The difference was particularly stark for certain sports teams, including squash and crew.

“People get the misimpression that athletics is a diverse thing, or that it is often a way for people from lower income backgrounds to have an opportunity to get a college education,” said Rick Eckstein, a sociology professor at Villanova University who focuses on the commercialization of youth sports. “But we’re not seeing that on the ground, especially on ‘country club’ sports teams like squash or sailing or crew.”

According to an analysis by the News, approximately 770 Yale College students are on varsity sports teams. The News sent a survey to all student-athletes and found that more than 85 percent of the 86 respondents were recruited athletes. The group of respondents spans 29 of Yale’s 35 varsity sports teams. 

Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan told the News that, over the past five years, between 180 and 210 successful first-year applicants were “supported by a varsity coach” each year. Quinlan added that the number of supported students that Yale admits each year is lower than what the Ivy League allows and that Yale’s admitted student-athletes have a higher academic profile than the League-established standards. 

In the Ivy League, athletic recruits generally must have grades and SAT scores proximate to those of admitted students overall. Coaches and admissions committees may recruit student-athletes who do not meet these standards, but only for exceptional athletes — and any exception must be balanced by admitting a recruit whose academic performance exceeds the standards, Inside Higher Ed reported in 2019.

“I am proud that in the ten years since I became Dean of Admissions Yale’s student body has become significantly more racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse,” Quinlan wrote in an email to the News. “At the same time, our varsity teams have been more competitive and successful than ever, winning Ivy League and national titles in a wide range of sports. I believe a student body that is diverse along multiple dimensions … contributes to better learning for students. Our student athletes contribute to all of these dimensions of diversity, and more.”

Comparing recruited athlete demographics with Yale College

In 2022, 65 percent of first-year matriculants at Yale College graduated from public high schools, while 35 percent graduated from independent schools, according to the Yale University Fact Sheet for the 2022-23 academic year. By contrast, a survey administered by the News found that 57 percent of athletes went to public schools and 43 percent went to independent schools.

Of the athletes who responded to the survey, more than 55 percent identified as white, compared to less than 33 percent in Yale College overall, according to 2023 data from the Office of Institutional Research. 

Through analysis of sports team rosters, the News was also able to determine demographics specifically among “country club” sports, as Eckstein described them. 

Country club sports in the United States are expensive and exclusive to play — and often draw overwhelmingly white, wealthy and private school athletes, per Eckstein. They include sports like men’s and women’s squash and fencing, as well as women’s rowing, men’s heavyweight crew, men’s lightweight crew and sailing. 

While Eckstein referred to country club sports as a phenomenon in the United States, the News’ analysis of all varsity Yale College athletes found that of the 221 students on so-called country club sports teams, at least 68 were international. 

Eckstein emphasized that he is not an expert in youth sports models in other countries, adding that all countries are very different from both the U.S. and from one another. He said that he does not know about the elite status of “country club” sports outside of the U.S. 

In addition to being less accessible to play in the United States, these sports are rare on the collegiate varsity level. Thirty-seven colleges have varsity squash teams, 156 colleges have varsity women’s rowing teams, 84 colleges offer men’s varsity rowing programs, 45 colleges have varsity fencing teams and 33 colleges have varsity sailing teams. 

By comparison, there are 858 collegiate football teams.

According to the News’ analysis, at least 141 out of 221 athletes on the teams that Eckstein listed  — men’s and women’s squash and fencing, as well as women’s rowing, men’s heavyweight crew, men’s lightweight crew and sailing — came from private schools, or roughly 64 percent. By contrast, about 31 percent came from public high schools. The News could not confirm the high school status of the remaining 11 athletes. 

Eighty-five percent of athletes on the women’s squash team graduated from private schools; of the private school graduates, the average tuition of their high school was $52,158. 

At least 86 percent of men’s squash players come from private schools, with the schools’ tuitions averaging to $59,753.

At least 71 percent of athletes on the men’s heavyweight crew team went to private high schools.

Expensive and “overwhelmingly white” rowing clubs

According to Thomas Allen ’25, a recruited coxswain on the men’s heavyweight crew team, white and wealthy overrepresentation in rowing is a result of the sport often being both financially and culturally inaccessible.

Out of 50 recruited athletes on the heavyweight crew team, three are athletes of color, as confirmed separately by two members of the team.

In high school, Allen rowed with a private rowing club based in his hometown of Marin, California. Membership on the club’s junior competitive team — the team open to high school students — costs $5,000 per year for students not receiving scholarships, according to the club’s website.

Allen described his high school rowing experience as “overwhelmingly white.” Outside of his rowing club, he said it was very uncommon for students to know anything about rowing. Allen himself learned about the sport from his older sister, who began rowing when he was in middle school.

“A lot of people had parents who had rowed or had been involved with the sport on a college level,” Allen said. “I mean, I can literally count on one hand kids who were not white. Every day, I would show up to practice and there would be multiple Teslas and G-Wagons in the parking lot.”

This dynamic was not reflective of his overall community, Allen said. He pointed to another high school rowing club near where he grew up in Oakland, California. 

While the club is located in Oakland, which is home to many underserved communities and has a median household income of $85,628, Allen said that the club had few rowers who actually lived in Oakland. Rather, it drew almost exclusively from surrounding wealthy suburbs, such as Piedmont, which has a median household income of more than $250,000.

Unlike some other sports, Allen said that equipment costs are not particularly high for rowers, since equipment costs tend to be covered through club membership. To train on their own time, however, Allen said that some athletes purchase rowing machines for their homes, which tend to cost around $900.

“With rowing, the barrier is both cost-based and cultural,” Allen said. “You don’t have to pay for the equipment; my team readily gave out scholarships. But it’s more a matter of it being inaccessible because the communities in which good rowing clubs exist are all incredibly affluent and homogenous. It’s geographical and cultural. Most people just don’t even know the sport exists.”

He added that it is difficult to get recruited to row in college from smaller, less expensive clubs.

Allen said that in the spring, it was common for a college coach to be present at his high school club’s practices multiple times per week.

Every year, around five seniors from Allen’s rowing club would get recruited to top college teams. His senior year, two of his teammates were recruited to Columbia, one was recruited to Harvard and one was recruited to Princeton.

In the seven years before he graduated, the coxswains from his club were recruited to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Cornell, the U.S. Naval Academy and Northeastern University, Allen said.

The pay-to-play pipeline

According to Eckstein, recruited athletes are a relatively homogenous population even beyond “country club” sports teams, due to a phenomenon known as “pay to play,” where students who participate in club or travel teams, which often come at high prices, gain advantages in the college recruiting process. 

These advantages often come through “showcase” events where private club teams compete with one another, attracting college coaches from top teams.

“The whole college recruitment system is rooted in these showcase tournaments and showcase regattas and showcase meets that are all tied to private club teams,” Eckstein said. “So if you want to get into these forums where college coaches are doing their recruitment, you’ve got to sign up with a club team or a travel team almost regardless of the sport. By focusing on these athletes, because it’s not a representative population, you’re more likely to get wealthier people.”

