Ellie Park, Photography Editor

Over 100 faculty members now have their signatures displayed on a website for a new faculty group, Faculty for Yale, which “insist[s] on the primacy of teaching, learning and research as distinct from advocacy and activism.”

Among other measures, the group calls for “a thorough reassessment of administrative encroachment” and the promotion of diverse viewpoints. The group also calls for a more thorough description of free expression guidelines in the Faculty Handbook; Yale’s current guidelines are based on its 1974 Woodward Report. The group also wants Yale to implement a set of guidelines regarding donor influence, which were first put forth by the Gift Policy Review Committee in 2022.

On its site, Faculty for Yale outlines issues that it claims stem from Yale’s “retreat from the university’s basic mission.”

“Faculty for Yale is a spontaneously coalescing group of (so far) over 100 faculty from throughout the university who wish to support our university in re-dedicating itself to its historic and magnificent mission to preserve, produce, and transmit knowledge,” professor of social and natural science Nicholas Christakis wrote to the News. “We believe that any loss of focus on this deep, fundamental, and important mission may contribute to a range of challenges being faced in universities like ours nowadays.”

Faculty for Yale also urges the University to adopt the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee report that urges institutional neutrality.

However, in an interview with the News in November, Salovey said that although more college presidents might be considering the principle of institutional neutrality “because they realize how fraught it has become to speak out” on the issues of the day, he does not yet hold that view. He added, though, that “it’s a worthy view to consider.”

“I still think that we are going to want to speak out as leaders in higher education on issues of the day, but the decision about when to and when not to is not an easy one,” Salovey said. “I tend to use a criteria of how directly our campus is affected by whatever the incident in the world is but that’s still not a perfect criteria … there are atrocities all over the world, and I’ve probably not spoken out on more of them than I have spoken on.”

Christakis, speaking on behalf of the group, told the News that “we hope to meet” with Salovey. 

Howard Forman, a professor at the School of Management, said that he signed the letter in part to emphasize Yale’s “promises for advancing and disseminating knowledge” amid the presidential search process. Forman also called himself a “big fan” of Salovey.

“He has served us extremely well, facing numerous internal and external upheavals and facing up to Yale’s own troubling history,” Forman said. “This letter does not sit in judgment of him or his predecessors. It speaks to our future and how we all can be better.”

Although the group was formed in December, a column published last month in the Wall Street Journal discussed emails from Christakis and law professor Kate Stith — sent to their faculty colleagues — in which they expressed views now available on Faculty for Yale’s site. 

Other signatories include the Trumbull and Grace Hopper heads of college — biomedical engineering professor Fahmeed Hyder and sociology professor Julia Adams, respectively. Hyder did not respond to the News’ request for comment.

Adams wrote to the News that academic freedom, which she described as “the bedrock of the advancement of knowledge through teaching and learning,” needs support at Yale and other colleges and universities.

“The concerns articulated in the FfY formation statement pertain to universities — and not their members! — as activists,” Adams wrote. “I consider myself something of an activist on behalf of academic freedom, scholarship, and the mission of the university. But there will also come times, as the Kalven Report notes, in which colleges and universities confront threats to their very mission, and must seek to defend their fundamental values. That is happening worldwide.”

Similar efforts at other universities have emerged in recent months, including Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom, Princeton’s Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry and the University of Pennsylvania’s pennforward.com. 

All such efforts formally began within the last year.