Ellie Park, Photography Editor

As Yale searches for its next president, questions have emerged about how presidential scrutiny at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard University — which culminated in the schools’ presidents resigning — may impact Yale’s ongoing search process.

Much of the recent controversy surrounding university presidents and the Israel-Hamas war stems from a Congressional hearing during which the presidents of Harvard, Penn and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would not provide direct answers when asked whether calls for “the genocide of Jews” violated their respective campus codes of conduct. All three presidents, without responding yes or no, ultimately testified that answers must be “context-dependent” as required by their universities’ speech policies.

Yossi Moff ’27 told the News that because universities have received so much media attention recently, campus speech has become increasingly politicized — an issue that he said Yale’s next president must be prepared to understand and address. 

“Our next president should be prepared to critically deal with the realities of campus conversations today, and not hide behind the comfort of university regulations or ‘free speech,’ but intentionally evaluate what it looks like to balance the values of free speech and individual safety of students on campus,” Moff wrote.   

Yale’s speech policies are currently governed by the Woodward report, a 1974 report on freedom of expression commissioned by then-University President Kingman Brewster ’41. It has guided the University’s policies on freedom of expression since Yale’s adoption of the report in 1975. 

In reference to the congressional testimonies, Ben Schneider SOM ’24 wrote to the News that the new president should be “​​able to clearly define what acceptable free speech is at Yale and what is punishable.” 

He elaborated that being prepared for difficult scenarios, such as the student protests and tensions surrounding Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, should be “essential” for the new leader.

Given these recent protests and campus social tensions surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, Schneider and Moff both said that Yale’s next president will have to tactfully foster a culture of open discourse while also protecting students from hate speech.

The Student Advisory Committee, involved in the ongoing search, collected a survey of the entire undergraduate student body, as well as graduate students, about the search and current campus climate. In the report, “ensuring free speech on university campuses” was classified as one of the top six “greatest challenges facing Yale.” 

Recently, Yale’s approach to handling speech issues came under fire after a message declaring “Death to Palestine” was written on a suite whiteboard in Grace Hopper College. Julia Adams, Grace Hopper’s head of college, wrote in an email to students at the time that “academic freedom and the expression of views and dissent are rightly protected” with no further action.

Based on recent turmoil at Harvard — where Claudine Gay resigned from the presidency amid allegations of plagiarism and weeks of controversy after her Dec. 5 Congressional hearing — Trevor MacKay ’25 discussed the essential nature of top-quality scholarship for the next University president.

Mackay suggested that the search committee should conduct an independent review of candidates’ academic credentials.

“The Committee should be extremely careful and vet any candidate’s prior academic output,” Mackay wrote to the News. “If they truly wish to preserve the integrity of Yale and avoid Harvard’s situation, they will have no qualms about doing this. I hope that they will consider choosing a candidate for Yale and Yale alone, not for any external influences.” 

Gay’s resignation also raised questions nationally about how racism influenced her treatment by the Harvard Corporation, given that she was the University’s first Black president. 

“I hope that the Yale Corporation does a better job of vetting candidates for the top job than the Harvard Corporation did,” Milan Singh ’26, a staff columnist who recently published an opinion column in the News about Gay’s resignation, wrote. “If the next president is nonwhite or a woman, they will — fairly or not — be hit with accusations of being a diversity hire, who received the job because of identity rather than merit. That is all the more reason to ensure that they do not have skeletons in their closet.”

Maya Fonkeu ’25, the vice president of Yale College Council, noted that Gay’s presidency was historic and that the lack of support she received from trustees was “incredibly saddening.”

Yale’s 23 presidents, to date, have all been white, and — with the exception of Hanna Holborn Gray, who served as an interim president from 1977 to 1978 — have all been men. 

Amid these concerns about the influence of Gay and Magill’s resignations, SAC members Julian Suh-Toma ’25 and Leo Greenberg ’26 — both speaking as individuals and not on behalf of the committee as a whole — do not see the search being influenced by the controversies at Penn or Harvard.

“I think the trustees are doing their job finding the right president for Yale, and that job continues regardless of what happens at other universities,” Greenberg said. 

The SAC includes 12 students total, with four undergraduates, four graduate students and four professional school students.