The truck, sponsored by the conservative advocacy group Accuracy in Media as part of its multi-stop “Campus Accountability Campaign,” appeared on campus as early as 11:55 a.m. on Nov. 16, outside Atticus Bookstore Cafe on Chapel Street, and was still present as of roughly 3:05 p.m., when it was spotted near the Watson Center on Yale’s campus. The truck appeared near Pauli Murray College on Prospect Street around 3:30 p.m., and it was seen around 3:50 p.m. on Broadway.

At least six students’ names and faces rotated through the truck’s screen, making them victims of a public shaming tactic known as “doxxing,” in which an individual’s personal information is spread publicly by an unauthorized individual. Five of those six individuals are graduate students of color. 

This is not the first doxxing truck to visit the Ivy League.

The truck was first seen outside Harvard University’s campus on Oct. 11. Two weeks later, a similar truck visited Columbia University in New York City and returned on Nov. 1. These public doxxing campaigns exposed mostly Black and brown people, some of whom are undocumented, Teen Vogue reported on Oct. 27 based on interviews with two Harvard students.

Also on Nov. 16, AIM’s X account proudly announced the doxxing truck’s presence, writing, “our Campus Accountability Campaign is at @Yale today to highlight the rampant antisemitism from radical ‘scholars’ on campus.” 

The Tweet links to a website that encourages students to petition the University to “take a stand against the antisemites on campus who issued a statement blaming Israel for the actions of terrorists.” It is unclear to what statement the group refers.

A typo on the website claimed as of 3 p.m. on Nov. 16 that the petition will go to “Columbia’s Board of Trustees,” a sign of the organization’s hasty effort to reach multiple Ivy League campuses in a brief period of time.

This is a developing story that the News will continue to follow.

The post Conservative ‘doxxing truck’ arrives on Yale’s campus appeared first on Yale Daily News.

During our opinion editing process — which is separate from reported coverage — the News failed to ensure that the columnists’ statements were properly cited and attributed. At the time of the columns’ initial publication, those specific forms of violence during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack were not independently confirmed by the cited source.

On Oct. 25 and Oct. 26, the News published corrections to both pieces, modeled on reporting and corrections from other outlets — such as The Forward and The Los Angeles Times — from earlier in the month. 

The News was wrong to publish the corrections. By the time of the first correction on Oct. 25, there had been widely reported coverage from outlets such as Reuters publicly verifying that Hamas raped and beheaded Israelis. 

These corrections erroneously created the impression that, as of late October, there still was not enough publicly available evidence for those horrific acts. The News therefore retracts those editor’s notes in their entirety and without qualification. The notes have been removed from the columns, and the original text has been restored. 

It was never the News’ intention to minimize the brutality of Hamas’ attack against Israel. We are sorry for any unintended consequences to our readership and will ensure that such erroneous and damaging material does not make it into our content, either as opinion or as news.

Threats of violence leveled against the News, its editors and their families have intensified this week. Threats of this severity are unacceptable in any circumstance. 

The News remains committed to reporting the facts and to creating a forum for free, fair and honest campus and community dialogue. 

The post On recent editor’s notes appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Glück joined Yale’s English faculty in 2004 and was teaching the Iseman Seminar in Poetry at Yale College this semester.

“Although our time working together was short, it was transformative,” Olivia Bell ’25, an English major currently enrolled in Glück’s poetry seminar, told the News. “Louise was a talented and impactful professor and warm, generous person, even inviting our class to her Vermont home. I am deeply grateful to have known her and heartbroken to hear this news.”

Glück, born April 22, 1943, attended George W. Hewlett High School in Hewlett, New York. 

She did not enroll in college as a full-time student and instead enrolled in poetry workshops at Columbia University. She has pointed to Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz, two of her professors there, as significant mentors in her development as a poet.

Margaret Spillane, a Yale English professor, credited Glück as an influence on her own work.

“All I can think of is how, as a very young writer, I was enraptured by her presence in literary magazines like ANTAEUS,” Spillane wrote to the News. “Years later, it seemed to me miraculous to find myself a part of the English Department’s Writing Concentration with this woman whom I’d admired for most of my life.”

Glück authored two collections of essays and more than a dozen books of poetry during her lifetime. Her many awards include the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

When Glück received the Nobel Prize in 2020 — making her the first American-born woman to win the award since Toni Morrison in 1993 — the prize committee praised Glück’s “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” the New York Times reported.

Richard Deming, the Director of Creative Writing in Yale’s English Department, wrote that Glück “showed us as a poet and a human being all the aching beauty of which language is capable of revealing.”

“I want to say that there are no words in the face of such a devastating loss,” Deming told the News. “But in fact we do have words, we have her words, the words she gave us in poem after poem, for decades. These poems shaped a sense of how to be in the world, how to be in love with the world and even, when the time came, how to face leaving it.”

A full obituary will appear soon.

Correction, Oct. 13: The article has been updated to reflect that Glück was the first female American-born poet to win the Nobel Prize in literature since Morrison — not the first American since T.S. Eliot.

The post Louise Glück, Nobel Prize-winning poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate, dies at 80 appeared first on Yale Daily News.

As friends and peers, we above all want to recognize and validate the hurt the elections process caused Megan, as well as others involved. Nothing we say will appropriately acknowledge or make up for these experiences; instead of relitigating or making any excuses, we instead want to use this space to transparently discuss how the elections process here works, prior attempts to improve the system and some of our thoughts for future efforts. 

Across four years — in each News election during which we have been Yale students — the process has caused candidates and News members anguish. Given widening campus discourse around the subject, we feel it is important to quickly and directly take action.

