On Tuesday, as I strolled between my morning and afternoon classes, I saw the usual array of famed Yale professors that students can regularly catch mid-commute or steeped in publications like the Financial Times or The Economist in the Benjamin Franklin dining hall. 

First, I caught Pulitzer Prize-winning professor Beverly Gage pacing down the steps outside of the Humanities Quadrangle. In 2021, after the controversy unfolded about her resignation from the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, she donned a characteristically determined look on her face for a photo accompanying the piece written about her in The New York Times. Tess Ayano photographed Gage that day, Gage’s hair blowing away from her face which was pointed across the lens of the camera. The caption: “‘It’s very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in a situation where you are being second-guessed and undermined and not protected,’ Beverly Gage said in explaining her decision to resign,” seems to have greater resonance today than it did then.

Second, I caught Pulitzer Prize-winning professor John Lewis Gaddis as he came into the Hogwarts-style seminar room on the fourth floor of the Humanities Quadrangle. When Gaddis entered, I was the only student who had arrived at “Time Machines: Reimagining the Past,” one of the seminars Gaddis is teaching this semester. Before the rest of the class appeared, Gaddis and I exchanged jokes about the impending “Liberation Day,” set for Wednesday, April 2, when another slew of the Trump Administration’s tariffs went into effect.

After cutting our seminar an hour short to give us additional preparation time for our final projects, Gaddis bid the class adieu and sent us out into the crowded landing atop the stairwell in HQ and back out into our daily lives to begin thinking about how we might travel back in time to preserve bygone events for “posterity.” In the meantime, we spilled out onto York Street, dodging pedestrians, peddlers, Porsches and Priuses.

Next, I needed to make it to Rosenkranz Hall for my “Politics of Fascism” seminar, which starts promptly at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesdays and is taught by professor Lauren Young. 

Cutting through Schwarzman Center and past Commons, committing a kind of time travel to get to Prospect Street and in the vicinity of Rosenkranz Hall, I hustled through the flurry of hungry “Commoners,” making it down to the street corner where Grove Street separates College Street from Prospect Street. 

That’s when it happened. I saw a red vehicle in the street that radiated sunlight like the one that Prince wrote about in his song, “Little Red Corvette,” which is about ambivalence, vulnerability and fear. But my immediate impulse as an audiophile had apparently obscured my vision, because the car was actually a Tesla and the color, according to Tesla’s website, is not red but midnight cherry. A familiar blonde woman was behind the wheel: President Maurie McInnis.

In disbelief, my eyes defied the commands doled out by my occipital lobe, darting between her face and her navy blazer, which was trimmed with white piping on the lapel and each of the garment’s cuffs. The blazer — in line with article five of the 20-article dress code, a sartorial version of Marcus Aurelius written by the Yale Dress Study Group in 1965, which strived to stipulate students’ style — embodied the Ivy look captured by Teruyoshi Hayashida in “Take Ivy.” That look was later refined by brands like J.Crew, J. Press and Ralph Lauren. McInnis dresses with a sophistication that feels preppy and collegiate — if not elegant.

But as quickly as I realized that McInnis was speeding away from campus behind the wheel of a vehicle manufactured by an egomaniacal, possibly Nazi-sympathizing firebrand, she was out of sight. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I made a split-second decision that was made in the interest of blind curiosity. Realized irony beamed from ear-to-ear across my face as a smug grin, I discarded my scuffed-up backpack on the sidewalk and sprinted down College Street, catching McInnis rolling toward the stoplight ahead of Old Campus and the New Haven Green.

The light was still red when I got there. 

I stopped in my tracks, completely out of breath and feeling a kind of lactic acid build-up that I hadn’t experienced since JV track in high school. Obstructing the sidewalk paved between Grace Hopper College and the traffic on the street that McInnis’ commute away from campus was being actively impeded by, I pulled the battered iPhone 13 out of my pocket and snapped away. The impulse to capture a photo of her may seem an unusual one, but I was overcome by disbelief at what I was seeing — and I wanted proof of what I was witnessing in broad daylight. It made my momentary scrutiny of our university’s chief unchangeable. The photo had been taken. 

