Christina Lee, Head Photography Editor

University President Maurie McInnis will kick off a new lecture series on Wednesday. The series will bring an expert to campus once a semester to give a talk, beginning with Harvard economist and Opportunity Insights director Raj Chetty.

McInnis wrote to the News that the series was born out of a refrain she heard during many hours of meetings in her first semester. She explained that people she met with on her “listening tour” expressed an interest in events with experts that could “spark meaningful dialogue and inspire new ideas.”

“I created the presidential lecture series to foster intellectual exchange regarding topics that are of national significance or new scholarship in areas of interest to our campus,” McInnis wrote.

The format of the event, such as whether there is a question and answer period, will vary each time, according to McInnis. Her office also advertised that community members provide recommendations for future guests through the University’s messaging portal to McInnis.

Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis also hosts an event series called the “Dean’s Dialogue,” in which he invites guests for public conversations about controversial contemporary topics they study. 

Like the Presidential Lecture Series, the Dean’s Dialogues are intended to foster campus discussion about social, academic and national debates. But the two series differ in some ways, Lewis explained: the Presidential Lecture Series will take place once a semester as opposed to several times, bring in guests from outside of Yale and attempt to reach an audience broader than Yale undergraduates.

“President McInnis’s lecture series is a larger-scale event,” Lewis wrote. “In both cases, the goals are to encourage the Yale community to engage with one another and with important views on timely topics.”

From 2016 to 2020, former President Peter Salovey hosted a lecture series intended to spotlight women and “particularly women of color” who were graduates of Yale. The idea was proposed by his wife Marta Moret SPH ’84, according to a Yale website, and ran five total talks. From 2020 to 2024, Salovey also held conversations with guests on the podcast “Yale Talk.”

On Feb. 19, listeners will gather in Zhang Auditorium in Evans Hall to hear the first speaker in McInnis’ series. In his talk, Chetty will make a pitch for the impact of scientific research on the world, he told the News.

His lecture, entitled “Creating Equality of Opportunity: New Insights from Big Data,” will walk listeners through his work at Opportunity Insights, where he studies how “big data” can reveal opportunities to advance economic opportunity and upward mobility.

“Similar to when biologists began using microscopes to study cellular biology, big data is giving us a new lens through which we can understand the science of economic opportunity with unprecedented precision and granularity,” Chetty wrote to the News. “We are able to literally ‘zoom in’ to the neighborhood level and investigate why opportunity varies sharply across areas.”

He plans to discuss Opportunity Insights research into case studies of improving economic opportunity across the country.

Specifically, he will explore how housing policy could be shaped to give low-income children the benefits of high-opportunity neighborhoods, how job training and mentorship programs can be effectively implemented and how university admissions processes can aid mobility.

Chetty and McInnis both mentioned the concept of the “American Dream” in their comments to the News, writing that this dream is fueled by upward mobility. In previous interviews with the News, McInnis has articulated a message similar to Chetty’s: that scientific research conducted at universities has a large impact on broad progress in the United States.

“The list goes on and on, but [universities] contribute to medical science, to economic innovation, to economic development, to national security,” McInnis said in January.

As rapidly-evolving federal policy is threatening the research funding of universities on ideological grounds, Chetty wrote that initiatives that investigate inequality through the lens of economic opportunity attract bipartisan support.

Yale incorporated a tool created by Chetty’s group Opportunity Insights, known as the Opportunity Atlas, into its admissions process after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action. The tool uses census tract data to assess economic mobility through place-based measures, and Yale employs it as part of its strategy to maintain diversity now that it can no longer legally consider race in admissions decisions.

The president’s office plans to post a recording of Chetty’s lecture online after the event.