This pay-to-play process is likely responsible for the nearly 10-percent discrepancy the News found between public and private school student-athletes compared to the overall student body, Eckstein said. 

It also contributes to deficits in other forms of diversity, such as geographic diversity, according to Eckstein.

He pointed to lacrosse, which he said is “pretty much unheard of” in urban and rural areas and is also rare in the Midwest.

According to the News’ roster analysis, 67 percent of athletes on the women’s lacrosse team and 64 percent of athletes on the men’s lacrosse team are from the Northeast. According to the University fact sheets for the classes of 2027, 2026, 2025 and 2024, between 29 and 31 percent of students in each Yale class are from the Northeast.

“By insisting on linking college recruitment to the pay to play pipelines, you’re all of a sudden weeding out huge swathes of the population who either can’t afford it or who can’t attend these tournaments that are sometimes thousands of miles away,” Eckstein told the News. “As long as that’s where the coaches are recruiting and the colleges are recruiting, those pipelines are just going to get stronger and stronger and keep weeding people out.”

Self-selecting

Even for sports that are not rooted in expensive club membership, the athletes that are recruited to play on the Ivy League level remain largely homogenous, according to an athlete on the track and field and cross country team. The athlete requested anonymity to “avoid any unexpected retaliation from Yale Athletics staff or the NCAA more broadly.”

She said that track recruiting is based solely on running time, rather than an athlete’s history of involvement with the sport or the status of their club or high school. To her knowledge, anyone who contacts a coach with interest and who has fast enough times can be considered.

However, she emphasized that this does not make the track recruiting process entirely democratic.

“There’s this argument that track is a sport that is open to everyone because all you need is a pair of sneakers,” she said. “But the reality is, most of the national-level competition was not available to me as a public school student. I didn’t get to go to a number of competitions because my school couldn’t fund that for me. They couldn’t afford to send me there. We were at the point where we won the state championship, but going to Nationals wasn’t even in the picture.”

While presence at national level meets may help athletes network with coaches at top colleges, it is not essential to be recruited, the student said. 

But she added that there is a “certain type of person” who would know to reach out to an Ivy League coach with their times. 

“You have to be empowered,” the student said. “You have to have some sort of insight into how to be recruited by an Ivy League school, of what will be required of you academically. I think for a lot of track athletes, running for the Ivy League seems unattainable. And also in some cases it can seem unrealistic, because the Ivies do not provide scholarships.”

The Ivy League is the only Division I conference that does not offer athletic scholarships — which a March lawsuit alleged to be a violation of antitrust laws. The student said the lack of athletic aid available at Yale and other Ivy League schools makes the pool of recruited athletes a “self-selecting” one. 

The student added that many of her teammates at Yale have parents who went to Ivy League schools and competed on Ivy League teams. 

While her parents did not attend Ivy League schools, the student said that she learned a lot about the Ivy League recruitment process from her older brother, who is an athlete at Dartmouth. Specifically, the “generous” need-based financial aid her brother received at Dartmouth opened her and her family’s eyes to how affordable Ivy League schools can be.

Allen said that the potential of scholarship money was not a factor that his family considered when deciding where he would attend college.

The eight Ivy League schools all offer need-based financial awards — intended to meet the full demonstrated financial need of admitted students — but do not offer merit or athletic scholarships. 

Quinlan defended Yale’s prohibition of athletic scholarships, saying that Ivy League athletes are the best example of student-first student-athletes.

“I also believe Yale’s ability to meet the full demonstrated financial need of all of our students, including varsity athletes – whether they continue playing with their team all four years or not – provides a much healthier environment for student-athletes than schools that offer scholarships contingent on athletic performance,” Quinlan wrote in an email to the News.

Eckstein believes that continuing to recruit athletes from country club sports can be a “back door” tactic for Ivy League schools to admit more students who can afford to pay near-full tuition. 

Yale advertises a need-blind approach to admissions, in which admissions officers consider and decide on students’ applications without knowledge of their financial status. But along with 16 other universities, Yale’s purported need-blind model was challenged in a lawsuit filed last year. The schools — including six of the eight Ivies — are a part of the 568 Presidents Group, a consortium of elite schools who collaborate in constructing financial aid formulas.

The group was sued on the grounds that they breached section 568 of the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act, which states that schools can only collaborate if all members of the group do not consider financial need in their admissions process. A complaint filed in February alleged that all 17 schools consider students’ financial need through indirect means like donor preference and by considering financial means in waitlist and transfer admissions.

“It’s a good gamble to take someone who’s played golf in high school, or even someone who played club soccer or lacrosse and make guesses about their economic background,” Eckstein told the News. “It’s a good bet, and kind of a way to game the system.”

The Ivy League conference was officially formed in 1954.

The post ‘Country club’ sports and ‘pay-to-play’ pipelines — does athletic recruitment favor certain Yale applicants? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

For the first time since public records started at the Office of Institutional Research in 2000, the number of graduates in science, technology, engineering or mathematics fields has outpaced the number of Yale College arts and humanities graduates. 

According to public records from the Office of Institutional Research, which date back to 2000, Yale has seen a consistent decline in humanities enrollment — majors like English, history and classics — since 2007, reflecting a broader national trend toward STEM.  

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there appeared to be a moment of revival in the number of humanities and arts majors at Yale. The overall trend, however, still leans overwhelmingly toward STEM, and more Yale students are declaring STEM majors than ever before. 

In the 2021-2022 academic year, registration in arts and humanities were at 320, compared to 340 and 579 in physical sciences and engineering and social science, respectively. Broadly, STEM encompasses majors like Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Computer Science and Mathematics.

National data reflect the same trend; the National Center for Education Statistics found that the number of graduates in the humanities declined by 29.6 percent from 2012 to 2020, as students have increasingly come to view college as an investment rather than an experience.

In part driven by a desire to attract and retain more STEM students, Yale has made landmark investments in some of its science and engineering sectors in recent years.  The University is investing $350 million in a new Physical Sciences and Engineering Building and Yale’s expansion of its School of Engineering & Applied Science is planning to add 45 new faculty members.

In February 2022, Yale also announced plans to distinguish the School of Engineering & Applied Science faculty from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 

The admissions office’s keenness for prospective STEM applicants and the University’s overall institutional emphasis on STEM is not new. Nine years ago, in 2014, although the University aimed for a first-year class that consisted of 40 percent STEM majors, only about 25 percent of the class of 2014 graduated with a STEM major. 

In 2014, responding to concerns that other higher learning institutions were offering more rigorous STEM programs, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan assured prospective students that they would not miss out on opportunities for cutting-edge research and funding opportunities if they chose Yale. 

“If [the trend toward STEM] happens here, it’s just a sign of how bad it is in the country because you know, Yale is a great university across the board,” said Lucas Bender, the director of undergraduate studies, or DUS, for the East Asian Languages and Literatures major. “But historically, Yale’s strength has been in the humanities and the arts. It’s one of the only universities that has top-ranked music programs, drama and opera programs.”