McInnis didn’t appear to touch the steering wheel, implicating her as either a casual driver or a technocrat who has opted for a Tesla equipped with driverless technology. Instead, she stared straight ahead, her hands fidgeting with one another. Grinning at the image of McInnis on my screen, I looked up from my phone right as she gazed back at me, flashing me a grimace and speeding away once more.

She did not seem keen on having her photo taken. 

Next, I retraced my steps to collect my backpack from the sidewalk. My stuff was well-preserved and intact, but my mind began to race about the scene I had literally chased and its humor that seemed destined for political cartoon fodder.

Then, in the midst of my fatuous thinking about what Clay Bennett, a cartoonist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the recipient of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, would do with the kind of image now neatly situated within the Photos app of my iPhone, I thought about its broader implications.

I have long been hesitant to jump on the anti-McInnis bandwagon because her tenure is still quite young. Back in the fall, I remember an early morning when I was coming home from an Old Campus affair when I saw her reporting for duty at her office long before the sun, or presumably university administrators, had risen and started the day. I was immensely proud to see her grit approach to doing the work necessary to lead Yale; it made me even prouder to be a Yale student.

But as I walked away from the moving scene I had chased down College Street, I played “Little Red Corvette,” listening through my wired, Apple-issued earbuds. I could not stop thinking about McInnis’ ownership of a Tesla, because aside from being the University president, she is an art history professor — something she emphatically told my class during her address at our opening assembly in August. She understands that visuals are important. But unrelated to McInnis’ choice of car, or Prince’s politically-agnostic intention in writing his hit song, I began to think about ambivalence, vulnerability and fear.

Those are not only Prince’s themes, but the themes that have tested McInnis’ leadership as she has operated this university during one of its most daunting eras. There has been institutional neutrality — which is, effectively, ambivalence about anything important. 

Few things reek of vulnerability more than the threat of losing nearly $1 billion in federal funding, simply because of who occupies the Oval Office. But that, as nearly every member of the Yale community knows, is our reality.

About fear: the Yale Daily News’ Tuesday, April 1 newsletter included the subject line, “Department leaders told to report all DEI initiatives.” There was also the recent departure of two of Gage and Gaddis’ colleagues in the History Department — and a third in the Philosophy Department. There has been chatter echoing around campus about the residential college deans’ clandestine, eleventh-hour emails ushering international students to the safety of the campus under the protection of its wrought iron gates and gothic arches. And, as of Monday, academic buildings on campus require an ID swipe.

Few people have forewarned the dangers of succumbing to these forces — ambivalence, vulnerability and fear — as saliently as economic sociologist Charlie Eaton, who recently argued in The New York Times’ opinion section:

“Universities sometimes call on the idea of intergenerational equity—that endowments should be preserved to provide comparable benefits for future generations—to limit spending their endowments. In this climate, intergenerational equity is little more than a fallacy. If those universities fail to defend free speech and scientific research now, future generations could lose their treasures to creeping authoritarianism.”

Mr. Eaton’s reference to “intergenerational equity,” can surely be substituted for “X.” That is, this country’s most elite universities’ leadership has led largely from a belief in the fallacy that if it just plays dead, a wannabe dictator might wane. Not so. 

As McInnis attends the formal ceremonies planned to give her rightful celebration for beginning a tenure atop one of the world’s premier academic institutions, I hope she will consider the following:

Sell your Tesla. Listen to “Little Red Corvette” by Prince and consider buying one, though you may want to avoid College Street. Reject fallacies — and certainly do not allow them to guide your leadership. Coalesce behind this campus or acquiesce before it. Read the words of a villanelle published by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in 1947, two years after fascism was impermanently defeated. Abide by them: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

ZACHARY CLIFTON is a first year in Benjamin Franklin College. He can be reached at zachary.clifton@yale.edu.