To My Yale Admissions Officer:
I’m sorry — I have to fess up to a mistake in my application. I am sure no one else has ever promised to make some big impact at Yale that they did not follow through with when they got here. In drafting this letter, I hope to clear my conscience.
In my “Why Yale” essay, I said how eager I was to become involved in campus criminal justice initiatives, such as the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project. Having arrived on campus, however, I now realize that joining that club will not be possible. From required trainings to posts on their official social media accounts, student organizations like YUPP frequently impose ideological litmus tests on prospective members — tests that weed out those who do not conform to a stringent political orthodoxy.
Of course, I shouldn’t assume that I would have been accepted to YUPP even if I had applied. But I think I would have had a good shot — in high school, I wrote and helped pass a bill that provides free phone calls to incarcerated women in Nevada. And as you know from my activities list, I’ve also worked for nearly four years at a national nonprofit that serves incarcerated individuals. Suffice it to say, I care deeply about reforming our broken criminal justice system.
But YUPP requires more of its members than that basic conviction.
Take, for example, the requirement for new members to attend a session of the student-led “Disorientation” teach-in. Past topics? Organizing “against the University” and Yale Police’s “occupying” role in New Haven. Or consider also YUPP’s statement professing “solidarity” with the organizers of the unauthorized encampments last semester. While I’m eager to engage with positions that are at odds with my own, I’m not comfortable tacitly endorsing them through my membership in a club.
Listening to speeches about divestment should not be a precondition to helping formerly incarcerated individuals with their resumes. But perhaps that’s not the point. YUPP’s implicit message is clear: if you disagree with us politically, you need not apply.
It’s not just YUPP. Yale student organizations across campus have the habit of amplifying political messages that are only tangentially related to their core missions. Several a cappella groups canceled their performances at an April dinner honoring former University President Peter Salovey to protest Yale’s investments while the Yale Women’s Center opposes fossil fuel investments. In conflating their particularist missions with their universalist idealism, Yale student organizations lose sight of the very people they were established to serve.
Maybe this is beyond your purview as an admissions officer, but in light of the recent conversation about institutional neutrality on Yale’s campus, I ask you a further question: should our clubs also be politically neutral?
Arguments in favor of institutional neutrality typically hold that a university’s mandate to promote free expression suffers from outside political pressures. The Kalven Report — the seminal treatise that established institutional neutrality at the University of Chicago — asserts that neutrality arises not from a “lack of courage” or “indifference and insensitivity,” but rather out of “respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints.”
To be sure, because students voluntarily associate with clubs, arguments in favor of club neutrality must strike a fundamentally different tone. The Yale College Democrats, for example, need not be neutral when endorsing political candidates. Moreover, club neutrality should not be a University-wide mandate — any suggestion otherwise would be an affront to the Kalven Report’s core findings.
Still, the logic behind institutional neutrality suggests that clubs are also best able to carry out their objectives by avoiding the expansive mire of the politics du jour. Extraneous political messaging — though it may prove popular among members — serves both to muddle a club’s core mission and to preclude certain students from participating.
The upshot? Clubs need to stay in their own lanes. Specialization is a core part of the liberal arts experience, so we should acknowledge our limits as commentators on issues that are beyond our expertise. The Yale Undergraduate Prison Project should feel free to opine on prison legislation in Hartford, but the complex politics of the Middle East are outside its purview.
Until Yale student organizations practice the discipline to focus on doing the actual work that improves the condition of those they serve, I fear that you will continue to receive letters like mine. So, again, I’m sorry — I didn’t follow through to become the “joiner” at Yale I promised you I’d be. But is writing opinion pieces for the News any consolation?
With regret,
Max Grinstein
MAX GRINSTEIN is a first year in Grace Hopper. He can be reached at max.grinstein@yale.edu.