Bender said that applicants often self-select when they choose Yale. He gave the example of someone having a choice between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale, commenting that if the applicant were a science person, they would probably have chosen MIT. However, the increasing emphasis on STEM at Yale reflects much larger national trends that merit further exploration, he added. 

Another reason for these patterns, according to Bender, is economics — he said that students with art or humanities degrees may be concerned that they will not get high enough paying jobs to cover the costs of college.

But an overall trend within arts and humanities does not necessarily reflect individual trends on a major and degree basis. According to former art DUS Lisa Kereszi the number of art majors increased from 2013 to 2023. She cited the eradication of course fees and a surge in interest in “self-expression” and “artmaking” as a possible cultural reaction to current events and the political landscape. This in turn could have driven increases in art majors, she explained.  

The options and flexibility offered by double majors might also explain the rise of STEM. According to Kereszi, there were more arts major students who also had another major last year than ever before: about 40 percent in 2022-2023, compared to the usual 25 to 30 percent, she said. Bender echoed that students who are double majoring have a high tendency to choose humanities as their second if their first is STEM-oriented. 

Some students remain hopeful about the future of arts and humanities at Yale, calling attention to the importance of studying what speaks to one’s interests.

“While there is a place for the pre-professional, I find it more rewarding to study our intrinsic humanity through the words and deeds of the world’s greatest thinkers, and seek the roots of the beauty of our shared culture,” said Camillo Padulli, ’25, who is majoring in history. “Yale has traditionally been a nexus for learning about the classic tenets of high Western civilization, and I would feel loath to miss out on that.”

In 1861, Yale conferred the first doctorate of philosophy ever awarded in the United States.

The post DATA: Yale College trends toward graduating more STEM than humanities and arts majors appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Across the country, pollsters have attempted to gauge support for the retired policy among Americans. Compared to polls from the Associated Press, Pew and PBS, which report that 60 percent of respondents favored affirmative action, the 360 respondents to the News’ anonymous survey expressed slightly higher levels of support, with 67 percent indicating their support as a six or higher out of ten (ten being strong support). 

The survey further suggests that staff and legacy students support race-conscious admissions models by the highest margin, compared to undergraduate and graduate students. Fifty-four percent of respondents rated their support for affirmative action as an eight or above out of ten, and 20 percent of respondents rated their support as a two out of ten or below. 

Thirty-seven students who responded to the survey self-identified as legacies; according to official University figures, about 181 members of the class of 2027 are legacy students, or 11 percent. Overall, about 538 students in the classes of 2024, 2025 and 2026 are legacies, amounting to more than 700 legacy students in Yale College alone.  

Staff and legacy students who responded to the survey were disproportionately white — 72 and 75 percent, respectively, compared to 47 percent of the whole sample — while legacy students were also disproportionately wealthy. Sixty-eight percent of self-identified legacy students reported an annual household income greater than $200,000, compared to 32 percent of the whole sample.

Crucially, the specific effects that the Court’s June ruling will have on admissions approaches are unclear, as a July analysis by the News listed six major questions about changing admissions models that remain unanswered. Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan has committed to announcing changes to the Yale College admissions process in the coming months; meanwhile, the role of standardized test scores and legacy status in admissions is growing increasingly controversial, in large part because of the disproportional wealth and whiteness of legacy pools. 

Here are five graphs summarizing the survey’s findings. 

Support for affirmative action:

The results of the survey show that across all groups — legacy students, non-legacy students, staff and faculty — the majority support affirmative action, with staff and legacy students supporting the policy by the highest margin. Fifty-four percent of respondents rated their support for affirmative action as an eight or above out of ten, and 20 percent of respondents rated their support as a two out of ten or below. 

Support for use of race in college admissions

The survey also asked respondents to rate their support for the consideration of race in college admissions. The results were similar to those of the previous question asking about support for affirmative action, with 55 percent rating their support as eight or above, and 67 percent as a six or higher. Faculty and legacy students also most strongly supported the use of race in admissions.

Support for use of race in admissions by race

When segmented by respondents’ racial identity, results show similarly broad support for race-conscious admissions across racial groups. 

Support was strongest among Black and African American respondents, 87 percent of whom rated their support as eight or higher. Support was lowest among Asian respondents, as 52 percent rated their support for race in admissions as a four or below. 

Although the survey included more racial and ethnic categories than displayed here, this chart reflects responses from the racial groups that the University — and most employers — uses in its reports. 

Support for affirmative action by income

Forty-five percent of respondents with a self-reported household income of $30,000 or less rated their support for the use of the policy as an eight or above, as did 52 percent of those with a household income of $200,000 or more. 

Heatmap of beliefs about admissions factors

Respondents also shared opinions on what factors admissions officers should weigh when deciding on an applicant’s future — and how heavily. For a set of potential components — gender, socioeconomic bracket, legacy status and athletic ability, among others — survey takers identified whether they felt that attribute constitutes a major or minor factor or should not receive consideration at all. 

In the chart below, boxes are classified based on the median of the responses for the associated sample. 

Across political groups, most agreed that socioeconomic status should be a major factor in college admissions. All groups also agreed that admissions officers should consider first-generation status and community service history, although their opinions varied regarding the importance of these factors. 

All groups except for those who described their political affiliation as right-leaning opposed the consideration of legacy status. Respondents broke along political lines when it came to the use of race and ethnicity in admissions, with only those on the left supporting its consideration as a minor factor and those on the center and right opposing its consideration. 

Nov. 1 marks the due date for early applications to the Yale College class of 2028, the first undergraduate application cycle post-affirmative action.

The post DATA: Survey suggests Yalies support affirmative action at rates slightly higher than national average appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Now, many of their children are applying for acceptance to the same universities.

With the Supreme Court slated to rule on the future of affirmative action this spring, what role does preference for legacy students — that is, applicants with one or more parents who graduated from a certain university — play in the diversity debate?

Affirmative action and legacy admissions

Parents of students entering universities today likely graduated between the years of 1980 and 2000. The average percentage of students of color at Ivy League universities increased from 15.8 percent to 34.2 percent during that time. During this time at Yale, the proportion of students of color increased from 16.9 to 31.3 percent. 

The uptick in students from racially diverse backgrounds at selective universities has largely been attributed to affirmative action, which has long been controversial. Recently, such policies have again come under intensified public scrutiny, with the Supreme Court hearing two cases challenging the practice this past October. 

The suits, both brought forth by the nonprofit group Students for Fair Admissions, accuse University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill of discriminating against white and Asian applicants and Harvard University of discriminating against Asian applicants. Should the Court decide to strike down affirmative action, it could become illegal for universities across the United States to consider race in the admissions process, or even to ask about racial identity at all.

The threat of eliminating race-conscious admissions has sparked protests and debate about its value in preserving and fostering diversity on college campuses across the nation. Concurrently, legacy admissions –– or, as New York Times columnist John McWhorter called it, “affirmative action for white kids” –– have come under fire, with more and more people, including the Yale College Council, calling for its removal. The main criticism has centered on how legacy admissions advantage wealthy, white students. Meanwhile, universities like Yale and Harvard remain steadfast in upholding and defending it. 

