On the Self-Entitlement of Yale’s Faculty

Whereas the emails that Larry Summers sent to the disgraced underage-sex-ring boss, Jeffrey Epstein, did not—at least to my knowledge—involve Summers’ role as a professor at Harvard, Yale’s David Gelernter, who had been wounded in 1993 by a mail-explosive that had been sent by the “Unabomber,”—an event that I remember in person as I was a Yale student back then—wrote not only on topics such as business and art, but also to recommend a hot female student to work as an editor for Epstein. Specifically, Gelernter had a Yale senior in mind—a student he described in the email as a “v small good-looking blonde.”[1] Whereas Larry Summers apologized publicly (and to his class) in late 2025 for his bad judgment in having continued to exchange emails with Epstein even after the latter’s conviction, Gelernter saw nothing to apologize for in spite of the fact that the flagged email pertained to his role as a professor (in recommending a student). He was actually proud of the email that he had sent as a professor concerning a student to the sex-predator! The sheer brazenness of Gelernter’s self-defense reveals something about the privileged mentality of Yale’s faculty—a mentality that is not good for academia or Yale.

Defending his email in a message to Dean Brock of Yale’s School of Engineering & Applied Science, Gelernter “noted that Epstein was ‘obsessed with girls’—‘like every other unmarried billionaire in Manhattan; in fact, like every other heterosex male’—and he was keeping ‘the potential boss’s habits in mind.’”[2] Epstein’s “habits” notoriously included sex with underage girls, and making them available to other adult, heterosex adult men. Gelernter concluded his argument with, “So long as I said nothing that dishonored her in any conceivable way, I’d have told him more or less what he wanted. She was smart, charming & gorgeous. Ought I to have suppressed that info? Never! I’m very glad I wrote the note.”[3] That referring to the student’s physical appearance can be considered to be dishonoring her, especially as the reference was made to a man operating an underage sex-ring for adult men, is a point that any reasonable person would at least acknowledge. Gelernter’s blind-spot may have been cultured and maintained by a very arrogant, self-entitled faculty-culture at Yale that would make a country-club mentality seem tame.

Besides Gelernter’s continued bad judgment—which makes Harvard’s Summers look good in comparison—Gelernter’s brazen defense to his dean may point to or reveal a cloistered and privileged world in which Yale faculty inhabit. As another data-point, not a few alumni who return to campus to take advantage of the perk of being able to audit Yale courses have reported (at least to one party in the Yale Political Union) that professors have been very rude in rebuffing such alumni seeking to gain more knowledge. This should be applauded and encouraged, but too many Yale faculty have the attitude that essentially says to alumni, “Your turn is over; it’s time for the current students.” Even if admitted to audit a course, many alumni are relegated to nonspeaking roles—taking audire literally!—even as the readings are required even for alumni audits. That the young students could benefit greatly from the more worldly experience applied to the same reading material is strangely missed or dismissed by too many faculty members at Yale. In short, too many Yale professors refuse to view alumni as part of the Yale community. “You’re not an affiliate,” has been the common refrain not only by faculty, but also by their support/administrative employees whose affiliation at Yale is hardly academic.

One take-away is that Yale’s administration could have been doing more to coordinate its alumni policies with its faculty, but a deeper implication is that too many faculty members at Yale may hold themselves as laws unto themselves—above being obliged to heed university policies and being held accountable more generally. The arrogance that comes with stature is not uncommon at elite universities such as Yale, where even librarians and other support non-faculty easily assume airs of superiority not only over students, but also alumni.

For people outside of academia looking in, the the bad odor of arrogant professors can easily be associated with valuing knowledge even though arrogance works against learning. In short, Yale professors such as Gelernter give scholarship itself a bad name. Perhaps universities such as Yale could improve faculty-hiring processes to include the consideration of values, including humility, both intellectual and otherwise. The knowledge-game should be open-system rather than closed shop—inclusionary rather than exclusionary. Hiring scholars who are well-grounded more generally carries the benefit of having a faculty that is able to stay grounded with respect to having a realistic rather than a vaulted perspective. Physicians and lawyers tend to be well-grounded with respect to what is realistic and common sense in the sense of being helpful with respect to their clients; perhaps Yale professors could be better chosen by the university. Maybe its deans could be better chosen too.

