Christina Lee, Head Photography Editor

Discussion panels, open houses and tours will stretch across campus and into New Haven during next weekend’s presidential inauguration, beginning Friday, April 4 and culminating in an installation ceremony Sunday morning.

Yale’s spokesperson told the News that around 350 invited guests are set to attend the inauguration, “including alumni, community leaders and delegates who will represent other colleges and universities.” The installation ceremony, which is expected to include an inaugural address delivered by University President Maurie McInnis, is invitation-only for the Woolsey Hall event but will be livestreamed. The inauguration is purely ceremonial, and McInnis has had full status and capabilities as president since she assumed the role in July.

The inauguration has been in the works for months and was planned primarily by steering committee co-chairs Kimberly Goff-Crews, Secretary and Vice President for University Life, and Daniel Colón-Ramos, professor of neuroscience and cell biology and associate director of the Wu Tsai Institute. Twenty-two professors, deans, student representatives and other Yale affiliates rounded out the planning committee.

“They did ask me what I hoped as an overall frame for the inauguration, and I said I wanted it to emphasize community, and I wanted it to emphasize Yale, not me,” McInnis said. “It is a celebration of Yale and it is a celebration of our community. Community is about Yale, but it’s also about New Haven.”

On Saturday, McInnis will host a presidential panel with three other university heads who attended Yale: Melissa Gilliam ’87 of Boston University, Jennifer Mnookin LAW ’95 of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Deborah Prentice GRD ’86 GRD ’89 of the University of Cambridge.

The inauguration website states that the panel of university presidents will address challenges facing universities, such as “advancing their missions amid financial pressures” and “complex issues from affordability and accessibility to the integration of artificial intelligence.”

The panel is cushioned by a morning “Symposium I: Promoting Knowledge” and an afternoon “Symposium II: Applying Knowledge.” The first panel will take on “the balance between academic freedom and the responsibility to combat misinformation,” according to the website, and the second will discuss “concrete examples of knowledge application.”

Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy, is a speaker on the first panel. He sees the event as “an opportunity to showcase how valuable a place like Yale is to the broader world.”

He believes the inauguration’s organizers thought “it would be good to showcase some of the professors across the campus who are engaged with cutting-edge knowledge creation to engage with what a university is.” He sees the audience for the panel as not only the Yale community, but also “those outside who are trying to make sense of the role of higher education and President Trump’s critique of higher education.”

Esty clarified that he was invited to speak months ago, before Trump’s attacks on universities dominated headlines, and that the panel is not a reaction to Trump.

Alongside Esty on the panel will be Ned Blackhawk, Howard R. Lamar Professor of History. He said that the panel is an example of “a longer conversation that’s happening across campus” about solidarity between professors across disciplines.

“It’s a good time to be communicating to broad audiences the work that academic scholars do,” Blackhawk said, and to display “the dynamic conversations and insights that Yale faculty and other professors across the country are contributing to society.”

From Friday through Sunday, around 40 open houses will take place, including backstage tours of the David Geffen School of Drama, late hours at the Yale Peabody Museum and newly-opened Yale Center for British Art, and an exhibit of historical inauguration materials in Sterling Memorial Library. The University spokesperson wrote that the University expects around 1,400 Yale community members to volunteer or attend the open houses.

McInnis is Yale’s 24th president and the first woman in the role in a non-interim capacity.