It’s 2015 and Yale’s campus is divided over Halloween.
“It is not about creating an intellectual space.... It’s about creating a home here,” a student screams at her headmaster, Nicholas Christakis. A crowd of classmates snap in approval. “You’re disgusting,” the student yells.
The confrontation came hours after Christakis’s wife and fellow Yale professor, Erika, responded to a school-wide e-mail advising students to be thoughtful about their Halloween costumes. Her memo, questioning whether free expression might include offensive dress, was swiftly branded by students as racially insensitive. The uproar drove the Christakises from the university and, in the public’s perception, placed Yale at the center of elite and unfettered wokeism.
Yet, a decade later, while Trump is taking a guillotine to American universities, Yale seems to be largely missing from his hit list. Since taking office, in January, his administration has frozen more than $8 billion in federal funds and slashed at least $1 billion in National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) grants to medical schools and hospitals. Harvard, battered by a 2023 Supreme Court affirmative-action lawsuit and President Claudine Gay’s resignation over her refusal to condemn anti-Semitism on her campus, has been hit with nearly $3 billion in cuts and is weighing whether to cave and pay a $500 million settlement with Trump in order to regain its access to federal funding.
Other universities have already folded. Columbia, whose campus was overtaken by a student “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” which shut down the final weeks of the 2024 school year, has since faced funding cuts so severe that, after laying off nearly 180 researchers, the university agreed to a $220 million deal with the White House. It also suspended its D.E.I. programs, altered its Middle Eastern–studies curriculum, and placed it under administrative supervision. The University of Virginia’s beloved president recently resigned under pressure to unwind the school’s D.E.I. initiatives.
The list goes on—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is slashing out-of-state aid, and Vanderbilt University temporarily reduced graduate admissions by half across the board. But Yale, though stung by the same N.I.H. cuts, remains otherwise untouched. Along with Dartmouth, it is an outlier in Trump’s nationwide higher-education purge.
The reasons why involve a conciliatory new president; a Rolodex of Trump-adjacent alumni, from Vice President J. D. Vance to Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh, to billionaire donors such as Blackstone head Stephen Schwarzman and San Francisco Giants owner Charles B. Johnson; and, not insignificantly, a decent ranking from FIRE.
For the past five years, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—founded in 1999 by University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Harvard-educated civil-liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, out of a concern about growing censorship on college campuses—has measured free-speech climates at universities across the country.
Though the Trump administration and FIRE have no line of communication and FIRE has explicitly asked that the administration not use its metrics to punish schools, Trump has been known to lean heavily on the FIRE rankings, effectively using them as a higher-education version of the Hollywood blacklist. “They’re not using them in the way that we intend them to be used,” says Sean Stevens, FIRE’s chief research adviser. “I’m not trying to cut off research funding. I have a Ph.D. I am a researcher.”
In recent years, Yale has inched steadily upward in the FIRE rankings, from 234th out of 248 schools in 2024 to 155th out of 257 in 2025. Stevens says the 2026 ranking, due September 9, will continue the trend.
(A good FIRE ranking doesn’t necessarily protect a school from the Trump administration, as evidenced by the University of Virginia, which comes in at No. 1 in the 2025 rankings but is still under attack. The bottom of the list features New York University, which is where Trump’s son Barron attends school and which has avoided attack; Columbia; and, dead last, Harvard.)
“Yale does better than most of the Ivies,” says Stevens. Unlike Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and Penn, where encampments, lawsuits, and presidential missteps have dragged down scores, Yale has for the most part avoided high-profile controversies in the Trump era.
The Yale DNA
“Old Harvard was annoying. That’s why they founded Yale in the first place,” says Jay Gitlin, a Yale alumnus and longtime professor. He is only half joking.
Gitlin can’t help but draw the historical comparison between Yale’s founding, in 1701—by a group of Puritan ministers who felt that Harvard had become “too liberal”—and today.
For one thing, Yale has the oldest political union of the Ivies—it turns 90 this year—and is known for fostering debates that run the full political spectrum. (Harvard’s counterpart, by contrast, is only 15 years old.)
Yale also has the conservative Buckley Institute, founded in 2011 and named after the influential conservative and Yale alumnus William F. Buckley Jr., whose members include 10 percent of undergraduates. It has hosted everyone from Ben Carson to Megyn Kelly to Mike Pompeo to Ben Shapiro without incident. “We had a thousand people waiting in line for Shapiro,” one student told me, “and it was fine.”
At one Buckley event this summer, a Yale Daily News reporter asked former vice president Mike Pence about why Yale had been spared from Trump’s ire. Pence praised the university as a model for its peers in accepting “diverse viewpoints” and gushed about his daughter’s experience at the law school. “Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility,” he said.
It’s a stance that speaks to the Yale ethos, hearkening back to formative moments in the school’s history that still inform how many of the individuals and organizations I spoke to for this story, including FIRE, view the university.
In the spring of 1970, Gitlin was a junior, volunteering as a student marshal, when tens of thousands of people swarmed New Haven to protest the Black Panther trial of Bobby Seale. Tanks encircled the city and violence felt inevitable. Two years earlier, anti-war protests at Columbia culminated in a violent police raid, in which 700 students were arrested and nearly 150 injured. And, just a year earlier, Harvard’s president, Nathan Pusey, had called in the police to break up its own student occupation, leaving nearly 75 students injured.
