Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor

Amid recent federal funding cuts to several Ivy League universities under the Trump administration, the News asked University President Maurie McInnis how she would respond if Yale faced similar reductions or if federal funding were tied to specific demands. 

In a Wednesday interview with the News, McInnis said that the University’s response would be “context-dependent,” noting that any action would depend on the nature of the administration’s requests.

Trump has taken aim at the federal funding of half the Ivy League schools. His administration required Columbia University to acquiesce to a list of demands if it wanted a shot at restoring $400 million in federal funds, which Columbia largely agreed to do. Higher education leaders nationwide have expressed worries that Columbia’s capitulation spells trouble for academic independence — the ability of universities to make their policies independently from government interference. The president of Brown University wrote in a letter that Brown would take legal action if it experienced “encroachments” on its “autonomy.”

McInnis said that if the administration makes similar requests to those made of Columbia, there would be principles that would underlie her response, namely “to defend Yale’s mission and Yale’s values.” When asked whether academic independence would be one of those principles, McInnis said that “academic freedom is a bulwark principle in higher education.”

McInnis said “we would have to see” whether Yale would take legal action if the Trump administration revoked federal funding. 

“There’s never a yes or no answer to those things,” she said. “It has a lot to do with the circumstances.”

Yale School of Management Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld said that he supports McInnis’ approach because each university is facing “situation-specific” decisions.

Sonnenfeld said that university presidents have the difficult job of communicating their thinking to their boards, faculty, staff and students to get the support of all stakeholders.

“They need to understand what the university is balancing off,” he said. “And something which strikes me that’s really good about Maurie is that she’s really good about talking about the trade-offs.”

Ben Cecil, senior education policy advisor at center-left think tank Third Way, explained that each university has a different landscape of stakeholders and budgets, and the individual opinions the institutions have to weigh matter to their decision-making.

“There are certain institutions that have a bit of a target on their back. Institutions are having to choose when and where and how they are having to engage with the federal government when it comes to federal funding,” Cecil said. “Something that works at Columbia might be detrimental at Yale.”

McInnis said that her strategy to preserve Yale’s funding and relationship with the U.S. government has remained the same: limiting public pronouncements while working behind the scenes to lobby lawmakers about the impact of university research on the country.

“As you can imagine, we get lots of requests for us to just speak and say ‘this is bad.’ And I think that would be a way of perhaps bringing attention to Yale, without necessarily being an effective way,” McInnis said. “What I’m trying to do is, instead of saying ‘this is bad,’ is instead be out there advocating for our mission, advocating for the work we do.”

McInnis’ goal is to establish a “regular presence” in DC between her own trips and the visits of colleagues and a lobbying firm. She said she took two or three trips to DC this month and has two more planned in the near future. Yale also recently hired an employee in DC to lobby full time. “It’s all about getting as many touch points with as many people as we can,” McInnis said.

McInnis has not issued a statement related to the federal government since mid-February.