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1. Dave Collins, “A Yale Professor Recommended a ‘Good-Looking Blonde’ Student for a Job with Epstein. He’s Not Sorry,” APnews.com, February 11, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Centuries of Dysfunctional Organizational Culture: The Mob at Yale

Jonathan Edwards fell out of favor with Yale’s president Clapp, who opposed George Whitefield’s Christian revivals as being too “enthusiastic.” So, Clapp had two pamphlets published to criticize Edwards, who had studied and then taught at Yale. In fact, one of Yale College’s residential colleges has been named after Edwards at least since the late twentieth century. I would imagine that few if any current or former JE students have been informed that Edwards ceased attending Yale Commencement exercises and even visiting campus once he had known of Clapp’s vitriolic pamphlets. It is ironic that in Edwards’s time, Yale’s faculty minimized the impact of original sin in what became known as the New Haven theology. It seems that compassion for people who hold a different theological (or political) view, as in “Love thy enemy,” was nonetheless above the grasp of Yale’s administration. Fast-forward from the first half of the eighteenth century to roughly three hundred years later and incredibly the same hostile, highly dysfunctional organizational culture was still well ensconced at Yale.

The full essay is at "Centuries of Dysfunctional Organizational Culture."

On Yale’s Anti-Conservative Ideological Faculty

In 2025, “Yale professors made 1,099 donations to federal political campaigns and partisan groups . . . Not one of the recipients was Republican.”[1] Other than the 2.4% of the donations that went to independent candidates or groups, the rest—97.6%—went to Democrats. In that same year, U.S. President Trump became very publicly critical of elite private universities receiving federal research dollars while being so partisan (i.e., Democrat-leaning). Trump may have been more concerned that the universities benefit by receiving the indirect-expenses portions of federal research-grants while the professors infuse their personal ideologies, which are in conflict with conservatism, into their lectures. I took many, many courses, including at Yale, in my formal and post-doctoral education, and the infusion of a professor’s ideology—nearly always progressive—was not uncommon, especially at Yale.

At a “Roundtable Conversation,” albeit without any table whatsoever being used, in March, 2025, Yale’s “Race, Migration and Coloniality in Europe” working group sponsored three speakers to speak on “Europe’s Authoritarian Turn: Right Wing Politics and Where to Go from Here.” The focus was on the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, which had finished second that February in the Bundestag election behind the CDU (the Christian Democratic Union). Yale’s own Fatima El-Tayeb touted academia in general, and the humanities more specifically, as having great potential in building and maintaining a repository of knowledge immune from the push and pull of political autocrats. El-Tayeb’s blind-spot, however, was on the salience of political ideology operating under the subterfuge of neutral scholars and scholarship.

Jeff Klein of the Multitudes Foundation advocated that Germany should ban the AfD party because, he said, it wants to get rid of democracy. Extricating the votes of the Germans who had voted for the AfD was somehow in line with democracy. This inconsistency alone attests to the salience of Klein’s anti-conservative ideology. He argued that were the AdF group to get a plurality of votes in the next election without any other groups joining in a majority coalition with the AdF group, democracy itself would be discredited and weakened.  To have a governing party with only a plurality rather than a majority in the Bundestag would at the very least render democratic governing unstable in that legislative chamber, but not anti-democratic. Klein’s next statement, that “the AfD should be banned in Germany,” evinced questionable reasoning from a democratic standing. Out of a concern that AfD might curtail democracy, Klein was curtailing democracy by advocating that a significant number of voters be effectively disenfranchised. He was utterly unaware of his own contradiction.

