Yale AAUP leads panel to prepare for a Trump admin-led Title VI investigation
The panel featured faculty representatives from Harvard, Columbia, and Brown—universities that have faced scrutiny under Trump's Title VI investigations.
No institutions that have thus far avoided federal action were included in the discussion.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at Yale University hosted a panel on Sept. 29 where faculty leaders from several Ivy League schools discussed how universities can organize in response to federal scrutiny and possible funding cuts stemming from the Trump administration’s Title VI investigations.
The panel featured faculty representatives from Harvard, Columbia, and Brown—universities that have faced scrutiny under the Trump administration’s Title VI investigations. No institutions that have thus far avoided federal action were included in the discussion.
AAUP representatives joined via Zoom for the panel, which was attended by more than 70 members of the Yale community both virtually and in person, the Yale Daily News reports.
Michael Thaddeus, acting president of Columbia University’s AAUP chapter, acknowledged that his chapter has not been as successful in effecting changes to federal policy as it has been in influencing “the court of public opinion.”
Thaddeus was previously involved in exposing Columbia University’s false reporting of various statistics including average class size in the U.S. News college rankings. The university later admitted to using “incorrect methodologies” when calculating and submitting some of its data.
Despite having taken part in exposing the factual inaccuracies in the way Columbia University presented itself in what he referred to as a widespread problem among “more” elite universities, Thaddeus has said that the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke federal funding in the wake of the university’s Title VI violations were because “the right wants to defund the left.”
At the event, Thaddeus positioned himself in opposition to what he sees as the Trump administration’s wrongful distrust of higher education. He highlighted the importance of faculty unions who can be “forming coalitions” with “the press.”
The president of Yale’s own AAUP chapter said the event was important because even though the university has until now been spared from loss of federal funding, it was important to think “about what could be on the horizon.”
Yale professor Alessandro Gomez said of the same subject that it’s not beneficial to maintain “a low profile” because “sooner or later they will pass restrictions or laws or certain whatever it is that they will do” and, Gomez says, Yale “better be prepared by that point.”
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Yale’s president Maurie McInnis has taken to the creation of many committees including a Committee on Trust in Higher Education that will work to “understand the erosion of trust in colleges and universities nationwide.”
This committee is made up of 10 Yale professors, 8 of whom have donated to ActBlue.
Under McInnis, the university opened a new Washington, D.C. office and hired a federal relations director whose role is described as working to “advance Yale’s central missions” by going on “lobbying trips for the President” and serving as the “face of Yale in Washington.”
On Sept. 30, the New York Times reported that Yale alumnus Stephen Schwartzman was helping to facilitate negotiations between Harvard University and the Trump administration.
Schwartzman allegedly spoke to Trump twice in one week, serving as a go-between for the White House and Harvard, according to three people the Times identified as “familiar with the conversations.”
In 2015, Schwartzman donated $150 million to Yale.
Only 7.1 percent of students identify as somewhat right-leaning, and Democratic faculty outnumber conservatives by 28 to 1.
The AAUP frames faculty organizing and coalition-building as the chief response to federal scrutiny, overlooking the lack of intellectual and political diversity that has contributed to public distrust of universities.
Campus Reform has reached out to Yale University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