Participants involved in the News’ elections for editorial positions consist of all outgoing editors and anyone who is running for a board position sitting together in a room. For each race, those running for that position leave the room. They are brought in individually to deliver a speech and to answer questions from the outgoing editor in chief and anyone else. The candidate then leaves the room before the whole group conducts a deliberation of the candidate’s merits, weaknesses and insecurities, moderated by the outgoing editor in chief and public editor. After this, the candidate comes back in for a brief response period where they are expected to address any remaining concerns.

The full day of elections, which involves positions from editor in chief and managing editors all the way to desk-level positions, can last all day. Last spring, elections began at 8 a.m. and went past 9 p.m.

But Megan’s column today, years of internal discussion and our own elections experiences demonstrate that this process can be irreparably harmful. 

The elections process has been subject to scrutiny before. The turmoil and tensions promoted during deliberations are often internally blamed for the eventual departure of staffers after losing elections. 

Following a tumultuous situation during the 2022 fall elections for last year’s board, News leadership made changes, which included introducing a response period and adding the public editor as a secondary moderator. As the News grows and changes, we have consistently strived to learn and do better. Clearly, those changes were not enough.

We, the editor in chief and public editor, began exploring new approaches to elections last spring, and we will continue this work throughout the semester in preparation for next term’s elections. Some of our ideas thus far include transitioning from a lengthy spoken deliberation period to preapproved written comments, fostering a more respectful environment within the room and stricter enforcement of the current ban on defamatory gossip. 

As a newspaper that strives to promote diversity in our newsroom and in our pages, we actively seek to build trust both internally and externally. We often fall short. Over the next few months, while we reevaluate our elections procedures, we welcome community input and hope to build a better newsroom. 

ANIKA ARORA SETH is a junior in Branford College and is the 146th editor in chief and president of the Yale Daily News. You can contact her at anika.seth@yale.edu.  

DANTE MOTLEY is a senior in Grace Hopper College and the News’ current public editor. You can contact him at dante.motley@yale.edu. 

The post SETH & MOTLEY: Letter from the public editor and editor in chief appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Just three days into the 2023-24 academic year, Salovey announced his intent to depart as president of the University this summer. Salovey, who is 65, did not specify a particular reason for his departure, which he did not classify as a retirement.

“I’ve been in higher administration — dean, provost and president — for 21 years, and at a personal level, it just felt that the time was right,” Salovey said in an interview this morning with the News in advance of the announcement’s release. “I very much want to finish my career at Yale, and I wanted to finish the way it started. I started as a graduate student and then as a professor, teaching and writing, doing research. I want to come full circle.”

Salovey wrote that should the search for his successor not be complete by June 30, he has expressed to Yale Corporation senior trustee Joshua Bekenstein ’80 his willingness to extend his tenure to provide “leadership continuity.”

Ultimately, he said he plans to return to the Yale faculty, work on writing and research projects and help with University fundraising.

“There is no perfect moment for one — there is always more to do,” he wrote in the announcement. “Yet, I believe the best time to search for a new leader is when things are going well. It allows for a thoughtful process and a smooth transition.”

Within the first paragraph of his announcement, Salovey noted the “very good news” that Yale’s “For Humanity” fundraising campaign surpassed a whopping $5 billion milestone over the summer, climbing toward the University’s total $7 billion goal. 

Salovey expects his future role in University fundraising to remain similar after his departure as president, he told the News this morning.

“Beyond this year, I will stay deeply involved in fundraising, appearing at events [and] meeting with alumni and friends,” Salovey said. “I don’t think you’re going to see much change in my fundraising as president and as president emeritus.”

Before starting as president of the University in 2013, Salovey served as Yale’s provost from 2008 to 2013, as dean of Yale College from 2004 to 2008 and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 2003 to 2004. He received two undergraduate degrees in sociology and psychology from Stanford University in 1980 and three graduate degrees from Yale all in psychology. He is credited with co-developing the “emotional intelligence” framework, which is the theory that just as people can have a range of intellectual abilities, they also have a range of measurable emotional skills.

Salovey’s predecessor, Richard Levin, stepped down after 20 years as president on June 30, 2013. Levin, who was also 65 at the time, was the most senior president in the Ivy League and reportedly one of the longest-serving in University history, according to the New York Times.

Levin began to consider stepping down after securing labor contracts with Yale unions over the summer of 2012. During Levin’s tenure, clerical, maintenance and service employees went on major strikes twice in 1996 and then again in both 2002 and 2003. 

In 2009, the University and its two main unions at the time — Local 35, which represents dining hall and maintenance workers, and Local 34, which represents clerical and technical workers — agreed on new three-year agreements nine months before their then-current contracts expired.

The University has fought graduate students’ efforts to unionize for decades. Salovey’s announcement comes just under eight months after Yale’s graduate and professional student workers voted to unionize; the University officially recognized the election’s results and confirmed that it would begin “bargaining in good faith” with Local 33. 

“I had been thinking about it, thinking it was one or two more years more, and I think once the labor contract was settled I thought at least it makes it possible to go now,” Levin told the News when he announced his intention to leave the role on Aug. 30, 2012.

Salovey was offered the position on Nov. 8 of the same year.

But four years before Salovey was officially offered the position, speculation swirled that Levin had essentially selected his own successor when he picked Salovey to serve as provost. 

“Peter Salovey will certainly be one of the people that would be among those who could be candidates for the future, obviously,” Levin told the News in 2008. “He’s done all the key leadership jobs in the University at this point. I have a lot of confidence in Peter, and the Corporation does as well.”

To fill Levin’s shoes, a presidential search committee directed by the Yale Corporation — the board that governs the University — considered more than 150 candidates. 

Berkstein told the News that the board of trustees has already kickstarted efforts to tap Yale’s next president.

“The first thing we’re going to do is get a lot of input from the Yale community,” Bekenstein told the News this morning, discussing the process of finding Salovey’s successor. “We named eight trustees to the search committee, and we’re going to add four faculty.” 