That virtually none of the Yale students and faculty in the room would have even questioned Klein’s anti-conservative ideology (nobody raised a critical question in this regard) supports my experience that an overwhelming proportion of students and faculty in Yale College and the Graduate School (excluding the professional schools) are and have been at least since the early 1990s (in my experience) anti-conservative progressives, politically (including social issues). Even though Yale interviews prospective faculty members because of their past outstanding scholarship, I suspect that the interviews serve as a litmus test on how well the applicants would “fit in” at Yale. It is not that political progressives are smarter than conservatives, so the scholarship is not what makes the Yale faculty so liberal as a group. Rather, while on campus both in the 1990s and in 2023 and 2025 (one term each), I could not help but pick up on the severity of the ideologically-left intolerance in too many students and even faculty members. The distinction of “insider” vs “outside” is not lost on Yale’s professors as well as even the non-academic managers whose arrogance vastly outstrips their academic credentials. The comfort in acting out unfairly on the basis of ideological intolerance is the elephant in the living room at Yale. The university’s public statement on December 23, 2025 that “Yale hires and retains faculty based on academic excellence, scholarly distinction, and teaching achievement, independent of political views” is an outright lie; if that statement were true, the extreme ideological bias in the political donations by the faculty would be a statistical anomaly that could only have truth-value on the island of misfit toys.[2]

The charge that Yale is and has been rife with progressive, or “liberal” political ideology even infused in academic lectures has much more validity than Trump’s accusation that Ivy League universities were antisemitic since 2023 just because they allowed pro-human-rights students to protest against what the ICC and UN both determined to be a genocide in Gaza being committed with impunity by Israel. In fact, Yale’s “police department” arrested 47 students in 2024 for protesting Israel’s genocide even though those students had the same kind of tent-protest-area in Beinecke Plaza that striking graduate-student teaching-assistants had had in the 1990s. Yale did not break up that encampment. Also, Yale’s presidents both in the 1990s and in 2024 were both Jewish. That Yale went after the protesting students was actually a move in the pro-Zionist favor. So Bruce Ackerman, a law professor at Yale and presumably a Zionist, was on an utterly wrong-headed crusade when he tried to “out” anti-Semites at Yale. That the administration could alternatively have valued and even encouraged students to value human rights and thus oppose crimes against humanity is something that Ackerman and other Zionists on Yale’s faculty would have been at pains to outwardly oppose.

Back in 2023, when I was back at Yale translating a theological and ethical text, I walked out of the main library one day to spontaneously join a march for the innocent residents of Gaza. Three young men, aged in the mid-20s, were walking next to me. “We’re Jewish,” one said to me. “I don’t care what background people come from; we are standing up for human rights.” The three guys and I even stood together at the end of the march in New Haven’s central park, the Green. Bruce Ackerman would have been at a loss to explain us had he been present. Maybe he was busy writing a check to the Democratic Party, which, like the more conservative major group in the U.S., was busy taking orders from the AIPAC at the expense, ironically, of liberal Democrats. If Yale’s faculty were at all concerned about the crimes against humanity that Israel was committing from 2023 at least through the time of the study on the donations, sending money to the Democratic Party was not the smartest move by “the smartest guys in the room.” This is obviously not to say that all of the professors’ respective donations were made to support the Zionist genocide or other conservative causes. After all, Yale’s “police department” arrested 47 students who were protesting against the genocide in 2024.  

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1. Jaeha Jang, “Yale Professors Donated Overwhelmingly to Democrats in 2025,” The Yale Daily News, January 14, 2026.
2. Ibid.

On University “Police Departments”: Accountability at Yale

Whereas in the E.U., universities do not have their own private police departments because the state governments hold the police power, the situation in the U.S. has devolved from such democratic accountability such that even small colleges (and even hospitals!) typically have their own “police departments.” This presents the unwitting American public with a potentially problem of conflict of interest: in disputes between a college or university administration, which is not democratically elected, and stakeholders, including students and the general public, the organizational police forces take orders from one side. This is especially problematic in cases, such as at Yale, in which the organizational police employees patrol off campus—off the university’s own “territory”—and arrest people who are unaffiliated with Yale and have not even been on the campus. Such a usurpation of the prerogative of the city of New Haven comes with the loss of democratic accountability.