Yale chose a different path. President Kingman Brewster Jr. and his aide, Henry “Sam” Chauncey Jr., quietly sought counsel from Archibald Cox, Pusey’s right hand. “We sat in a field in the middle of Massachusetts because we were so afraid someone would see us,” Chauncey recalls. Cox’s advice was clear: “You can’t lock the gates. You will have blood. Your buildings will burn down.” Driving back to New Haven, Brewster and Chauncey decided to open the gates instead.
The result was closer to a teach-in than a riot: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Jean Genet debated alongside Yale students. And Brewster, in a speech that became legend, reminded the campus: “The presumption of innocence is not only a legal concept; in common law and in common sense, it requires a generosity of spirit toward the stranger.”
“I am, to this day, a friend of Bobby Seale,” Chauncey tells me, grinning.
Four years later, Yale codified that philosophy in the Woodward Report—now canonical in free-speech circles, such as FIRE and the Buckley Institute—declaring the university’s duty to “think the unthinkable, mention the unmentionable.”
Leadership also plays a major role in Yale’s current political landscape. In the days following Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, as other university presidents equivocated, Yale’s then president, Peter Salovey, who is Jewish, swiftly condemned the violence and stood firm on managing campus protests.
When Maurie McInnis succeeded him, in July 2024, the blond, charming southerner with a hard line on campus unrest made free speech the centerpiece of her presidency. She elevated Yale’s Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech, launched a new center on political discourse led by Princeton’s free-speech scholar Keith Whittington, and added undergraduate free-speech coordinators to freshman orientation alongside the standard talks on sex and consent.
On campus, McInnis is well liked—even admired, with several people emphasizing to me that they believe she is the main reason Yale hasn’t been attacked by Trump. “Everyone thinks she’s a Republican,” one sophomore whispered to me after praising her. “She drives a red Tesla.”
Behind the scenes, she has seemingly worked to appease the Trump administration with quiet policy concessions. In March, without issuing any public statement, the university updated its discrimination and harassment policies to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism—a contested definition that includes the “targeting of the state of Israel,” specifically, which both Columbia and Harvard also adopted as part of their settlements with the Trump administration. Linda Maizels, the inaugural managing director of the Yale Program for the Study of anti-Semitism, told the Yale Daily News that the university’s sudden adoption of the definition was, in part, the result of federal pressure.
McInnis also shifted Yale’s policy on institutional speech, adopting a stance of neutrality that has meant far fewer statements from the president’s office—and far fewer political land mines. The only time she’s spoken out publicly was to lament Trump’s new endowment tax, part of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which is expected to cost the university approximately $280 million in 2026 as opposed to $46 million under the old policies.
“I am concerned that not speaking on contemporary world affairs is an abdication of leadership responsibilities,” wrote Salovey in an opinion piece in November, not so subtly attacking his successor’s meekness. “I am not always certain that a lot of public pronouncements make a difference,” McInnis retorted in a statement to the Yale Daily News in January. “I would rather be focused on the work that does matter for Yale … [and to] continue to advocate for the mission of higher education with lawmakers who are ultimately going to be setting policy and funding priorities.”
That advocacy has taken her to Washington, where she has spent much of the past year acting as Yale’s ambassador. The university has poured more than half a million dollars into lobbying in just six months (almost double from the second half of 2024), hiring firms stacked with Yale alumni, including former Texas congressman Lamar Smith, as well as Evan Corcoran, Trump’s onetime defense attorney.
Yet, as Chauncey points out, “the attacks being leveled by the current government are random” and “seem to me to be based on somebody’s personal feelings.” (Trump has been known to harbor old grudges: his animus toward the Pritzker family dates back to a bruising real-estate feud with Jay Pritzker over a hotel deal in the 1970s and has continued with Jay’s niece Penny—an early Barack Obama supporter who served as commerce secretary and now sits on the Harvard Corporation board after endowing the university with $100 million.)
So while Yale’s powerful alumni mostly fall into the category of allies of the current administration, there are signs that the university is bracing itself for a Trump about-face: selling $3 billion of its endowments portfolio in anticipation of an endowment tax—expected to cost Yale $1.5 billion in the first five years—as well as freezing hiring and tightening its own budgets, including ending the Adobe subscription used by several of its school newspapers and magazines each month.
A loss of federal research grants threatens not only the sciences—half of Yale’s yearly budget is absorbed by the medical school—but also the humanities, which rely on federal funding for fellowships and archives. The university is rumored to have launched an ambitious multi-billion-dollar campaign to bolster the sciences over the next decade, including a new physics lab, already under construction. That kind of project can’t simply be stopped.
When he was a 24-year-old graduate student at Yale, Chauncey tells me, he studied under Hajo Holborn, the German-émigré historian who fled the Nazis with his Jewish wife in 1938. His course on Hitler’s Third Reich still lingers with him.
“One of the things potential dictators do is go after the universities. The reason is simple: historically, universities have told the truth,” Chauncey says. “They also go after culture. They orchestrate crises that require the National Guard. I don’t know whether Mr. Trump wants to be a dictator, but he is following the signs of what Adolf Hitler did, what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary. So these attacks on the universities may be part of a plan.”
“What we’re really up against here is an authoritarian takeover,” says David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale. “We’re not equipped for this.”
“The line has already been crossed. Democracy is at stake.”
Clara Molot is the Investigations Editor at Air Mail
