights and international law when financing Israel’s genocide and scholasticide in Palestine.
Meanwhile, when Yale police pin community members to the ground using “disproportionate” force, and when Yale administrators refuse to pay full taxes in a community where schools don’t have enough funding to “keep the lights on,” New Haveners hear the institution’s voice loudly without the trustees or President uttering a word.
Advocates for neutrality seem married to a romantic view of the university as limited to faculty offices and seminar rooms that create a forum for “diverse viewpoints and open dialogue and debate,” isolated from the stakes of social crises and material injustices. But, by further positioning the university as a political actor in local policy and global finance, administrators have turned Yale from an open forum to a one-sided force on an array of social and economic issues. A neutrality policy that restrains what leaders say, but gives them free rein over what they do, won’t return the university to the ideal form that some envision.
Worse, a policy of “neutrality” will only help administrators evade the basic ethical responsibilities, including to human life and international law, that comes with its financial and policy commitments. At peer institutions, university leaders deploy neutrality as yet another convenient cudgel to quell calls for institutional accountability. The University of Chicago has relied on the Kalven Report, considered the gold standard for institutional neutrality, to silence community demands for divestment from fossil fuels — a move that its original writers consider an overextension. At Vanderbilt, administrators weaponized neutrality to block students from engaging in democratic debate and referenda on divestment, sparking more combative protests. On these campuses, claims to “neutrality” have helped trustees and presidents cling to their unspoken guiding value: a commitment to maximizing profit, regardless of the social cost. If the Committee on Institutional Voice adds “neutrality” to administrators’ litany of deflective tools, they’ll only help leaders escape accountability while escalating the means by which students and community members find it necessary to dissent.
Yale cannot and will not be a neutral institution as long as it maintains extractive investments in global atrocities and an exploitative relationship with New Haven. Rather than provide leaders with the fog of neutrality, the committee should clear the air with a recommendation for transparency and democratic governance of the University’s numerous assets. The best way to ensure that University leadership does not misrepresent our community’s values — in word and deed — is to ensure that University leadership is accountable to our community. Let the Committee on Institutional Voice know at their listening sessions and via their webform: institutional neutrality would just be an illusion while Yale actively profits off of people’s despair, and the world will see right through it.
TARAN SAMARTH is a doctoral student in political science and an organizer with the Endowment Justice Collective. They can be reached at taran.samarth@yale.edu.
HINDANI PATEL is a first year in Davenport studying Environmental Engineering and Ethics, Politics and Economics and is an organizer with the Endowment Justice Collective. They can be reached at hindani.patel@yale.edu.