Yale’s New Committee on Trust in Higher Education Has Zero Republicans
May 1, 2025
On April 11, 2024, Yale University announced the formation of a new Committee on Trust in Higher Education. The committee, convened by Yale President Maurie McInnis, was created “to better understand public perception of colleges and universities and explore ways of strengthening confidence in them.”
According to the Buckley Institute’s research, seven of the committee’s ten members are registered as Democrats and/or have donated exclusively to Democratic candidates and causes. Two of the remaining three are registered as unaffiliated and had no publicly available donations to political causes. Party registration or donation information was not available for the last member of the committee.
The committee is soliciting thoughts and ideas on how to restore confidence in higher education. In recent years, the Buckley Institute and its campus reform effort, Fight for Yale’s Future, have proposed several ideas for restoring public and alumni confidence in Yale. Feel free to share these with the Committee on Trust in Higher Education:
- Expand ideological diversity among Yale’s faculty and make efforts to include conservative and other dissenting voices in university decision-making processes and on committees like the Committee on Trust in Higher Education
- End Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming that amounts to little more than racial discrimination, especially considering the Supreme Court ruling overturning affirmative action in college admissions
- Trim Yale’s bureaucracy, which, at one point, exceeded the undergraduate population
- Commit to true institutional neutrality and hold university leadership and administrators by that policy
- Set a standard of welcoming open dialogue and debate on campus and in the classroom, including by promoting awareness and appreciation of the free speech rights set out by the Woodward Report
- Establish rules and norms to ensure that students, faculty, and staff do not need to pass a political litmus test to access the campus or be an equal participant in campus life
