The name “Yale” was once synonymous with American statesmanship, intellectual rigor and cultural pride. Today, Yale’s reputation stands diminished in the eyes of the public. The erosion of public trust confronting our grand university arises from a drift toward intellectual abstractions and ideological utopianism divorced from the historically rooted traditions of the United States.
At Yale, academic departments elevate only those who challenge conventional truths and Western ideals. These departments have lost serious scholars of the classics, military history and the West, and chosen to replace them with scholars who reject the very validity of our great heritage. We must recommit our institution to engaging thoughtfully with our civilization’s founding beliefs and history, rather than recklessly deconstructing them and casting students into the wide maw of “progress,” expecting they will somehow emerge fulfilled and morally prepared to be engaged citizens.
A university and a society cannot live in self-hatred. Yale should remember that it exists not outside of time or a nation but within a civilizational context — one grounded in Judeo-Christian, classical and constitutional traditions. Yale must serve our civilization, not posture against it.
Intellectual inquiry and the pedagogy of the academy are, by nature, conservative. How can we even begin to learn without looking to the knowledge of the past? Our current refusal to acknowledge this truth has fostered serious errors in thinking in the academy. Edmund Burke captured the essence of this tragedy by lamenting the collapse of reverence for tradition and inherited wisdom in favor of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.” Abstract rationalism, divorced from historical continuity, has come to undermine the very foundations of our culture.
Restoring trust in Yale and recovering it as the great American institution that it should be demands a restoration of that dignity and reverence for the past that once defined its intellectual mission. In this way, intellectual conservatism not only teaches respect and gratitude for our civilizational inheritance, but sustains both society and scholarship into the future.Yale dooms itself and our society to obsolescence if it does not.
Yale worships so-called “rationalism” — embracing systems of thought prioritizing abstraction, critique, and deconstruction above all others. This rationalist drift is evident in the Yale Art History Department’s decision to eliminate its renowned European art history survey course because of the prominence of white, male artists. And in the English Department, students can graduate without ever reading Shakespeare or Milton. These are not isolated instances of ideology; they reflect a deeper commitment to abstract, progressive, rationalist systems that claim to know better than the moral and intellectual authority of hundreds of years of civilizational inheritance.
Today, Yale is rightfully held in suspicion and distrust for its shameful discarding of the past, as evidenced by Yale’s negative relationship with its own namesake. Elihu Yale was once honored as a foundational benefactor whose generosity enabled the existence of the college we hold dear. Today, he has been relegated to near-silence in official discourse. Despite never actually owning slaves, his portrait was subjected to controversy regarding even being displayed at the Yale Center for British Art. At the same time, his legacy has been quietly minimized in official narratives.
Rather than teach complexity and moral conflict honestly, Yale has chosen widespread erasure. This is not isolated; 2017 saw Yale renaming Calhoun College in an act of moral sanitization rather than educational engagement. Historical plaques have disappeared from view, and the living, active commemoration of its alumni that shaped early American civil life is now only found in the statues and plaques that do remain. For the rare commemorations of Yale and America’s past that do exist, they are heavily qualified with apologies and minimization. These acts reflect an institutional posture of disavowal and a disowning of the very history that has given Yale its identity and prominence.
A renewed emphasis on practical knowledge, historical consciousness and meaningful application of tradition in Yale’s curriculum and campus life would reconnect the academy to the public and endear our campus to the nation it once served. The survival of Directed Studies is both remarkable and shocking — but it should not be the exception. As a former student in the program, I can attest to its intellectual rigor and formative power as one of the few serious institutional commitments to engaging with the Western canon.
But there is no guarantee of Directed Studies’ continuation. Every year, it must defend its existence against criticism that it is “too Eurocentric,” “too traditional” or not “diverse” enough. Efforts have been made to create a parallel or alternative curriculum decoupled from Western intellectual history. Programs like Directed Studies were once assumed to be central to a liberal education. Now, it feels like a contested outlier at Yale.
My time at Yale let me personally experience this tension between intellectual tradition and institutional culture. In Directed Studies, I discussed and debated the great works of the West. Outside of the classroom, in my role as president of the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program and chairman of the Tory Party, I saw how the broader Yale community and environment treats tradition, patriotism and cultural inheritance as relics to be dismantled, rather than starting points for serious inquiry.
A coherent cultural foundation is crucial to the survival of all that Yale and America hold dear: liberty, justice, equality and republicanism. True intellectual diversity and academic freedom thrive within this tradition — not outside of it. Yale has inherited a moral and civilizational legacy forged in the blood, sweat and sacrifice of generations. We should not be ashamed of that history — nor of our nation’s. It is this disconnect that lies at the root of Yale’s public credibility crisis. Yale must stop treating its deepest traditions as liabilities and begin to once more champion them as strengths.
Yale once cultivated leadership devoted to the common good, as embodied beautifully in: “For God, for Country, and for Yale.” Today, Yale positions itself as a global institution training global citizens. It has distanced itself from national obligations and diluted its commitment to the cultural and moral framework that once grounded its public legitimacy.
Yale has severed itself from the nation, despite the fact that this relationship once served Yale and America alike. Is it any wonder that our American system falters, just as our university loses its standing? We must reclaim and restore Yale as the American university.
TREVOR MACKAY is a senior in Timothy Dwight College studying history. He plans to work at McKinsey & Company in Washington after graduation. He can be reached at trevormackay@aya.yale.edu.