New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Salovey ‘sorry’ alleged donor issue led to prof quitting post
Grand Strategy director resigns
NEW HAVEN — Yale University President Peter Salovey has apologized in a letter to faculty that he didn’t do more to resolve issues that led to history professor Beverly Gage resigning last week as director of the BradyJohnson Program in Grand Strategy.
In his letter, Salovey acknowledged that Gage had received “more unsolicited input from donors than faculty members should reasonably be expected to accept.”
The New York Times reported Thursday that an advisory committee would be dominated by conservatives preferred by Nicholas Brady, 91, and Charles B. Johnson, 88, who donated $17.5 million to support the program, founded in 2000. One of those members is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Gage, who will step down in December and remain a professor of history and American studies, told the Times, “It’s very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in a situation where you are being second-guessed and undermined and not protected.”
Brady, class of 1952, was treasury secretary under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Johnson, class of 1954, is a billionaire mutual fund investor whose $250 million gift to Yale, the largest in its history, financed the creation of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray residential colleges. He had also proposed the naming
of one of the new colleges after Franklin, which drew student protests.
A message seeking comment was left with Johnson. Brady could not be reached for comment.
Gage, who did not respond to requests for an interview, posted on Twitter that she had resigned “with regret.” “I am grateful to the program’s founders, John Gaddis and Paul Kennedy, for their steadfast support over many years. They have been — and continue to be — wonderful colleagues and mentors,” she wrote.
In his letter, Salovey called Gage, Brady and Johnson “wonderful members of our community who care deeply about Grand Strategy, and about
Yale.” He added, “For everyone’s benefit, I should have tried harder to improve the situation.”
Salovey wrote that “Yale is committed to free inquiry and academic freedom. … I unequivocally support the faculty’s right to conduct research, scholarship, and teaching without outside interference.”
He wrote he had heard “from many faculty members and alumni. Your emails to me have a clear message: we must take great care to ensure that gifts we receive do not infringe on the academic freedom of our faculty.”
He said, with the public phase of Yale’s $7 billion capital campaign, “For Humanity,” having launched Saturday, “I am
giving new and careful consideration to how we can reinforce our fundamental commitment to academic freedom in our engagement with donors.”
Salovey also issued a statement Friday, saying, “Professor Gage’s teaching and scholarship are a big part of what makes our History department so special. She has led Grand Strategy with distinction, and I look forward to her continued contributions to Yale.”
The faculty of the History Department issued a statement supporting Gage. “No faculty member should have their courses or programs under outside surveillance,” the faculty wrote. “It is a longstanding principle of academic freedom
that donors to university programs do not control or shape the scholarship, curriculum, or classes that their donations support.”
“We would like explicit reassurance that the university administration will protect the academic freedom of all faculty members and the integrity of all departments, programs, centers, and institutes on our campus,” the letter said.
The Grand Strategy program was founded by Yale historians John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy and the late Charles Hill, a former aide to Kissinger and former Secretary of State George P. Shultz.
According to the program’s website, the program “offers a year-long course … that addresses large-scale, long-term strategic challenges of statecraft, politics, and social change. The course encourages understanding of historical and contemporary global and domestic challenges, while developing students’ capacity for strategic thinking and effective leadership in a variety of fields.”
Gage had broadened the curriculum to include social movements, including the Civil Rights Movement
and the Hong Kong prodemocracy movement, the Times reported.
A Nov. 9 Times opinion column by political science professor Bryan Garsten, an affiliate of the Grand Strategy program, titled “How to Protect America from the Next Donald Trump,” apparently irritated Brady, who began to complain about the direction of the program, according to the Times.
Brady then pointed out that the bylaws of the program included a “board of visitors” that had never been formed. Gage said such a board should include a variety political viewpoints, but the three conservatives chosen by Johnson were included, leading to her resignation, the Times reported.
Keith Whittington, chairman of the Academic Freedom Alliance, said the advisory committee set up when Brady and Johnson made their gift in 2006 was problematic because it could “potentially create pressure on faculty that would be inappropriate. … That’s not a standard process for how academic programs are set up and it’s just rife for creating problems.”
Whittington, a professor of politics and Constitutional law at Princeton University, said faculty should have full say in what is taught in a program. “As the faculty involved in running the program and circumstances change, it’s not uncommon to get evolution and drift in the nature and direction of these academic programs,” he said.
In April, President Joe Biden nominated Gage to the National Council on the Humanities, which advises the National Endowment for the Humanities. Gage, 49, graduated from Yale in 1994.