When I was back at Yale as an alumnus during the Spring, 2025 term to conduct academic research, a local resident who worked at a local New Haven hospital told me that Yale police employees arrest local residents coming out of bars, presumably when those Yale employees assume that “a local” could potentially menace Yale students. That the university “police” employees have been given the power by Connecticut to arrest people beyond Yale’s property does not imply authority to go on routine patrols outside of Yale. 

Although Yale police vehicles routinely travel between the medical and the main campus in New Haven, seeing the cars off that route, off-campus, on city streets, was not uncommon from at least 2023.

I suspect that the power to make arrests off-campus was premised on the assumption that such arrests stemmed from an incident on the campus. If so, then the statement of Yale’s “police department” that it would also investigate a Palestinian flag that a protester had placed on a Jewish symbol in New Haven’s central park, which is called New Haven Green, rather than leave the matter to New Haven’s police department represents just the sort of overreaching that such a slippery slope enables, especially when a thirst for more power is present. 

A New-Haven police car in the city's central part, the "Green," in 2025. The presence of Yale police there defending Yale's "truth" by investigating a political flag there could be considered "over-kill."

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an academic administrator in Yale’s School of Management, defended the overreach by stating that Yale needed to “defend its truth.” I contend that for a non-governmental private organization to bring up truth in connection to having police-power is dangerous. Put another way, for Yale to use its police-power to enforce the administration’s ideological conception of truth itself on city property is such a blatant over-reach that the very notion of a university “police department” can be flagged as inappropriate in a republic. From the European students in the U.S. whom I’ve met, the notion itself is nothing short of strange. Today, in early 2026, I would be tempted to suggest to such students that U.S. President Trump use Yale’s “police force” to invade Greenland because Yale’s guns have invaded New Haven rather than restrain themselves to Yale (while of course being able to chase culprits off-campus and arrest them).

On an edge of Campus (Chapel St) in 2025, a Yale "police" employee suddenly pulled up to a bus stop and showed his car's head-lights on the Black local-residents  at the bus-stop. 

So it is more than disconcerting that although a city ordinance enacted in 2019 required the Civilian Review Board of New Haven’s police department to “’develop a memorandum of understanding’ with the Yale Police Department” so the city could be made aware of complaints registered by local residents and Yale students against Yale “police” employees, Yale Daily News reports that “progress on the agreement was slow-moving.”[1] It would not be until January 1, 2026, interestingly just after the departures of the chiefs of the New Haven and Yale police departments, that an agreement went into effect such that “all policing agencies that are operating within city boundaries have some kind of citizen-led review process for complaints.”[2] The Yale Police Advisory Board, which was “meant to review civilian complaints against the Yale Police Department,” had even been “discontinued without an announcement to the city or University” in 2024.[3] “Its successor, the Public Safety Advisory Board, took shape in the fall of 2025 . . . The newly formed board’s charter does not mention civilian complaints.”[4] So the agreement commencing at the start of 2026 may be more about communicating with the city than any realization on the part of the university’s administration that using its police-power to defend Yale’s truth on local streets and parks might result in complaints not only from students, but also from local residents who have nothing to do with the university. Although Alyson Heimer, formerly with the Civilian Review Board, confirmed that as of January 1, 2026, “all policing agencies that are operating within city boundaries have some kind of citizen-led review process for complaints,” she also said, “We should be really proud that we actually have something in [sic] paper, a written agreement, to have reporting and transparency between the agencies. I think it’s really important.”[5] 

I suspect that as Yale is a private (non-profit) organization, Yale’s core administrators would not have been excited about local residents being able to complain about a Yale department, and as for the students, the outgoing director of Yale’s “police department” referred in an email to students who were protesting for human rights in Gaza as “losers and criminals.” He quickly accepted the invitation of the FBI to train Yale’s “police” employees in counter-terrorism tactics that could be used on Yale students. Fortunately, the university did not, at least as far as I know, charge the students more tuition to cover the added service—the response from students could be, Thank you; hit me again, Sir.

