Bending the Knee at Yale

This spring, I stood in a tent on Yale University’s Old Campus, surrounded by classmates marking the occasion of our 25th college reunion. The tent was full of spouses and bored children and the half-eaten remnants of lunch, and thankfully everyone was wearing name tags so that I did not have to guess at the names of people I last spoke to in 2001. 

For a moment that weekend, the dull roar of conversation was hushed so that the president of Yale, Maurie McInnis, could address our assembly and offer some nostalgic thoughts about the college experience, the passage of time, and the work the school was doing to provide educations to the next generation of students.

Not too long after the reunion attendees said their final goodbyes and headed back to their lives, word spread of negotiations between Yale and the Trump administration regarding the university’s admissions policies. As part of their effort to undo all attempts to increase diversity on elite campuses, Trump and his minions were pressuring Yale to sign an agreement with the administration, with the threat of withholding federal funding wielded as a cudgel. McInnis, last seen warmly greeting alumni like myself, was now intent on doing irreversible damage to Yale in the name of protecting it from the federal government. How could you claim to provide a quality education to students after ostentatiously kissing the ring of someone hellbent on destroying universities?

At my reunion, I was surrounded by people who had the good fortune to receive an Ivy League education and who were living totally ordinary middle-class or upper-middle-class lives. They were working as nurses and lawyers and middle managers and teachers and (God help them) writers. Many of them had flourishing careers. Absolutely none of them were names you would recognize. But many of them were people who had invested a notable part of their time and energy to combating authoritarianism. 

Back in 2023, when it looked like Ron DeSantis—our college classmate, thankfully absent from the reunion—might be the Republican nominee for president, some of us had organized a fundraising effort to demonstrate that we wanted nothing to do with the bully from Florida. Luckily for us, DeSantis soon fell flat on his face, unable or unwilling to punch back against Donald Trump, and his campaign sputtered out in short order. We wound up raising almost $300,000 for Movement Voter Project anyway.

I know little to nothing about Maurie McInnis’ politics, but if I had to guess, there is probably minimal overlap between her ideological point of view and that of Meatball Ron. And yet what links them both is McInnis’ willingness to capitulate to Trump. If you asked her she might have said, along with so many others of the great and the good, she had no other choice but to bend the knee: Trump is the king president, after all. I will merely note that Yale, as of last year, had an endowment of approximately $44 billion. If $44 billion does not qualify as literal and figurative fuck-you money, then what does? You could have pooled the life savings of all the former Yale students who had devoted their time and energy to battling against American authoritarianism and come up with a very tiny fraction of $44 billion, but those alumni had fought anyway.

In seeking to capitulate, McInnis was also fighting her own community, including law school dean Cristina Rodríguez, who sought to remove the law school from any settlement the university reached, and many of the members of Yale’s faculty, who hired their own law firm to see if they could undo any potential deal. According to the New York Times, Rodriguez and some of her faculty “have quietly lobbied top Yale leaders in recent days, arguing that the Trump administration cannot be trusted and that settling would threaten the rule of law and the university’s reputation.” 

I have nothing but respect for Rodríguez for fighting, and also it does not require a JD degree from Yale to be aware that Donald Trump’s word is worthless, and that reaching an agreement with him will be a permanent brand of shame on any person or institution that chooses to do so. How did so many of the world’s most accomplished people become so exceptionally foolish, short-sighted, and cowardly?

These traits are hardly limited to McInnis. The past eighteen months of American life have been deeply sobering for those of us who might have once believed that people with power were inclined to fight for those of us who lack it. Undoubtedly, we each have our own annotated lists of surprise Trump lackeys. Mine includes Tim Cook of Apple; Claire Shipman, the former president of Columbia University; Jeremy London and Brad Karp, the chairs of law firms Skadden Arps and Paul, Weiss; and Shari Redstone of Paramount/CBS. People with immense wealth, fame, or power who chose to use none of it to combat an unprecedented authoritarian onslaught, or—like Cook and his fellow tech moguls—who got out in front of the onslaught by publicly kneeling in obeisance. The more power you have, it seems, the less likely you are ever to use it.

When Columbia first began to wobble in early 2025, an organization called Stand Up for Yale stepped forward, led by alumni including novelist Susan Choi, epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, and pro-democracy lawyers Jessica Marsden and Erica Newland. And when word spread that Yale might join Columbia in ignominy, Stand Up for Yale asked people to reach out directly to McInnis’ office. More than 5,000 people signed Stand Up for Yale’s letter.

McInnis wound up responding defensively to the Stand Up for Yale campaign, saying that she was “seeing speculation and misinformation spreading, and…causing concern in our community.” The president listed the “five fundamental principles” that governed her negotiations with the administration, including intellectual freedom, control over hiring and firing, and free expression on campus. 