Among other accomplishments throughout his time as president, Salovey highlighted in his announcement progress on campus facility construction and renovation as well as on increasing diversity within the student body. Salovey told the News that increasing the size of Yale College, creating multidisciplinary centers like the Humanities Quadrangle, creating innovation centers such as the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale — Tsai CITY — and increasing the share of first-generation, low-income students on campus helped to accomplish his goals.

“Of course, I respect scholarship for its own sake, but I also want Yale to have great impact on the world, ” Salovey told the News this morning. “I would say we are, as compared to 10 years ago, indeed, more accessible, more unified and more innovative.”

While Salovey thanked university groups including trustees, deans, faculty members and staff in his announcement, he thanked only his wife, Marta Elisa Moret, by name. He also made note that Moret, who graduated from the School of Public Health in 1984 and is president of New Haven public health consulting firm Urban Policy Strategies, pushed off her retirement to support Salovey in his role as president. 

“I appreciate that she has delayed her full retirement to help me in a role not characterized by work-life balance,” he wrote. 

Salovey and Moret met during their graduate studies at Yale.

Correction, Aug. 31: This article has been updated with the correct spelling of senior trustee Joshua Bekenstein’s name. 

The post Salovey to step down appeared first on Yale Daily News.

An organization called Lawyers for Civil Rights filed the complaint on behalf of three Black and Latine advocacy groups, alleging that Harvard’s donor and legacy admissions preferences violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by disproportionately favoring white applicants. According to studies cited in the complaint, rates of admission are nearly seven times higher for donor-related applicants than for non-donor-related applicants and nearly six times higher for legacies than for non-legacies. Almost 70 percent of the pool of donor-related and legacy Harvard applicants are white.

Per a letter from the Department to LCR, the investigation will focus on whether Harvard “discriminates on the basis of race by using donor and legacy preferences in its undergraduate admissions process,” the Boston Globe reported Tuesday. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act explicitly prohibits organizations that receive federal money — such as universities — from discriminating on the basis of race. The original complaint says that if Harvard wishes to continue receiving federal funds, it ought to cease legacy-preferential admissions. 

At Yale, legacy students make up approximately 12 percent of the class of 2026, 14 percent of the class of 2025 and 8 percent of the class of 2024. Several Yale student groups began advocating for the abolishment of legacy preference even prior to the Court’s decision against affirmative action, as marked by the passage of two Yale College Council resolutions in as many years. Calls among students to end legacy admissions have become more widespread in the three weeks since the decision.

“We are struck by the irony of continued consideration of an arbitrary privilege in the face of new restrictions in ensuring diversity on college campuses,” the YCC wrote in an open letter to University President Peter Salovey, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis and Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan shortly after the affirmative action ruling. 

The Council added that while University officials have expressed strong moral opposition to the Court’s decision in public statements, the school must back its words with “decisive action.”

Earlier this week, Connecticut liberal arts college Wesleyan University announced that the school will no longer practice legacy admissions. Wesleyan admitted 15.7 percent of applicants to the class of 2027, of which 4 percent had a parent who went to Wesleyan according to the class profile. The University of Minnesota Twin Cities made the same change.

In this move, the two schools join a growing list of selective schools which have dropped legacy admissions in recent years, including Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and Amherst College. 

“In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision regarding affirmative action, we believe it important to formally end admission preference for ‘legacy applicants,’” Wesleyan President Michael Roth wrote in a blog post. “We still value the ongoing relationships that come from multi-generational Wesleyan attendance, but there will be no ‘bump’ in the selection process.”

The formal beginning of the investigation comes just after research in the National Bureau of Economic Research this week confirmed that legacy applicants are most advantaged in the process of seeking admission to selective schools, especially wealthy ones. 

People on both sides of the affirmative action debate have expressed strong opposition to legacy preference. Groups like LCR and the YCC are among those who fiercely supported affirmative action and believe that the repeal of legacy admissions is now even more important since affirmative action no longer stands.

On the other hand, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions — the group that challenged Harvard’s use of affirmative action before the Supreme Court and won — told the News a year and a half ago that SFFA opposes legacy preference in admissions. The founder, Edward Blum, said the practice “inhibit[s] and diminish[es] the opportunities of applicants from modest socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Harvard spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain wrote in a statement to the Harvard Crimson that the school is conducting an internal review of its admissions processes.

“Following the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” Swain wrote to the Crimson, “we are in the process of reviewing aspects of our admissions policies to assure compliance with the law and to carry forward Harvard’s longstanding commitment to welcoming students of extraordinary talent and promise who come from a wide range of backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences.”

Despite schools like Wesleyan making the shift away from legacy preference, schools in the Ivy League have either dug in their heels or remained silent on the subject. 

Last week, the Dartmouth College spokesperson told the Boston Globe that the school will continue to offer legacy applicants a leg up in the admissions process. Though they have released several public statements in response to the affirmative action repeal, Yale administrators have not offered insight on where the University stands on legacy preference in light of the affirmative action ruling. 

However, last February, Quinlan submitted written testimony to the Connecticut General Assembly against a bill that would have ended legacy admissions in the state. He argued that while universities could voluntarily stop employing legacy preference, a state bill making it a requirement would pave the way for “other intrusions on academic freedom.”

“Even without [legacy] preference, students with more resources will still have an advantage in college admissions, just as they have an advantage in securing a good job and in many other aspects of daily life,” Quinlan wrote. “Instead, the state should support schools in their efforts to identify, recruit, and graduate low-income and first-generation students.”

Quinlan also previously told the News that legacy students contribute to the diversity of the student body. 

This is a developing story that the News will continue to follow.

The post Department of Education launches investigation into legacy, donor preferences at Harvard appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Here, the News works through six dominant questions about post-affirmative action admissions, which we intend to explore and answer over the course of future coverage.

1. When can schools consider race?

According to the ruling, should applicants personally decide to describe their experiences with race and racial identity, schools can consider such information if it is “concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”

The phrasing is somewhat vague, as it is unclear what a concrete tie to quality of character really entails. Does this mean that schools can consider an applicant’s racial identity if they include information thereof in their admissions essays? Or are schools allowed to deduce an applicant’s racial or ethnic background — and determine it to be sufficiently meaningful — in other ways, such as based on a student’s activities or awards lists? Perhaps an applicant is a member of a Minority Scholars Program, a leader of a Black Student Union, a longtime Indian classical dancer or involved in some other activity that reveals information about their racial identity without them spelling it outright. Can it be considered then?

If racial consideration is constitutionally permissible when students write about their identity in their essays, what is to stop selective schools from adopting — as some, including Duke University, already have — an additional optional supplement that specifically asks students to write about their lived experience, which could include racial or ethnic characteristics? 

2. Quantitatively, how will this affect racial diversity at selective schools? What about economic diversity?

After the Court’s ruling last month, Morehouse College President David Thomas ’78 GRD ’86 wrote in a June 30 letter to the Morehouse community that the decision was already estimated to result in a 40 percent decrease in Black enrollment at Yale. Thomas is also a member of the Yale Corporation, also known as the University’s Board of Trustees.

Thomas declined to comment further and has not shared where the 40 percent figure originated. 

Prior to the Court’s ruling, eight states already had affirmative action bans in place: California since 1996, Florida since 1999, Michigan since 2006, Nebraska since 2008, Arizona since 2010, New Hampshire since 2012, Oklahoma since 2012 and Idaho since 2020. Texas imposed a similar ban from 1996 through 2003, as did Washington from 1998 until last year. 

Over the roughly 25 years since California ended race-conscious admissions in its public universities, Black, Latine and Indigenous student populations have declined, according to demographics reports. In Michigan, Black student enrollment dropped to just 4 percent on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus after the statewide ban went into effect.

What will the racial makeup of future accepted classes of Yalies look like? And how might this relate to or affect economic diversity within the student body?

Yale and many of its peer institutions practice need-blind admissions (though the University is part of the group of 17 selective schools facing a lawsuit alleging that not all members of the bloc are truly need-blind). While it is far from a strict one-to-one relationship, given national correlations between race and income, it seems likely that a bar on race-conscious admissions may also impact socioeconomic stratification within classes of admitted students. But it is not yet clear exactly how. 

3. Why are military schools exempt?

In a brief footnote of the 237-page document, Chief Justice John Roberts — who delivered the majority opinion — noted that the ruling does not apply to military academies. He said this is because no military academy was a party to the case and that there may be “distinct interests” at play. 

An article earlier this month from CBS News cites an amicus brief filed by 35 former military leaders to hypothesize that the exemption may have been carved out for national security intentions. In the brief, the authors argued that diversity within the military officer corps is essential because the forces that they lead are racially diverse, and placing a diverse team under the command of “homogeneous leadership” may yield internal violence. 

It remains unclear if this is specifically why the ruling includes an exemption for military academies. If the argument does, however, hold true, it is also unclear why the necessity for diversity within military leadership does not then extend to civilian institutions, given that a substantial share of officers also hail from non-military higher education institutions. 

4. Will this mean the end of legacy admissions?

Data show that legacy preference — the practice of advantaging the children or direct relatives of alumni — favors white, and typically wealthy, applicants. Schools sometimes justify such policies by arguing that they encourage alumni donations. But the tide may be turning.

Less than a month after the ruling, Wesleyan University — a top-ranked private liberal arts college based in Connecticut — announced that it will no longer use legacy preference, as did the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Harvard is now facing a civil complaint alleging that its use of legacy preference violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by disproportionately favoring white students. 

During the October hearings related to the Harvard and UNC lawsuits, some of the justices questioned whether the universities’ use of affirmative action complied with the legal strict scrutiny standard. The standard dictates that any sort of explicit racial consideration can only stand if all other possible ways of achieving racial diversity have been exhausted. In concurring opinions, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh ’87 noted that affirmative action was unconstitutional, in part, because legacy preference is antithetical to elevating racial diversity. This line of thinking is what led legal scholars such as Richard Sander, as reported by the Harvard Crimson before the decision, to argue that had Harvard done away with its legacy preference model, the university could have won its affirmative action battle. 

With all this in mind, is it possible that legacy admissions at Yale and nationwide could be coming to an end? 

5. Will this mean the end of standardized test requirements?

Another avenue universities may pursue to increase racial diversity is abolishing standardized testing requirements and instead switching permanently to a test-optional — perhaps even a test-blind — admissions model.

Over the course of the pandemic, Yale became one of many schools across the country that made submitting standardized test scores optional. Yale’s undergraduate admissions office previously told the News that going test-optional is at least partially responsible for the consequent increase in the shares of international applicants and of domestic applicants from racially underrepresented backgrounds. 

In March, the admissions office extended its test-optional policy for one additional year, marking its fourth cycle without requiring test scores. The University had previously told the News it would announce a long-term policy by the winter of 2023 but then pushed the announcement back until the end of the coming semester. While administrators have not specified a relationship between this one-year delay and the affirmative action decision, the relationship between test-optional admissions and racial diversity within the applicant pool makes a link between the delayed decision and the ruling seem likely. 

6. How far will the ruling’s effects permeate?

In an opinion column for the New York Times, sociologists Richard Arum and Mitchell Stevens make the case that because most higher education institutions are not selective, and most college-going students do not attend selective schools, the repeal of race-conscious admissions affects very few people materially. 

They specify that just 6 percent of all college students attend a school with an acceptance rate of 25 percent or less — the vast majority of college-going students attend institutions with acceptance rates upwards of 70 percent.

The ruling does still, as Arum and Stevens also agree, majorly impact admissions to selective schools. It could also impact how students of color approach the application process and navigate life post-matriculation, should they receive and choose to accept an offer of admission. And research shows that universities such as those in the Ivy League offer great potential for socioeconomic mobility. 

While our coverage at the News over the year to come will certainly grapple with affirmative action and admissions questions, such as the ones outlined here, it is worth remembering that the context of college admissions within selective institutions is not reflective of college admissions nationwide. In their column, Arum and Stevens caution against tunnel vision limited to Ivy-and-peer admissions and instead encourage directing attention to the other tiers of American postsecondary education as well.

The post ANALYSIS: What comes next? Questions after the affirmative action decision appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Following the Court’s June decision to repeal race-conscious admissions, which experts believe will lower enrollment rates of underrepresented racial groups at elite universities, schools are seeking ways to continue promoting racial diversity. Some universities, like Wesleyan, have narrowed in on legacy preference — an admissions model that offers a leg up to the children or direct relatives of alumni — given research that demonstrates the legacy pool to be whiter and wealthier than other applicants.

The liberal arts college’s decision comes less than a month after a Boston-based civil rights group filed a complaint against Harvard University alleging that its use of legacy preference violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by disproportionately favoring white applicants. 

Wesleyan, which admitted 15.7 percent of applicants to the class of 2027, joins a growing list of selective schools which have dropped legacy admissions in recent years, including Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and Amherst College. Four percent of students accepted to Wesleyan’s class of 2027 had a parent who went to Wesleyan, according to the class profile. 

Yale, however, has not yet taken a public position in the weeks since the affirmative action decision. Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis and Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan released a joint letter to the undergraduate community after the ruling, as did University president Peter Salovey to Yale affiliates broadly, but neither of these statements offered conclusive insight into the future of legacy admissions at the University. 

“In the coming months, my colleagues and I will announce details of new initiatives designed to expand our outreach,” Quinlan wrote last week in a News opinion column urging current students to promote the University in their own communities. “But preserving Yale College’s strength and excellence will require more than new programs … the most effective component of any college’s outreach strategy is a current student sharing their own personal experience.”

At Yale College, legacy students make up approximately 12 percent of the class of 2026, 14 percent of the class of 2025 and 8 percent of the class of 2024.

Although the University has not taken a public stance on legacy admissions in the weeks since the Court’s affirmative action ruling, Quinlan said in an interview with the News two years ago that legacy students contribute to student body diversity. Last year, he submitted testimony against a Connecticut bill that would have banned legacy preference statewide, arguing that universities should retain the right to make decisions about their own admissions processes.  

The admissions office declined to provide comment for this story, and senior associate director for outreach and recruitment Mark Dunn told the News that the office does not intend to share further information with reporters until it announces details about the new initiatives to which Quinlan’s column refers.

According to Roth, Wesleyan chose to move away from legacy preference because of the “unlearned advantage” it provides legacy students and had been considering the decision for a few years; the Supreme Court ruling was the final straw.

“We still value the ongoing relationships that come from multi-generational Wesleyan attendance, but there will be no ‘bump’ in the selection process,” Roth wrote in his Wednesday blog post. “As has been almost always the case for a long time, family members of alumni will be admitted on their own merits.”

Roth told ABC News that the move away from legacy preference is partly intended to signal to prospective applicants that Wesleyan is continuing to prioritize diversity.

Elissa Nadworny of NPR’s All Things Considered last week described similar motivations at other universities, noting that some admissions leaders have been concerned that students from underrepresented backgrounds will not apply to selective schools because they are nervous about how the affirmative action repeal may impact their chances of getting in. 

“We wanted to send a very clear signal to students of color around the country, to low-income students around the country, to people from regions of the United States and elsewhere who don’t normally apply to Wesleyan and schools like us,” Roth said. “We wanted to send a strong signal that we want them to come to Wesleyan, [and] that we want them to apply.”

Legacy preference at Harvard University — one of the defendants in the legal battle that ultimately ended affirmative action — has also come under fire. Earlier this month, Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a civil complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging that Harvard’s donor and legacy admissions preferences violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by disproportionately favoring white applicants.

According to recent studies cited in the complaint, nearly 70 percent of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white. Rates of admission are nearly seven times higher for donor-related applicants than for non-donor-related applicants and nearly six times higher for legacies than for non-legacies.

Yalies have long advocated against legacy preference. Before the affirmative action decision, the Yale College Council passed two separate resolutions condemning the practice. The YCC also wrote an open letter to University administration after the ruling, as did the News’ independent Editorial Board, both of which called on the University to abolish the practice. 

“Yale must be a leader among elite and selective colleges,” wrote the Editorial Board, “ensuring now more than ever that opportunities granted by a Yale education are not stripped from the disadvantaged by virtue of them instead being generously afforded to those that already have Yale’s blue blood in their veins and the associated generational privileges their Yale connections provide them.”

A common rationalization of legacy preference is that the practice prompts alumni to donate more money to their alma maters. Multi-generational attendance could yield stronger familial connection to a school, in turn prompting an increase in donor-funded revenue.

Wesleyan’s president, however, is not concerned. 

“I’m betting on the idea, and I wouldn’t have made this decision if I thought it would seriously hurt the university’s economic foundation,” he said. 

After LCR filed its civil complaint against Harvard, Yale spokesperson Karen Peart referred to Lewis and Quinlan’s June 29 message to the Yale College community, in which they committed to “closely examin[ing]” the University’s admissions process in light of the Supreme Court decision.

Also after the complaint, YCC vice president Maya Fonkeu told the News that the University needs to turn its words into action.

“President Salovey said that Yale has an ‘unwavering commitment to creating and sustaining a diverse and inclusive community’ in his response to the SCOTUS decisions,” Fonkeu said, quoting from Salovey’s message to the University affiliates after the fall of affirmative action.  “Ending legacy admissions is one way to make good on that promise.”

Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit organization that emerged victorious as the petitioner in the Court’s ruling against affirmative action, had fought for decades to put a death knell to race-conscious admissions. A year and a half ago, founder Edward Blum told the News that SFFA also opposes legacy preference, noting specifically that the practice “inhibit[s] and diminish[es] the opportunities of applicants from modest socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Wesleyan University was founded in 1831.

The post Wesleyan drops legacy preference appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The complaint, which could force Harvard and other universities to stop giving admissions preferences to children of alumni and prominent donors, closely follows last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision restricting the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Lawyers for Civil Rights filed the complaint with the U.S. Department of Education on behalf of three Black and Latine advocacy groups, alleging that Harvard’s donor and legacy admissions preferences violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by disproportionately favoring white applicants.

According to recent studies cited in the complaint, nearly 70 percent of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white. Rates of admission are nearly seven times higher for donor-related applicants than for non-donor-related applicants and nearly six times higher for legacies than for non-legacies.

“Harvard’s practice of giving a leg-up to the children of wealthy donors and alumni — who have done nothing to deserve it — must end,” said Michael Kippins, a litigation fellow at Lawyers for Civil Rights, in Monday’s announcement. “Particularly in light of last week’s decision from the Supreme Court, it is imperative that the federal government act now to eliminate this unfair barrier that systematically disadvantages students of color.”

At Yale, legacy students make up approximately 12 percent of the class of 2026, 14 percent of the class of 2025 and 8 percent of the class of 2024. Despite widespread student advocacy against legacy preference, including two Yale College Council resolutions in the past two years, opposing the practice, university officials have remained fiercely supportive of legacy admissions. 

Last February, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan submitted written testimony to the Connecticut General Assembly in support of legacy admissions. He argued that while universities could voluntarily stop employing legacy preference, a state bill making it a requirement would pave the way for “other intrusions on academic freedom.”

“Even without [legacy] preference, students with more resources will still have an advantage in college admissions, just as they have an advantage in securing a good job and in many other aspects of daily life,” Quinlan wrote. “Instead, the state should support schools in their efforts to identify, recruit, and graduate low-income and first-generation students.”

Monday’s complaint explicitly draws on the Supreme Court’s majority opinion from last week’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the Court declared race-conscious admissions unconstitutional on the grounds that affirmative action benefits Black and Hispanic applicants at the expense of white and Asian ones.

Part of the Court’s decision in SFFA v. Harvard noted that the use of affirmative action violated a legal principle called the strict scrutiny standard, which dictates that any explicit racial consideration can only be deemed constitutional if all other possible methods of promoting racial diversity have already been implemented. Given that legacy preferences favor a group of applicants that is mostly white, the Court’s concurring opinions noted that both legacy-preferential and race-conscious admissions cannot stand concurrently. 

After the Court’s repeal of affirmative action, the Yale College Council sent an open letter to University President Peter Salovey, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis and Quinlan urging that they reconsider legacy preference. The YCC said that while the University has come out staunchly against the Court’s decision to bar race-conscious admissions, it must back its words with “decisive action.”

“We are struck by the irony of continued consideration of an arbitrary privilege in the face of new restrictions in ensuring diversity on college campuses,” the Council wrote in its letter. 

University spokesperson Karen Peart referred to a June 29 message from Quinlan and Lewis to the Yale College community, in which the administrators said that they would “closely examine” the University’s admissions process in light of the Supreme Court decision and “consider new programs and initiatives.”

YCC vice president Maya Fonkeu ’25 referred to previous YCC resolutions against legacy preference and to the anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic ideologies that have historically motivated such practices.

“President Salovey said that Yale has an ‘unwavering commitment to creating and sustaining a diverse and inclusive community’ in his response to the SCOTUS decisions,” Fonkeu said, quoting from Salovey’s message to the Yale community after the fall of affirmative action.  “Ending legacy admissions is one way to make good on that promise.”

Fonkeu added that she hopes the University will move to a permanent test-optional admissions model — a change that, over the last three admissions cycles, has been associated with greater racial diversity in the applicant pool. 

In its letter, the YCC also asked the University to implement measures aimed at improving campus diversity and inclusivity beyond the admissions process. This includes committing to meet with campus advocacy groups run by communities of color, increasing funding to existing cultural houses and granting a new cultural center for Middle Eastern and North African students.

“At this critical juncture, it’s even more important that the University engages with the student advocacy groups that have historically championed diversity on campus,” YCC president Julian Suh-Toma ’25 wrote to the News. “Communities of color at Yale have long safeguarded and advocated for equity and diversity, and these tragic unfortunate present circumstances give the University an opportunity to recognize the value of cultural student advocacy spaces by giving them a seat at the table.”

Although SFFA — the group that waged and won a decades-long legal battle against affirmative action — has thus far dedicated all its resources to striking down affirmative action, founder Edward Blum told the News a year and a half ago that SFFA opposes legacy preference in admissions. He said the practice “inhibit[s] and diminish[es] the opportunities of applicants from modest socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Blum declined to provide further comment for this story.

Amherst College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, Purdue University and Johns Hopkins University have all recently done away with legacy admission preferences.

Correction, July 4: Supreme Court justices argued in concurring opinions that legacy preference and race-conscious admissions cannot concurrently stand. This was not explicitly part of the ruling, as a previous version of this article stated.

Update, July 5: This article has been updated to include a new statement from Yale College Council president Julian Suh-Toma.

The post Harvard faces new challenge to legacy and donor preferences appeared first on Yale Daily News.

At Yale, the admissions office can no longer constitutionally consider candidates’ races when making decisions on applications. If a student chooses to describe their experiences with race and racial identity, schools can only consider such information if it is “concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university,” according to the decision document. 

The majority argued that achieving a society that is truly racially equal requires eliminating all forms of racial consideration. But in the dissenting opinions, one written by Sonia Sotomayor LAW ’79 and one by Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Court’s liberal justices challenged the legitimacy of colorblind frameworks.

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” the faction wrote. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” 

During a 2019 trial in federal court, both Harvard and SFFA hired economists to simulate what the racial composition of Harvard’s undergraduate class of 2019 would have been without affirmative action. Both simulations estimated that a raceblind admissions model would have sunk the share of Hispanic students in the class by about 30 percent and cut that of Black students in half, the Harvard Crimson reported. 

Similar trends could occur at a post-affirmative action Yale. 

In the hours following the Court’s ruling, University President Peter Salovey expressed his “strong disagreement” with the Court ruling in a letter to the Yale community. He said the University intends to employ “all lawful means” to continue fostering diversity “in its many dimensions.”

“Beyond Yale…as a nation and global society, we are strengthened by a higher education system that admits and graduates into the workforce diverse and excellent cohorts of students,” Salovey wrote. “To the extent today’s decisions impede progress in this regard, I believe they have done the nation a disservice.”

Five of Yale’s organizing groups for students of color — the Asian American Students Alliance, the Native and Indigenous Student Association at Yale, the Black Student Alliance at Yale, Mecha de Yale and the Middle Eastern and North African Student Association — also decried the Court’s verdict. 

Last October, AASA, NISAY, BSAY and Mecha sent a delegation of over 40 Yale students to the nation’s capital, where they protested Students for Fair Admissions’ anti-affirmative action advocacy on the day of the Supreme Court hearings for both lawsuits. The coalition shared a joint statement with the News in response to the decision, expressing their “strong and continued support for affirmative action” and urging Yale to continue fighting for racial equity.

In Thursday’s ruling, the Court found specifically that the universities’ use of affirmative action violated a legal principle called the strict scrutiny standard, which dictates that any sort of explicit race consideration can only stand if all other possible ways of achieving racial diversity have been exhausted. In concurring opinions, the Court wrote that legacy preference — which Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill both employ, as does Yale — is antithetical to elevating racial diversity, making affirmative action as it currently stands unconstitutional. 

The lawsuits

The Court voted 6-2 in the Harvard case and 6-3 in the UNC case, with Chief Justice John Roberts delivering the majority opinion and Clarence Thomas LAW ’74, Samuel Alito LAW ’75, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90 joining. Gorsuch filed a concurring opinion, which Thomas joined, as did Kavanaugh. Justice Sonia Sotomayor LAW ’79 filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Elena Kagan in the Harvard case and both Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the UNC case. Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case due to her prior role on the school’s board of overseers. 

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” the majority wrote, arguing essentially that a colorblind admissions framework is necessary to achieve a racially equal society. 

Students for Fair Admissions, led by longtime anti-affirmative action legal activist Edward Blum, filed two separate lawsuits against Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill respectively in November 2014. The group argued that Harvard unlawfully discriminated against Asian American students in its admissions process and UNC-Chapel Hill against white and Asian American students. 

In September of 2019, a district court upheld Harvard’s admissions policy, and in October of 2021, a district court also upheld UNC-Chapel Hill’s. Following a series of appeals — in which an appellate court also ruled in favor of Harvard’s admissions policy — SFFA, in 2021, filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to hear both cases. In their prior rulings in favor of the universities, lower courts cited Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 case in which the Supreme Court upheld race-conscious admissions practices. 

Just after the Oct. 31 Supreme Court hearing, University spokesperson Karen Peart said the Court was being asked to “uphold 40 years of its own precedent” by ruling in favor of Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill. The Court instead went in the opposite direction.

Earlier this year, Yale filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill alongside 14 peer institutions. A total of 82 corporations and business groups, including 25 Harvard student and alumni organizations, signed three amicus briefs asking the Court to uphold over 40 years of precedent by ruling again that it is legally permissible to consider race as one of many factors in university admissions.

Amid the affirmative action debate, controversies surrounding legacy admissions — in which universities afford preference to applications submitted by the children or grandchildren of alumni — have also intensified. 

Despite more and more groups — including the Yale College Council — criticizing legacy preference models  for advantaging predominantly white and wealthy students, universities like Yale and Harvard remain committed to the practice. Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid, testified before the Connecticut General Assembly in support of legacy admissions last February. 

In its verdict and in the October hearing, the Court’s conservative faction raised the question of legacy admissions, challenging whether affirmative action can meet the “strict scrutiny” standard so long as legacy preference remains in place.

Under strict scrutiny, policies of any organization receiving government funding — which includes universities — must 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 needed to prove that their admissions policies meet this standard. 

“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.

An analysis by the News from February suggests Gorsuch’s premise to be true: removing legacy preference would likely increase racial diversity. 

Some legal scholars like Richard Sander said before the decision that had Harvard done away with its legacy preference model, the university could have won its affirmative action battle, the Harvard Crimson reported. 

What does the decision mean for Yale?

Prior to Thursday’s ruling, eight states had already barred affirmative action: California since 1996, Florida since 1999, Michigan since 2006, Nebraska since 2008, Arizona since 2010, New Hampshire since 2012, Oklahoma since 2012 and Idaho since 2020. Texas imposed a similar ban from 1996 through 2003, as did Washington from 1998 until last year. 

Over the approximate quarter-century since Californians voted to abolish affirmative action in their state universities, demographics reports show that Black, Latine and Indigenous student populations have declined. Similar trends followed in Michigan, where Black student enrollment dropped to just 4 percent on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus.

American Civil Liberties Union president Deborah Archer, who is also a law professor at New York University, said ahead of the ruling that a Court decision on SFFA’s side would prevent applicants from self-describing their racial background. 

“This would require applicants to erase any trace of their race or ethnicity from their application for admissions,” Archer said in an interview with NYU News. “It would prevent an applicant of color from fully expressing their identity—and, in particular, those parts of their identity inextricably bound to their race.”

However, the decision document clarified that students can choose to discuss their own racial experiences. Universities can only consider such discussions, though, if concretely reflective of a candidate’s character or “unique” abilities.

After the ruling, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan and Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis sent a joint statement to the Yale College community committing to — despite their “concern” over the decision — comply with the law while still continuing efforts to “make Yale a leader in welcoming and educating students of all backgrounds.”

Quinlan and Lewis added that they intended to use the summer to consider new ways of building and supporting Yale’s diverse community. Among the deans’ listed priorities are expanding outreach to underresourced school districts, strengthening college preparation programs for low-income and rural students, investing in the University’s need-based financial aid program, supporting the four campus cultural centers and working with the Poorvu Center on Teaching and Learning to establish a new Office of Educational Opportunity. 

Lewis and Quinlan’s letter echoes comments from the admissions office directly following the October hearing. At the time, office members told the News that though they would not make any assumptions about the lawsuits’ outcomes, they would — in a post-affirmative action world — continue taking steps to promote diversity. 

“Earlier this year, the Admissions Office completed a review of the race-neutral initiatives we currently use to build a diverse student body,” Quinlan wrote in an October email to the News. “We will expand those initiatives, and we are working closely with the partners across campus to identify ways to obtain the benefits of diversity, even in a changed legal environment.”

Among these measures might be the new Small-Town And Rural Students College Network, a consortium of 16 schools including Yale, that was announced in April. Through this initiative, which is race-neutral, the University hopes to increase its outreach to and enrollment from small-town and rural communities, which are often underrepresented in selective higher education institutions. 

In March, the admissions office extended its test-optional policy for one additional year, marking its fourth such cycle. The University told the News that it would make a long-term decision on testing requirements next winter, a one-year delay from its previous commitment to announce a long-term policy by the winter of 2023.

The University has not specified a relationship between its delay announcing a long-term testing policy and the looming context of affirmative action, but as Yale’s test-optional policy has been correlated with a more racially diverse applicant pool, a link between the delayed decision and the affirmative action ruling seems likely. 

Members of the student body, too, intend to continue pushing for ways to promote racial diversity.

After the ruling, The Yale College Council worked with the University’s five largest organizing groups for students of color — the Asian American Students Alliance, the Native and Indigenous Student Association at Yale, the Black Student Alliance at Yale, Mecha de Yale and the Middle Eastern and North African Student Association — to write and send an open letter to Salovey, Quinlan and Lewis. The coalition urges the University to cease offering preference to legacy applicants and switch to a permanently test-optional admissions model.

The YCC also asked the University to work toward improving campus diversity and inclusivity outside of the admissions process. Specifically, the letter includes requests to increase funding for cultural houses and establish a new cultural center specifically for Middle Eastern and North African students.

“In the previous visit that Dean Lewis made to YCC, he spoke of the Admissions Office’s work to prepare and adjust for the event that affirmative action would be declared unconstitutional,” the Council wrote in the letter. “We commend and share in these sentiments, but words must be accompanied by action.”

When the Court heard arguments for both cases on Oct. 31, 41 Yalies joined student delegations from other universities — including Harvard and the UNC-Chapel Hill — on the Court steps to protest SFFA’s attempts to repeal race-conscious admissions. Over the past school year, members of Yale’s Asian American Students Alliance also organized a variety of on-campus initiatives related to affirmative action, including virtual and in-person campus seminars, an informational postering project on Cross Campus and teach-ins for New Haven middle and high school students.

For student organizer Resty Fufunan ’24, the core goal of these efforts was to promote awareness of the then-looming decision on affirmative action — and the potential consequences. Fufunan felt it particularly important to challenge the SFFA narrative that Asian Americans are hurt by and thus opposed to affirmative action.

“Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, I think it’s important for us to show the community and people that come after us that we were there, we were fighting,” Resty Fufunan ’24, one of the student organizers of these actions, told the News in October. “Students for Fair Admissions does not go unopposed. There are Asian Americans and, more broadly, people of color that value affirmative action, that value diversity on campus.”

The group of Yalies that traveled to the Court in October was composed of 23 students from AASA and 18 from the Native and Indigenous Student Association at Yale, the Black Student Alliance at Yale and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán de Yale, representing the largest cross-cultural undertaking among University student activists since the 2019 protests to bolster the Ethnicity, Race & Migration program.

Going forward, AASA, NISAY, BSAY and Mecha hope to strengthen the relationship between these four activist groups and brainstorm creative ways to continue promoting campus diversity.

“In keeping with the legacy of our groups’ historical partnership and commitments, we will continue to fight for racial equity,” the groups wrote in their joint statement. “We urge Yale University to do the same. We hope to meet with university leaders in the coming weeks to discuss solutions and efforts to support prospective students of color.”

The News previously reported that SFFA is funded in large part by conservative trusts, including organizations with financial ties to the Federalist Society, a network of primarily libertarian and conservative lawyers. The society was founded at the University in 1982 and is linked to six of the nine sitting SCOTUS justices.

Correction, June 29: A previous version of this story included an outdated name for Mecha de Yale. The piece has been updated accordingly.

Correction, June 29: A previous version of this story cited legal analysis prior to the ruling that said applicants would not be able to self-describe their racial identity. The article has been updated with specifics from the Court’s decision, which says that students can discuss experiences with race but that admissions officers can only consider these discussions if they are concretely indicative of an applicant’s character or ability.

Update, July 4: University President Peter Salovey issued a statement to the Yale community on June 29 following the ruling, as did Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis and Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan to undergraduate affiliates. The article has been updated to include their sentiments.

Update, July 4: The Yale College Council sent in July an open letter to Salovey, Lewis and Quinlan as a response to the ruling. The article has been updated to include the YCC’s asks of the University. 

The post SCOTUS axes affirmative action appeared first on Yale Daily News.