Legacy admissions give preference to the children of alumni in the admissions process. Despite attempts to eliminate the policy in Connecticut and some universities — ​​such as Texas A&M, Purdue, the California Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins, and Amherst — eliminating it altogether, other elite universities continue to accept a high number of legacy admits. In the Yale College class of 2023, 12 percent of students were legacy affiliated, as were 8 percent in the class of 2024, 14 percent in the class of 2025 and 12 percent in the class of 2026. 

Many of the same activists fighting for the preservation of affirmative action have advocated for the removal of the legacy policy, viewing the two policies as contradictory. SFFA, the group currently suing the schools in an effort to take down affirmative action, has also publicly come out in opposition of legacy admissions — reflecting strong anti-legacy preference sentiment from both sides of the affirmative action debate.

The Supreme Court of the United States currently has a conservative majority of justices who are skeptical of affirmative action. At the October hearings, the Court debated whether admissions boards have truly exhausted all other options to increase diversity without considering race, raising the question of whether schools can constitutionally consider racial identity while still employing legacy admissions. 

A 2021 article in the Princeton Legal Journal explains that race-conscious policies must satisfy what is known in the law as the standard of “strict scrutiny.” Strict scrutiny demands that policies of any organization receiving government funding must meet two conditions: they must be used to further a “necessary” state interest and must also minimize “differential treatment on the basis of race.” For Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill to win their cases, they have to prove that their admissions policies meet this standard. 

Richard Sander, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Harvard Crimson in October that racial preferences can only be deemed acceptable by the court if all other alternatives to achieve racial diversity have been exhausted. Sander said that affirmative action fails to reach strict scrutiny because every option to diversify the set of accepted students — such as eliminating legacy admissions — has not been exhausted.

“Suppose a university — a wealthy university — could eliminate those preferences which tend to favor the children of wealthy, white parents and achieve diversity without race consciousness: Would strict scrutiny require it to do so?” Justice Neil Gorsuch asked at one of the hearings.

In essence, Gorsuch questioned whether affirmative action fulfills the strict scrutiny standard at universities that employ legacy admissions, arguing that race-conscious admissions policies do not minimize the impact of race if a school could support diversity efforts through other means — such as eliminating legacy preferences entirely. And admissions data suggest he is correct.

Admissions data at Harvard and MIT

Both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology boasted similarly selective undergraduate acceptance rates of about 3 percent for the class of 2026. MIT, which does not use legacy admissions, admitted a more racially diverse class than Harvard, where legacy preference continues to factor significantly into admissions decisions. Both schools practice affirmative action.

While Harvard does not ordinarily release comprehensive demographics data, more information has emerged through the ongoing affirmative action lawsuits. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper, released in 2019, draws from Harvard admissions data covering the classes of 2014 to 2019, who applied to Harvard between 2009 and 2015.

Specifically, Harvard considers students with at least one parent who attended the school to be legacy applicants. In its admissions records, the university groups athletes, legacies, students on the “Dean’s interest list” and children of faculty into one category — known as ALDCs — for much of their data. Recognizing that athletics constitute its own unique section in admissions, the report specifies which students are LDCs — meaning either legacy, Dean’s interest list or children of faculty — or as non-ALDC, meaning they are in none of the four special categories.

Between 2014 and 2019, the acceptance rate for legacy applicants was 33.6 percent, dwarfing the school’s overall acceptance rate of just six percent, according to data from the NBER. 

Their research also separates the acceptance rate for legacy applicants across racial identities. 34 percent of white legacy applicants were admitted. The acceptance rate for Black legacies was the lowest at 28.5 percent, while Hispanics — 35.6 percent — and Asian Americans — 35.1 percent — stayed within two percentage points of the acceptance rate for white applicants. 

These numbers reflect the large role legacy preference plays in admissions across all racial categories. But within the pool of all legacy applicants, the vast majority are white. 

Between 2014 and 2019, 69.3 percent of Harvard’s legacy applicants were white. Despite the similar acceptance rates across racial groups of legacy students, the sheer number of white legacy applicants skews the diversity of the actual admit pool. White LDC admits in Harvard’s admissions numbered 1,362, whereas Black LDC admits numbered just 81. 

Because MIT practices affirmative action but, unlike Harvard, does not employ legacy preference in admissions, admissions data from MIT offer insight into the impact of removing legacy admissions.

For the class of 2026, MIT’s overall admissions rate was 3.96 percent. Harvard’s was 3.24 percent. The schools are similarly selective. A comparison of MIT and Harvard admissions data by race show a greater percentage of students of color in the classes of 2025 and 2026 at MIT, where there is no legacy preference. 

Percentages of class composition by race differ from acceptance rates, so while these figures do not confirm whether acceptance rates themselves are more favorable for students of color without legacy admissions, they do corroborate that the removal of legacy admissions helps form more racially diverse classes overall. 

A matter of time?

Several alumni of color from prestigious universities — including sitting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor LAW ’79, who earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton and her J.D. from Yale Law School — have publicly defended legacy admissions. Sotomayor, who is Puerto Rican, questions the fairness of abolishing legacy preference now that people of color have begun benefitting from it. 

In a 2013 Supreme Court hearing about affirmative action, Michigan Solicitor General Bill Schuette raised a similar opinion as Gorsuch. He testified that removing legacy preference would constitute a race-neutral step that universities could take to benefit racial minorities.

Sotomayor disagreed.

“They finally have children and you’re going [to] do away [with] that preference for them? It seems the goal posts keep changing every few years for minorities,” Sotomayor said.

Even though presently, legacy applicant pools are largely white, legacy pools could grow more diverse in 10 to 20 years due to the increasing racial diversity within current college classes — a diversity that can be partially attributed to affirmative action.

Sanford and Anastasia Williams, both of whom are Black alumni of the University of Virginia, told the New York Times that they support legacy preference playing a small role in the admissions process. 

“We have tons of friends whose kids are starting school,” Sanford Williams, who is a lecturer at the University of California’s Los Angeles School of Law, told the Times. “They think, ‘Why is it every time we get a chance to do something, the rug is pulled out from under us?’”

Legacies make up 14 percent of UVA’s class of 2025. All three of the Williams kids received undergraduate degrees from the University of Virginia.

Checking the legacy box on a Yale application today means that the parents of an applicant likely graduated between 1980 and 2000, as the proportion of admitted students of color almost doubled.

By 2000, there were 3,373 “White and Unknown” students enrolled in the graduating class, which still far surpassed the 1,538 students of color.

If every student from the Yale class of 2000 had a child that applied to the University, they would likely be seeking entry to the classes of 2027-2034, based on current predicted ages of parenthood. That means, looking just at the class of 2000 as an example, there would still be over 1,800 more white students than students of color that could check the legacy box in their application over the course of about the next eight application cycles.

