It’s a common sentiment on campus that Yale is an oppressive force in New Haven, my hometown. Because the university is so wealthy and because it lies in the heart of a city that’s unjustifiably poor, it must’ve sucked up all the money and hoarded it for itself. 

But for all of the “Yale: Respect New Haven” signs, it’s not Yale that disrespects the city. The University now gives New Haven a substantial amount of money, $135 million over the current six-year period. And for all the uproar about the size of the endowment, running the University is expensive; and furthering knowledge — improving the world through “outstanding research and scholarship,” as Yale’s mission statement reads — is valuable. Most Yale students should appreciate that, given that, after all, they’re at Yale. 

There’s a concept — completely unrelated to Yale —  that my uncle likes to talk about. Rage, especially that of the young and idealistic, is proximate. When there’s an injustice in the world people often get mad at what’s close to them and not what’s really to blame. Yale students upset about Israel’s conduct in Gaza get mad at Yale; Yale students upset about climate change get mad at Yale; Yale students upset about New Haven get mad at Yale.

You can see this dynamic in the Yale-New Haven relationship. Yale is simply not the cause of poverty in New Haven. That would be the decline of industrial manufacturing, a phenomenon that devastated many cities in Connecticut: Waterbury, Danbury, Bridgeport, Hartford. Waterbury was the “Brass City,” the center of America’s brass industry. Danbury was the “Hat City,” the home of mad hatter’s disease due to the immense amounts of mercury used in production. New Haven made guns — a touch ironic since the proponents of arms divestment at the University are campaigning against the industry that once created New Haven’s middle class. But the Winchester Repeating Arms factory, now an apartment building in Yale’s rapidly expanding Science Park, closed in 1980. Another manufacturer, Marlin Firearms, shrank its business and shut down its North Haven plant in 2011.

The city’s plight, starting with the loss of the industrial base, was compounded by a demographic shift that accompanied deindustrialization. The white middle class, in large part built by factory jobs, left as soon as the factories disappeared and continued to leave through the 1990s. New Haven was left with Yale as its primary employer. Waterbury and Bridgeport were left with less. The result is that Connecticut is a state with very rich suburbs and very poor cities. If you look just a short drive down I-95, you’ll find vaster riches by far than you would at Yale: the five wealthiest men in Greenwich and Darien have more than $60 billion between them. Immense wealth in Fairfield County doesn’t have to face the same scrutiny Yale’s endowment does because it moved far enough away. And stopping there would itself be a kind of proximate rage. Why not blame the mismanaged globalization of American industry writ large? It doesn’t make sense to reward people for abandoning struggling cities and punish the institutions that stayed.

I can think of a couple of reasons for protesting Yale specifically. Of the powerful and rich institutions in Connecticut, Yale is a highly visible one. More importantly, Yale is willing to cave to student demands. Why aren’t more Yale students protesting the Sikorsky plant just off the Merritt Parkway, which manufactures and supports helicopters destined for Gaza? Probably because Sikorsky would call the cops and not bother negotiating like they did in 1972 when hundreds of Yale student protestors — alongside Noam Chomsky! — descended on the facility. 

If you believe that Israel is committing genocide, Sikorsky is much more directly implicated than Yale is. Students target the University because (a) it looms largest in their minds; and (b) because it’s to some degree willing to tolerate encampments. This is another kind of proximate rage: rage at the people who are friendliest to you. That’s why there were more pro-Gaza protests at the DNC than the RNC. When activists cause headaches for Kamala Harris but not Donald Trump, does that make Democratic leadership more likely to bend to protestors or more likely to shun them? Did Trump’s election benefit Palestinians? The president now says wants to “buy and own” the Gaza strip and expel its residents en masse, so it would appear that the answer is “no.”

That doesn’t mean that the University is perfect or blameless. Yale’s influence over the Broadway/Elm commercial area — the “Shops at Yale”— is probably not great for New Haven. It’s a problem for the city that so much central real estate is owned by a tax-exempt nonprofit. 

Without Yale, though, I’m not sure the generated tax revenue would be more than New Haven gets from Yale and from Hartford’s PILOT funding. Bridgeport, which is slightly larger than New Haven and not dominated by a nonprofit corporation, pulls in less property tax revenue than our city does. 

A better way to help support New Haven’s schools and most vulnerable people might be something like Mayor Justin Elicker’s proposed tax on towns that fail to meet the state’s affordable housing target. I wouldn’t call it a “segregation tax” — that formulation came out of a 2020 political moment that has long passed — but a way of sharing the responsibility for teaching and housing Connecticuters. Better still would be a national share-the-responsibility tax. There’s no reason to keep America’s costs proximate.

TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. His biweekly column “The American Crisis” explores history, politics and current events in America and at Yale. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu.