https://www.city-journal.org/article/more-of-the-same-at-yale
Yale University has announced its next president: Maurie McInnis, the current president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an art historian specializing in slavery and Southern culture. McInnis concluded her introductory video with an exhortation: “Most importantly, I will encourage us to ask ourselves what change we wish to see in the world and how we might best accomplish that. I can’t wait to begin!”
Uh-oh. McInnis may be eager for Yale to change the world, but the rest of us should be wary of the prospect.
The McInnis selection is a possible bellwether for how elite universities intend to govern themselves in the post-October 7 era. Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and other colleges are seeking new presidents, thanks to leadership shakeups in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks on Israel. While selective colleges serve a minuscule fraction of the U.S population, they exercise a disproportionate influence over the culture. Their graduates populate the federal judiciary, corporate boards, and key public and private bureaucracies. They lead big tech companies and the nonprofit sector. They are our public-health and criminal-justice “experts.” Yale in particular has been a leading proponent of the progressive view of America’s alleged racism. What does its choice of McInnis portend for key issues facing higher education: intellectual diversity, academic freedom, and administrative overreach?
It was foreordained that Yale’s outgoing president, Peter Salovey, would be replaced by a woman. Until the post–October 7 rout, 75 percent of Ivy League leaders were female. Yale has bragged that McInnis is its first permanent woman president, as if selecting her from the heavily female administrative ranks of elite universities represents a bold move. The new president, for her part, has said that she will “play an important role as a role model,” as if females hadn’t already begun their takeover of higher education.
Indeed, by now, being female is so humdrum an accomplishment that Yale was undoubtedly hoping for at least an intersectional twofer, of the sort that Harvard basked in before Claudine Gay’s self-destruction. McInnis makes up for not being black, however, by an academic focus on slavery. Her most recent book, Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University (2019), which she co-edited, argues that the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, had “slavery at its core.” Though Jefferson designed the university to “visually minimize the physical presence of the laboring black body,” McInnis writes, its grounds were a “landscape of slavery.” One of Jefferson’s goals in creating the university was to insulate Virginia’s youth from the abolitionist thinking that they might encounter in Northern schools, McInnis argues in the introduction. Her chapter, called “Violence,” seeks to document the beatings that the college’s students inflicted with impunity on local slaves.