Race is not the whole story

Whether applicants are white or not, admissions data reveal that legacy status follows higher socioeconomic status. At Harvard, per the NBER study, over half of non-ALDC admitted students within each racially marginalized category — Asian American, Black and Hispanic — received financial aid. However, over half of admitted students of color who were LDCs did not need financial aid, showing that the legacy pool trended wealthier even among non-white admits. 

This means that legacy admissions support a minority of minorities, providing financially-privileged racially diverse legacies a leg up in admissions. 

The situation has not changed significantly since the 2019 NBER study. In a survey of the Harvard College class of 2025, which polled 78 percent of the undergraduate class, The Harvard Crimson found that legacies reported higher incomes than other students, with 30.9 percent reporting a combined family income of more than $500,000. 

“The college admissions process [at present] doesn’t fully allow for the nuances within racial categories and instead generalizes the different experiences of students of color,” said Alvaro Perpuly ’23. “These continue to affect multiple underrepresented racial and ethnic categories, especially when discussing different levels of wealth and challenges each community may face within each defined category.”

Like Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas LAW ’74 — another sitting Supreme Court justice of color — graduated from Yale Law School. While Sotomayor is a vocal defender of race-conscious admissions, Thomas takes the opposite view. He considers affirmative action a form of “benign discrimination.”

Meanwhile, students like Isaac Yu ’24 — who was formerly a managing editor for the News — see affirmative action as an important tool for promoting racial diversity in higher education, but they also do not necessarily think race-conscious admissions are enough. A student’s racial identity may shape part of their story, but it does not necessarily determine all of it. 

Yu, who is low-income and Asian American, is the first in his family to go to college. He does not believe affirmative action alone accomplishes its goal of diversifying classrooms.

Yu said that considering race alone cannot promote true diversity of experience. As an example, he noted that a person of color could be a legacy student that had gone to the same schools with the same resources and opportunities as other wealthy — albeit often white — admits. 

“I’m bringing my experience growing up in suburban Dallas, going to a Title I high school,” Yu said. “And that is the ‘diverse experience’ that I bring that most people in the room [at Yale] have not encountered.”

The Supreme Court is expected to decide on the fate of affirmative action in two separate rulings this spring.

The post ANALYSIS: The legacy of affirmative action appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Tenure, term and non-ladder faculty

The various ranks of Yale faculty are divided into three groups: tenure, ladder term and non-ladder.

Tenured faculty include tenured professors and tenured associate professors. Ladder term faculty include professors who are on the tenure track, or undergoing the tenure selection process, but not yet tenured. Non-ladder faculty includes both instructional and research positions that are not on the tenure track.

The number of tenured faculty has experienced a fairly steady rise from 2011 to 2020, with 52 professors achieving tenure over those years. The non-ladder faculty, while initially experiencing a steady rise as well, suffered a drop of 47 professors between 2013 and 2015. The number of ladder term faculty has steadily decreased over time with a loss of 37 faculty members over the time period.

This graph provides a more detailed look at the faculty breakdown of Yale College by academic division for the current academic year. “Ladder,” in the graph, contains both tenure and ladder term appointments, while the non-ladder criteria remain the same as in the previous graph. The graph also includes visiting professors, both instructional and research.

The humanities division has the largest number of both ladder and non-ladder faculty, with more than triple the number of ladder faculty in the engineering and applied sciences division. The social science and biological and physical sciences divisions have the highest numbers of visiting faculty, with four professors each, while the humanities division has three and the engineering and applied sciences division has only one.

Race, ethnicity and citizenship breakdown

The News analyzed data on the demographic breakdown of Yale College faculty, or the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, by race, ethnicity and citizenship. The graph uses data from the source from Yale Provost’s Faculty Development and Diversity team. The source and the graphs use federal race and ethnicity categories adopted by the U.S. Department of Education.

From 2008 to 2020, white faculty members have made up the majority of Yale College faculty, hovering between 63 percent and 71 percent of faculty. The next highest group are international faculty members, who comprised around 13.8 percent of faculty in early 2010s. The figure dipped to 10 percent in 2015 before returning to 13.7 percent in 2019. The last group that has held over 10 percent of faculty positions between 2008 and 2020 are Asian faculty members, making up 8.1 percent of the faculty in 2008 increasing to 10 percent of the faculty in 2020. From 2008 to 2020, Hispanic or Latino faculty members increased from 3.4 percent to 4.9 percent, and Black and African American faculty members hovered between 2.4 percent and 3.4 percent. American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and faculty members of two or more races have made up less than 1 percent of total faculty — but have had at least one faculty member — for all nine years.

This graph breaks down faculty by race across rank divisions. Ladder includes tenured, ladder term and also continuing faculty — faculty members not eligible for traditional tenure. Non-ladder faculty are split into instructional and research faculty who focus primarily on teaching and research, respectively.

Across ladder and non-ladder instructional ranks, the data follows the trends in overall faculty breakdown by race. White faculty continue to make up the majority of ladder and non-ladder instructional faculty members. Recently, Yale’s non-ladder research faculty became the only category to have a majority other than white. The number of international non-ladder research faculty overcame the number of white faculty in 2020, after that figure doubled from 23.9 percent in 2015 to 43.6 percent in 2020, and white faculty decreased from 44 percent in 2015 to 35.9 percent in 2020.

Race, ethnicity and citizenship breakdown for Yale graduate schools

The News also examined the racial breakdown of faculty in Yale’s graduate schools, separated by ladder, non-ladder instructional and non-ladder research.

In general, Yale’s graduate ladder faculty racial breakdown remained largely consistent with Yale College’s breakdown. Notably, the proportion of white faculty dropped by around 11.9 percent, and the proportion of Asian American faculty experienced a steady increase since 2008. Most of the other proportions for racial groups remained fairly stagnant.

The breakdown for Yale’s graduate non-ladder instructional faculty was quite similar. Still, the number of white faculty decreased by 181 faculty members between 2017 and 2020, and the number of unknown race faculty increased from 19 to 96 between the years 2012 to 2013. 

Yale’s graduate non-ladder research faculty came the closest of the three groups to having minorities consisting of almost equal proportions to white faculty, with the number of international faculty coming in at 244 in 2020, compared to 263 white faculty members.

Gender breakdown

From 2011 to 2020, the gender breakdown of Yale College’s faculty has remained fairly stagnant, with only a 2 percent increase of the number of female faculty at Yale from 34.2 percent to 36.2 percent. Between 2014 and 2016, Yale College experienced a decline in their female faculty from 390 to 370.

The number of faculty members who reported their gender as “other” remained at zero until 2018. In between 2018 and 2020, five non-binary faculty members joined Yale College.

The post Race and rank in Yale faculty appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Amazing job on the final!!! I just finished going through these and I am so pleased and excited,” Newhouse wrote, though he declined to comment for this article. “You did exceptionally well as a class and maybe were the best class year that I’ve seen.”

