Jessai Flores

I have been at Yale for about three months now, and, somewhere in the mess of new faces, wrong turns and poorly-planned all-nighters, I seemed to have stumbled upon something resembling normalcy. It occurs to me that the past three months will be vastly different from the rest of the time that I spend at Yale. Never again will I wander around campus unsure of where HQ is, and, luckily, it seems as though my days of sheepishly sidling up to strangers and asking if I can eat with them are coming to an end as well. These three months will also be the only period when I didn’t know that Donald Trump would be president for the rest of my Yale experience. 

So, while I have spent the first half of the semester trying to navigate Yale’s campus, I anticipate that much of the second half — in fact, much of my remaining time at Yale — will be spent navigating Yale’s legacy. 

I came into college not wanting to talk politics with new people. I am a staunchly liberal Texan from a family that runs the gambit in terms of political affiliations, and this context has made me uniquely aware of how politics can supercede character. But since Donald Trump’s historic win last week, it has dawned on me how short-sighted it was to try and separate Yale from the upcoming election. In many ways, it seems as though the ideals that Yale stands for are at the crux of contemporary politics — and could well be a major reason for the red wave that just drowned the United States. 

The truth is that this election, in particular, has brought into focus the issues with intellectualism and its seemingly unavoidable byproduct of intellectual elitism. In the hours before the polls closed last Tuesday, I phone banked with Yalies4Harris and talked to constituents in Pennsylvania, Montana and Arizona. On the calls, I couldn’t help but think: Do these people really want to get a call from a Yale student? We introduced ourselves by saying we were calling with the Pennsylvania — or whatever the appropriate state was — Democrats, but had we said that our effort was organized by Yale Dems, what reaction would that have garnered? 

In the days following the election, my friends and I spent hours analyzing the results, beginning sentences with promising generalizations like “Americans want X,” “Americans hate Y,” and, frequently, “Working-class Americans won’t Z.” We debated the reasons until the results lost all meaning, anesthetizing ourselves to the prospect of another Trump administration through increasingly clinical over-intellectualization about what had gone wrong. It wasn’t until one friend uttered this sobering thought that the analytical spiral stopped dead in its tracks. He said, “People would hate the idea of Yale kids having this conversation.” 

In an era when the United States is clearly grappling with its relationship with intellectualism, I can’t help but wonder what my own relationship should be. I cannot believe that the answer is to abandon the pursuit of critical thought, which I truly believe to be the reason applicants flock to institutions like Yale. But we also cannot ignore the ways in which intellectual elitism has created a world that gatekeeps political discourse and alienates those who did not have the opportunity to receive a Yale education. The neverending train of new politically correct language judges people on a moving target.

Yale certainly does reckon with its legacy and criticize its institutional history. From Yale’s land acknowledgement to the many courses on Yale’s role in history, such as “Yale in Japan,” “Yale in America” and “Can it Happen Here Again? Yale, Slavery, and the Civil War,” the University seems borderline obsessed with self-reflection. But is it possible that we are so focused on the University’s past wrongdoings that we have lost sight of our present impacts? 

I have absolutely loved my first three months at Yale. It is quite possibly the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, which I can better appreciate now that I have stopped constantly running into things and making wrong turns. But I can already feel the world outside of campus fading into a hazy, caricatured outline. I can see how easy it could be to forget that beauty and passion and, yes, intellectualism, exist outside the magical space of the college campus. But the types of discussions had within the walls of Yale do not belong exclusively to the people who live, work and study here. I am beginning to believe that our key responsibility as Yale students is to remind ourselves of that fact and to continually pursue the discourse that we love so much with people outside of the institution.