Faculty and Students Demand Yale Not “Cave” to Trump

A growing contingent of students, faculty and alumni are demanding Yale University refuse to settle with the Trump administration, which is investigating the university’s admissions policies to determine whether it unlawfully discriminated against white and Asian students.

Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has investigated dozens of universities over alleged civil rights violations, threatening to cut federal funding for those found in violation. While some—most prominently, Harvard University—have refused to settle without a fight, others, including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University, have made deals with the government.

Now it’s Yale’s turn to decide how to react, and faculty and students are worried the university will cave under pressure.

That’s in part because Yale hired McGuireWoods, The New York Times reported—the same law firm that the University of Virginia used last year to negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department—to cut a deal with the government amid the DOJ’s investigation of Yale’s admissions practices at the law school, medical school and undergraduate college.

“The choice before Yale is not simply whether to settle one investigation,” the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers wrote in a letter Tuesday to Yale President Maurie McInnis and the university’s Board of Trustees. “It is whether to participate in a broader campaign to turn civil rights enforcement into a mechanism of political control over higher education.”

The letter followed a similar plea that Yale’s student government sent to McInnis and the board last week.

“In the face of a politically-motivated Department of Justice, Yale must use every tool in its arsenal to defend its right to pursue this core goal through lawful means,” reads the online petition, which had more than 4,000 signatures as of Thursday evening. “This is not civil rights enforcement. This is an effort to chill lawful efforts to build a diverse academic community, to undermine Yale’s academic independence, and to intimidate every institution watching this spectacle.”

Despite the possibility of a forthcoming deal, the only publicly available result of the investigation so far is a six-page letter the DOJ issued in May concluding that Yale School of Medicine “discriminated against other applicants to benefit preferred race classes of Black and Hispanic” students after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such a practice unconstitutional in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The DOJ based that finding in part on variations in median test scores and grades; it noted that while Black and Hispanic students who matriculated in 2025 had MCAT scores in the 95th and 94th percentiles, respectively, white and Asian students scored in the 100th percentile.

But those who don’t want Yale to settle say the DOJ hasn’t provided enough information to support its claims of racial discrimination.

“The DOJ’s factual findings are bogus—cherry-picked, statistically weak, and presented without appropriate context or support in the record,” Sher Tremonte LLP, the law firm representing Yale’s AAUP chapter, wrote in a letter to McInnis earlier this week. “We strongly urge the University to hold fast against any DOJ demands and maintain all facets of the University crucial to the development of its faculty, its student body, and its historic academic excellence.”

At a news briefing Thursday, Muneer Ahmad, a law professor and general counsel for the Yale AAUP, added, “Even if the government were able to overcome all of these substantial substantive and procedural requirements, at most they could withdraw funds that are related to the admissions office and not withdraw funds from the university as a whole.”

And in the event that Yale does move forward with a “hasty settlement with the government, the Yale chapter of AAUP is considering legal action,” he said. “For Yale to cave in the face of baseless factual allegations and unfounded legal claims risks further erosion of public trust in Yale and in higher education at large.”