But according to one student in Newhouse’s class, the exceptional grades were not the result of an extraordinarily intelligent or hard-working class, but due to acts of academic dishonesty committed by students — acts made much easier by the online format of the course.

“It’s because you can literally from an iPad, switch over to Google and Google the exact problem … find the answer, write it down, and they wouldn’t be able to tell,” the student said. All of the students who spoke to the News, whether they committed academic dishonesty or not, did so under the condition of anonymity.

Newhouse’s class was not the only one where cheating occurred.

Last month, the News conducted a survey on academic dishonesty at Yale, which was completed by 336 Yale undergraduates. Of that number, 96 students, or 28.57 percent of respondents, reported committing academic dishonesty during their time at Yale. Around half of those 96 students said they committed their first act of academic dishonesty during remote learning. The survey follows a similar one conducted by the News in February 2019, which found that 14 percent of the 1,400 respondents committed academic dishonesty.

“The heart of a university is a community of trust,” Tamar Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told the News. “And the fraying of that fabric is a source of sadness and disappointment for faculty and students alike.”

The consequences

When a student is suspected of academic dishonesty, which can range from unpermitted collaboration on problem sets to plagiarism, the instructor in that course will often refer the case to the Executive Committee — colloquially known as ExComm — whose purpose is “to enforce the Undergraduate Regulations in a fair, consistent, and uniform manner,” according to their website.

The committee then decides whether or not to pursue a formal charge. For academic dishonesty, charges often range from a reprimand to suspension, depending on the severity and frequency of the infraction.

According to David Vasseur, chair of the Executive Committee, students are also able to meet with members of the committee to discuss the charge, choose an adviser to guide them through the process and sit before a panel of members of the committee “whose goal is to understand the context of the situation and, where warranted, to help students reflect on their actions and identify ways to grow from the experience.”

According to data from the committee, in 2019, there were 30 cases of academic dishonesty, 24 of which came from a plagiarized problem set or lab assignment. The majority of the punishments were either reprimands or probation. Data from 2020 is not yet available. 

Another anonymous student who responded to the survey told the News that they were charged pre-pandemic by the Executive Committee for academic dishonesty and ultimately received the punishment of academic probation, which meant that they could not be in leadership positions for a year after, and the charge would show up on their transcript until they graduated.

“When the actual day came around [to sit in front of the panel], they gave me a ‘court’ date,” the student said. “They were meeting in one of the top level rooms of SSS so … it’s kind of isolated … and they restricted it to make it look like a courtroom, like there’s two sides, the plaintiff and defense.”

They called the experience “very scary,” and said, “I personally regret doing this, and I wouldn’t do it again, obviously.”

The survey

Vasseur told the News that, for the past few years, the Committee handled approximately 50 to 70 cases of academic dishonesty per year. This year, however, he anticipates “that we will be well beyond that range.” He added that they have already seen an increase in the number of academic dishonesty cases as compared to the last two pre-pandemic semesters, although he declined to provide a specific figure.

 These results are in line with the News’ survey, which found that approximately 50 percent of those who committed academic dishonesty did so for the first time during the virtual learning semesters.

Yair Minsky, department chair of mathematics, wrote in an email to the News that this might be attributed to how the pandemic “scrambled everyone’s assumptions,” and made some students feel as though the remote learning environment was not as “real” as in-person learning.

“I think that, with everyone remote, the natural gut-level pressures to behave in certain ways are attenuated,” Minsky wrote. “We are social animals and without physical social contact we become less constrained.”

A third anonymous student echoed Minsky’s sentiments, noting that he has heard students compare this year to “a game,” making academic dishonesty feel more detached and less personal from the teacher and classmates and therefore easier to commit.

In an email, Vasseur similarly told the News that the stress of the pandemic and additional responsibilities, as well as the ease of accessing additional resources during exams, has combined to increase academic dishonesty during the past year. Along with “pressure to collaborate or share information with peers,” these additional casualties of the pandemic “ha[ve] very negatively impacted our community.”

Alongside an increase in cheating during the pandemic, the News’ survey also found that 52.58 percent of those who committed academic dishonesty did so in a science course, and 50.52 percent did so in a quantitative reasoning course. Only 19.59 percent committed academic dishonesty in a humanities and arts course.

Vasseur called this discrepancy unsurprising, as the type of exams taken in QR courses emphasizes the correctness of one unique answer, which can “increase the stress levels that students feel when completing assignments and tests.”

Dana Angluin, chair of the Computer Science Academic Honesty Committee, also told the News that she was unsurprised by the discrepancy, citing a 2019 News article on cheating in STEM courses. In that February 2019 survey, which 1,400 students answered, “35 and 40 percent of student respondents said they would be more likely to cheat in mathematics and sciences, respectively.”

In line with the survey results, Jessica Brantley, department chair of English, spoke about the lack of academic dishonesty in her department.  “I’m glad to say I haven’t encountered academic dishonesty among my students in English,” she wrote in an email to the News.

‘Ethical cheating’ — is it possible? 

The anonymous student in Newhouse’s class had never cheated before the pandemic began. But he found the classroom circumstances “so impossibly difficult” that “[he] felt like it was very ethical to cheat.”

“I always feel like I’ve never unethically cheated because I’ve always tried to honor the spirit of the rule and make sure that I’m learning,” he said.

But this term, “ethical cheating,” was largely derided by the other students and faculty interviewed by the News.

Minsky wrote in an email to the News that he “very much disagree[s]” with the idea of some sort of moral basis for committing academic dishonesty. He added that academic integrity is not “some kind of transactional thing.”

In an email to the News, Vasseur agreed, writing that while instructors need to adapt their courses to accommodate online learning and the stresses incurred by the pandemic, academic dishonesty is “unwaveringly viewed as a serious offense by the executive committee,” whether or not adaptations to virtual learning are actually made.

A fourth anonymous student interviewed by the News, who said she has not committed academic dishonesty, acknowledged that some professors have been unaccommodating and said that she understood the rationale behind committing academic dishonesty during the pandemic. But she still said that she did not consider it to be acceptable.

“Everyone’s just kind of doing what’s best for them,” which is “worse off in the long run,” she said. “Whereas if we all work together to petition a change in the way the course is being run, that would have a better result overall.”

Shelly Kagan, professor of philosophy, approached the question of whether the pandemic made cheating more ethical from a more philosophical perspective.

He said that he was largely skeptical of the claim, calling it “self-interest disguising as a moral argument.”

“In the previous four years,” Kagan said, “there were insane amounts of depression because of Trump being the president. … So shall we say, okay, so cheating for the last four years was fine. Climate change has been a problem that we’ve been increasingly aware of for the last 10 or 15 years. So shouldn’t we say that cheating was perfectly fine for the last 10 or 15? There’s always stuff.”

In a follow-up email, Kagan added that, “in almost all cases,” cheating ultimately harms the person who committed academic dishonesty, as they never actually learn the material.

“And if the class was worth taking in the first place,” Kagan said, “that is not only a waste of their time and money, but shortchanging their education, which is a horrible thing to do to oneself.”