“Amid this uncertainty,” her letter closed, “you can be certain of my promise to the entire Yale community: my decisions will be guided by what I believe is in the best interests of our university.” What was missing from her logic was a dictum I learned long before my years shuffling from Street Hall to Cross Campus for class: when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. The mere willingness to treat this gangster administration as legitimate negotiation partners was itself an act of cowardice, the stain of which would not be easily removed. A friend of mine emailed his development-office contact at Yale and said as much: “A settlement is a stain that will affect alumni giving. I’m hopeful she understands the trade-off.” 

McInnis’ carefully worded bulletin felt muddled and uncertain, but the bigger takeaway was that pressure—from students, from faculty, from alumni—had prompted her to send it at all. Last month, a follow-up message from Stand Up for Yale laid out a question that lies at the heart of this peculiar battle: “Why is McInnis assuming a conciliatory posture towards a federal government that makes use of tactics that are extortionate, authoritarian, and possibly unlawful? Those of us who love Yale and want it to stand up for its values won’t have it” (Stand Up for Yale email, July 14).

Thinking back to that moment of listening to McInnis on Old Campus, I remembered how many of my classmates jumped in to fight off the coming tidal wave of authoritarianism. They raised money; they donated their artwork; they reached out to friends, assembled email addresses, and strategized. And in the time since Trump had returned to power, I knew firsthand how many of them had carried on, emailing and knocking on doors and donating and simply refusing to abdicate responsibility. I accidentally horrified a classmate at the reunion weekend by noting that our children were far closer in age to those students we once were than we are now. And of course, that was at the heart of so much of this effort: that many of us were parents, and that giving up hope in a better future was giving up hope for our children. 

Moreover, the summer of 2026 is not the winter of 2025. It was deeply mistaken then, too, to cede power to Trump, but it might just have been possible to assume that this was the new American order. But after Minneapolis and Iran and countless visits to the gas pump, Trump is desperately unpopular, and any calculation of the financial cost of defying the government that zeroes out federal funding forever, rather than starting with the next two and a half years, is misleading and unnecessarily defeatist. Moreover, we now have examples of differing responses to the MAGA onslaught. If door number 1 is Columbia, which preemptively caved to pressure from Trump, and saw its reputation dramatically suffer, and door number 2 is Harvard, which has successfully fought back, why would any university president select door number 1? 

As money and influence pool in fewer and fewer hands, the links between people like McInnis and the rest of us grow ever more tenuous. With credit to the varied likes of Harvard President Alan Garber, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jon Ossoff, shockingly few powerful voices have been willing to use the influence they have to fight back in Trump’s second term.

So why is it that McInnis and her fellow elites crumbled so instantaneously, and seem to bear little awareness of how immensely unpopular the president and his crusade is? Why, in short, are they not only callow and lacking in moral strength, but also such poor strategists?

I suspect there are two answers, one potentially understandable and one practically unforgivable. As stewards of their designated institutions—Yale, Meta, Skadden, ABC, what have you—people like McInnis believe themselves to have been handed an immense responsibility to protect their organizations from harm. If Trump is rampaging, then best to hand him cash or gold or a Middle Eastern Studies department or a nightly news program to get him off their backs. I, too, want Yale and CBS News to live on, but the evidence of the reputational damage heaped on anyone who caves to MAGA only grows stronger by the day. 

The other answer, I believe, is that people like McInnis who have entered the rarefied air of shareholder meetings and yes-man retinues retain the belief, unconscious or otherwise, that however much damage a force like Trump may inflict upon the country, they will personally be OK, and their institutions will be OK. They will still have their titles, their contact lists, their stock portfolios. They will be protected from harm. Memories are short and their institutions will carry on as if they had never held the door open for authoritarian goons.

Ten years on from Trump’s first election, elites concluded that he was a force of nature, the avatar of a new America, and that it was past time to make their peace with his assaults and give him what he wanted. The rush to cave stemmed from the abundance of targets. Columbia and Paul, Weiss were hardly the same institution, but you could see the same thought bubble emerge over their heads: that if they rolled over quickly and easily, the bully would move on to the next target. 

And this is where elites and ordinary people part ways. I’ve spent every day since the 2024 election engaged in some form of conversation with people about how to respond to the terror and uncertainty of the moment. Some people are hellbent on fighting. Some want to fight but struggle to summon the energy. Some believe the fight is already over and that we lost. Absolutely no one, whatever their ideological bent, is under the impression that giving in is a crafty solution to the problem of authoritarianism.

Powerful people will not save us.  To reach a less dire future, we will actually have to fight all the Maurie McInnises of the world and her brethren, who insist on being sensible and cautious as the arsonists surround our homes and flick matches at the walls. I do not trust people with great power anymore because they have demonstrated, again and again and again, that very few of them have the will or the desire to hold the line against American tyranny. 

Featured Image is from the Yale campus, by Michael Marsland