I agree with the typical European reaction that I have encountered against universities, whether state-related or private (non-profit or for-profit), being lawfully able to have their own “police departments.” I contend that police power is an inalienable, and thus non-transferrable, power of a public government. In the E.U. and U.S., there can be both federal and state (including municipal) police, either of which can be enhanced rather than such a core governmental power being “subcontracted” out to organizations. Unless the American electorates object to the existence of organizational “police departments” and insist that organizations stick with security guards (who should not be dressed like police so as to mislead “civilians”), more organizations—even companies including grocery stores—could receive authority from a government (after some well-placed political-campaign contributions) to have their own so-called police departments. Police could be everywhere, using constant intimidation itself as a deterrent, which was the case at Yale at least as of 2023.

At the very least, electorates would benefit from being shown the institutional conflict of interest that exists when an organization’s management has “police” employees who can do the management’s bidding in disputes with stakeholders, including students and local residents.[6] When Yale’s “police” employees were busy arresting 47 students for being in tents on Beinecke Plaza on campus to protest against the genocide taking place in Gaza with impunity, it is telling that Yale students protesting the university’s draconian action went to a nearby intersection because then those students would be under the jurisdiction of New Haven’s police, who did not arrest any students—and they promptly cleared the intersection at 5pm for rush hour as requested by the New Haven police. Meanwhile, Yale’s “police” employees on the scene were falsely claiming that their jurisdiction did not include city streets—even though Yale’s “police” cars could be regularly seen on patrols on city streets even at a distance (i.e., blocks) from Yale’s property, which, by the way, I witnessed as I walked along Howe Street in 2025. It is interesting, in other words, that Yale’s “police department” claims to keep to Yale’s campus when the public eye is on, while on weekend evenings employees of that same department patrol city streets and even arrest local residents coming out of bars. Similarly, I suspect that any public statements by Yale’s administrators that complaints from “civilians” would be taken seriously, as per the agreement with the city would actually be lies meant to mislead the public eye.

Yale police conduct surveillance of undergraduate Yalies relaxing on May 1, 2025 on Cross-Campus lawn a day before the final exams began. If the students were being watched and intimidated by a Yale police-employee in a "lit-up" police car because the administration or its "police chief" feared spontaneous pro-Gaza protests on the day before finals, then the administration/police knew nothing about how seriously Yalies take final exams. 

Being both loyal and yet critical (of conscience) to an alma mater is a difficult balance to achieve, especially after having encountered so many nasty administrators and arrogant faculty-employees on campus. Maybe the Crimson at Harvard will get to share in the fun of being critical by conscience of their university’s police-power once Campbell, who headed Yale’s department, gets settled in at Harvard in 2026. As stated by Yale Daily News, Campbell, the protestant minister who had described human-rights students at Yale as “losers and criminals” in 2025, “decamped” to Harvard at the end of that year.[7]

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1. Adele Haeg, “New Haven, Yale Reached Accord on Police Oversight before Chiefs Left,” Yale Daily News, January 15, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. In my book, Institutional Conflicts of Interest, I argue that given the inevitable susceptibility of temptation felt by humans to exploit such a conflict of interest, the very existence of an institutional conflict of interest is unethical, even before exploitation occurs.
7. Adele Haeg, “New Haven, Yale Reached Accord on Police Oversight before Chiefs Left,” Yale Daily News, January 15, 2026.

On the Pros and Cons of AI in Science

Will there eventually be an automated lab run by artificial intelligence? Could AI someday order equipment, conduct reviews of prior empirical studies, run experiments, and author the findings? What does this mean for scientific knowledge? Is it possible that foibles innate to how we learn could be avoided by AI? Can we provide a check on the weaknesses in AI with respect to knowledge-acquisition and analysis, or will AI soon be beyond our grasp? It is natural for us to fear AI, but this feeling can prompt computer scientists obviate the dangers so our species can benefit from AI in terms of scientific knowledge.

The full essay is at "On the Pros and Cons of AI in Science."