In 2012, the first available year of Executive Committee data, there were 31 charges of academic dishonesty.

Data analysis and visualization by Kevin Chan.

Correction, Apr. 29: An earlier version of this story said Angluin was the chair of the Computer Science Academic Dishonesty Committee. In fact, it is called the Computer Science Academic Honesty Committee. The story has been updated.

The post As pandemic continues, cheating gains speed appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Administered between Nov. 18 and Nov. 23, the survey targeted Yale students and reflected consumption prior to the pandemic, during lockdowns and during the virtual fall semester. Approximately 100 students reported their drinking frequency, type of alcohol most consumed and alcohol preference during the three time periods, though more students responded to other questions in the survey. Three seniors shared their experiences with the News.

“At school, it’s generally not every week, but if I do [choose to drink] it’s anywhere from one to three times a week,” Keyi Li ’21 said. “This semester, it’s mostly just hanging out with people in their apartments or suites. During a normal year, going out’s definitely a part of it. This year that’s obviously not a possibility.”

With 34 student respondents on Yale’s campus this fall, Li was in the minority as an on-campus student. Out of 124 responses, 46 students reported being off campus in New Haven and 45 students reported being off campus elsewhere.

When asked when the last time they had consumed alcohol was, 58 of 124 respondents reported doing so within the past week. Wes Day ’21, who was on campus this fall semester and also a former editor at the News, said that he drank “once every three weeks to [a] month.” Living in an off-campus residence in New Haven, Charlie Markert ’21 said that he drank “three or four times a week.”

“Prior to COVID it [drinking] was mainly [in] large social gatherings with friends,” Markert said. “And then this semester, [drinking is] usually just with close friends that I live with. But definitely smaller gatherings as well.”

While 42.4 percent of respondents reported hard liquor as their most consumed alcoholic beverage prior to COVID-19, only 17.9 percent did so during the fall semester. While 28.8 percent of respondents chose not to drink on campus in the past, that number rose to 43 percent during lockdowns before dropping to 38.8 percent during the fall semester. There was also an increase in wine consumption among survey respondents from 5.3 percent prior to the pandemic to 20.9 percent this semester.

Even though 5.3 percent of respondents reported wine as their most consumed alcoholic beverage prior to COVID-19, 22 percent identified it as their favorite alcoholic beverage. While 42.4 percent of respondents identified hard liquor as their most consumed alcohol type prior to COVID-19, only 22.7 percent said it was their favorite. Consumption and preference more closely mirrored each other during and after lockdowns.

“I’m a big IPA person,” Li said. “It’s definitely a robust subculture at this point, kind of a meme, but quite good. If I’m just trying to have a couple of drinks, it’ll definitely be a beer, but if I’m going out to get drinks, I’m more likely to get a margarita — big fan of tequila.”

Markert and Day shared Li’s sentiments about beer. Whether grilling, watching sports or playing games with friends, Markert emphasized that it is a good compliment to activities. Day said that he associates beer with when “you’re out with your friends and you are in for more casual social bonding rather than more professional relationships.”

Day and Li told the News that they did not drink during the lockdown. Markert would often drink once a week with his siblings. 

“During quarantine I experimented with making some cocktails, like making mojitos or different things like that,” Markert said. “Those are fun, but they do take some time.” 

When respondents were asked their frequency of alcohol consumption per month, there was a large increase in the number of students who drink more than seven times a month throughout the year from 17.6 percent prior to COVID-19 to 41.4 percent during the fall semester. Despite an increase in those choosing not to drink during lockdown, from 9.7 percent to 24.8 percent, the number has decreased to 18.2 percent in the fall. 

With choosing not to drink being the most popular choice for Yale students, the ranking of alcohol preference this semester came in the following order: wine, carbonated alcoholic drinks, hard liquor and beer.

“I think depending on what you drink, whether it’s beer, hard liquor [or] cocktails, it can be a major factor in setting up the atmosphere of the conversation and group you’re with,” Day said. 

The legal drinking age in Connecticut is 21. 

Data analysis and visualizations by Leon Lufkin. Contact him leon.lufkin@yale.edu.

Zach Morris | zach.morris@yale.edu

The post Survey reveals Yale College’s alcohol preferences appeared first on Yale Daily News.

According to Federal Elections Committee filings data analyzed by the News, 611 current Yale professors and lecturers have donated $200 or more — the minimum donation amount that is publicly disclosed — to individual political groups and campaigns over the past seven years while employed by the University. Of these donors, less than 3 percent donated to Republican-affiliated candidates and groups.

11,526 donations went to Democratic-affiliated groups, totaling $2,196,222. Groups that donate to both Democratic and Republican candidates received 223 donations, and just 65 donations, totaling $20,861, went to Republican candidates and groups. 558 individuals donated to Democratic-affiliated candidates and groups, 54 individuals donated to groups that make expenditures on behalf of both parties and 18 donated to Republican-affiliated candidates and groups.

Of all donation recipients, the Biden campaign received the largest sum from Yale faculty — $169,390 — while the Clinton campaign received donations from the greatest number of faculty — 132. The DNC closely followed Biden in the amount of money donated, receiving around $130,000. During the recent Democratic primary, a greater number of Yale faculty donated to Sen. Elizabeth Warren than to any other presidential candidate.

Visualization by Thomas Woodside

Nineteen students and professors interviewed by the News commented on the data and its implications for faculty and undergraduate teaching.

“Yale professors seem overwhelmingly in favor of some central values and policies that fight against inequality, against sexism and against racism, while advocating for social justice, good and universal health care, and other similar ones that better the lives of all inhabitants in the U.S., citizens and non-citizens alike,” wrote Jesus Velasco, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, which has one of the highest departmental percentages of donors within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with three out of eight faculty donating. “I am happy to be part of a community of colleagues who express this degree of universal solidarity,” he told the News.

The dataset analyzed by the News is not necessarily exhaustive given potential name variations — such as a name being “Jim” on the FEC filing for a professor whose first name is James — that may not be accounted for. In addition, FEC disclosure rules have changed over time. To be included in the dataset, donors had to give more than $200 to a single candidate within a specific period of time, but that time frame has changed over the years: one quarter for all donations in 2013 and 2014, one election cycle for donations to candidate committees in 2015 or later and one calendar year for donations to PACs or party committees in 2015 or later.

Top donating departments

Of all University departments, academic faculty at the Yale Law School had both the highest number of donors — 51 — and the highest dollar amount of donations: $329,154. The Yale School of Management had the second-highest number of unique donors and donations, at 25 donors and $191,428 in donations.

Visualization by Thomas Woodside

As for percentage of donors by department, two departments tied for first place, each with 50 percent: the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program in Yale College and the oncology specialty in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the Yale School of Medicine. Roderick Ferguson, chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, declined to comment. Alessandro D. Santin and Elena Ratner, the oncology chiefs at the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the Yale School of Medicine, did not respond to the News’ request for comment.

The Department of Astronomy, the only FAS STEM department among the top 10 donating departments, had one of the highest total amounts of donations — the 10th highest of all schools and departments — as well as the seventh-highest departmental percentage of donors within the FAS. Sarbani Basu, the chair of the Department of Astronomy, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The donors

Professors at professional schools topped the list of donation sizes.

The top individual donors were assistant professor of clinical public health Shelley Geballe, Milton Steinbach Professor of Management Barry Nalebuff, Deputy Dean and William K. Townsend Professor of Law Ian Ayres, Dean of the School of Public Health Sten Vermund and Deputy General Counsel and Yale Law School lecturer Cynthia Carr. All five donated exclusively to Democratic candidates and groups.

Geballe, who has donated a total of $174,250, told the News that “my husband and I view our donations as an investment in building a more equitable, inclusive nation for our nine grandkids.”

Nalebuff was the second-highest individual donor, whose donations included a $25,000 donation to the DNC this past spring. According to a previous analysis by the News, he donated a similar amount in 2018.

Nalebuff told the News that, as a whole, the Yale School of Management is very politically active and takes its mission of educating leaders for both the business world and society at large very seriously.

“My colleagues and I believe in science and in climate change,” Nalebuff said. “We believe in diversity. We believe in the value of immigrants and the contributions of international students. We believe in honesty. We believe in protecting others. We believe in wearing masks. I hope our teaching reflects these values without being political. And I, for one, would be pleased to support any political party that supports those values.”

Although Nalebuff is a generous donor, he also stressed that the Yale faculty are politically active in many ways that do not involve donations. For example, Skelly Wright Professor of Law James Forman Jr., who donated to several Democratic-affiliated organizations, held weekly letter-writing campaigns to encourage people to vote, with participants writing over 6,300 letters over the span of four weekends.

Politics in the classroom?

William S. Beinecke Professor of Economics and Management Edward Snyder was one of the few donors to a Republican candidate, according to information available from the FEC filings.

While Snyder told the News that he hoped that Yale, and universities at large, would avoid “echo chambers,” he also complimented his colleagues in the School of Management for the fact that they avoid letting political views interfere with the quality of classroom instruction.

“Many Yale SOM professors raise questions with students about business and society in a neutral way,” Snyder said. “It’s noteworthy that many students appreciate that approach.”

Lecturer in English Mark Oppenheimer ’96 GRD ’03 expressed worry, however, about the ramifications of left-leaning political uniformity at the University, although he does not think such uniformity is the fault of any administrative official. Still, he said, faculty members’ political views can affect the education that Yale students receive.

In Yale College, Aron Ravin ’24 is similarly worried about politics entering the classroom, and he is particularly concerned about how holding political beliefs that differ from faculty members might affect grading. But Ian Berlin ’24 and Shannon Sommers ’22 said that faculty members’ political views have yet to affect their education.

Sommers, who is a political science and history major, frequently encounters professors who engage with contemporary politics in and beyond the classroom as “public intellectuals.” She told the News her professors handle those conversations “exceptionally” well.

But of all 19 people asked to comment on the data as a whole and its implications for faculty and undergraduate teaching, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History John Gaddis gave the most succinct answer.

“I wish we had more political diversity on the faculty,” Gaddis said. “But I also wish the Republicans were less loathsome than they’ve recently become.”

Democratic dominance

More generally, students and professors reacted to the findings with varying degrees of surprise.

T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Professor of Religious Studies Carlos Eire told the News that he was surprised that there were Republican-affiliated donations at Yale, an institution he considers to be a “giant liberal echo chamber.” He expected there to be none.

“There is no genuine diversity in higher education when it comes to political leanings, and no genuine inclusion,” Eire said.

David Gelernter, professor of computer science, agreed. In an email to the News, he wrote that to him, the data suggests that Yale faculty as a whole are both “closed-minded” and “incurious,” which he claims is a widespread issue across academia.

However, for David Simon, director of undergraduate studies for the Department of Political Science, the question of intellectual diversity is misleading. Simon acknowledges that there is an underlying preference for Democrats over Republicans in faculty, but claims that this could, at least in part, be due to “systematic” tendencies.

“While a couple of generations ago the key differences between the two parties might have been over economic or even foreign policy, they are now as much over values as anything else,” Simon wrote in an email to the News. “Universities have emerged (over the decades) as places that lean towards values like believing diversity itself is intrinsically beneficial, which runs counter to what the current Republican party leadership [believes]. One result of this is surely the bias in whom university faculty chooses to support, but it also certainly affects who chooses to seek work at a university in the first place.”

In an email to the News, Tamar Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wrote that Yale does not take into account political leanings when hiring faculty.

Professors back a professor

Sid Carlson White ’22, chair of the Yale Socialist Party, was unconcerned by the number and ratio of Yale faculty donations to Democratic-affiliated groups. Instead, he was worried about the level of faculty support for the Warren campaign.

Carlson White, who called Warren the candidate for the “intellectual elite class,” also told the News that it was unsurprising that Yale professors would throw their support behind Warren. But he considered that support to be “terrifying,” as he saw Warren as resisting the radical theory of change that Bernie Sanders represented.

“[Professors who donated to Warren] are practicing a radically different theory of electoral politics than what they’re preaching [in the classroom],” White said. “Anyone who monetarily supports a candidate who resists that theory of change is highly suspect in terms of what their commitments are.”

Nalebuff and Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science Steven Smith also found the amount of Warren support unsurprising. Like Carlson White, they both specifically noted that Warren was the sole professor running, meaning that professors felt a certain comfort with her and her ideas that other candidates did not provide.

Visualization by Thomas Woodside

Sterling Professor of English Ruth Yeazell, one of Yale’s top donors to Warren’s campaign, added that Warren’s plans, both in their explanations of the problems and policy solutions, also likely stemmed from this professorial past.

Eugene Fidell, senior research scholar in law at Yale Law School, was another top donor to the Warren campaign. In an email to the News, he wrote that he first met Warren when he taught at Harvard Law School as an adjunct and Warren was a professor.

“I agree with her that we need major structural change and felt (and feel) that she has the intellect, rigor and personal integrity needed to bring that about — and raise the level of political discourse,” he wrote. “I also admire how she overc[a]me significant obstacles in her own life. The country is fortunate to have her in the political arena.”

Sterling Professor of Political Science James Scott, another top donor to the Warren campaign, added that he considered Warren to be more electable than Sanders despite her similarly progressive ideals.

According to a report from the Office of Institutional Research, Yale had 4,869 faculty members in the 2019-20 academic year.

Data analysis and visualizations by Thomas Woodside. Contact him at thomas.woodside@yale.edu.

Madison Hahamy | madison.hahamy@yale.edu

Correction, Nov. 5: An earlier version of this story said that Fidell first met Warren when they were both professors at Harvard Law. In fact, Fidell was an adjunct and Warren was a professor. The story has been updated to reflect their professorial ranks at the time.

The post Large donations from Yale faculty went almost exclusively to Democratic-affiliated candidates and groups appeared first on Yale Daily News.