‘Insights’ Into Yale’s Woke Biz School

ANYONE wondering why execs and upper-level bureaucrats in government and at nonprofits are so hopelessly woke these days need look no further than Yale’s School of Management, its MBA-granting business school. The school has been striving to be taken more seriously in the business world, but here’s a big strike against it. Take the May edition of its newsletter, Yale Insights: It reads like a laundry list of progressive spins on events. It trumpets, for example, an SOM study that claims backing racial and gender equality (e.g., whether someone was open to voting for a black or female president) reflects “liberal” values. Yet it ignores the fact that Democrats, who claim they are “liberal,” were the predominant forces building the American KKK and trying to block the Civil Rights Act. Currently, liberals preside over urban areas that are rampant with violent crime, which disproportionately endangers people of color.

Insights also ignores that it was conservative Republican states that first granted women the vote. And that today, “liberals” are erasing rights for biological women by destroying their access to Title IX protections in competitive sports and leaving them vulnerable to harm from biological males in women’s prisons, domestic violence shelters, locker rooms and restrooms.

The study also claims, “People often assume that past opinions were much more conservative than they really were, and that attitudes had therefore changed much more than they had in reality.” Yet Yale Insights doesn’t examine whether media bias may have played a role in shaping public opinion against conservatives or inaccurately reporting viewpoints of the vast majority of Americans. The newsletter also fails to mention that today’s media is overwhelmingly liberal — just check out the political donations or self-described ideologies among media workers. You’ll observe a hard-left tilt.

Yale Insights also hits religious nursing homes without offering fair comment from alternate voices. Not surprising from an institution that is filled with religionbashing professors.

Another article is a paean to liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer — that same Chuck Schumer who may have inspired the recent assassination attempt of a sitting Supreme Court justice through his reckless rhetoric. The piece bemoans the rise of gerrymandering and sharp partisanship without considering the possibility that the school itself helps erode social cohesion.

What all these partisan Yale SOM articles have to do with business education is unclear. What is clear is SOM embraces the same left-wing ideological bias seen campus-wide.

A review of political donations from Yale employees by OpenSecrets found a mere 3% of Yalie donors gave to Republican federal candidates during the 2020 election cycle; 97% to Democrats.

It was even worse in 2018, with 0.8% of donations to Republicans and 99.2% to Dems.

Yale SOM apparently missed a study by the Brunswick Group management firm that found 63% of corporate execs “agree unequivocally that companies should speak out on social issues” but just 36% of voters agree. The study reported corporate executives have “a highly inflated sense of how effective corporate communication has been on social issues compared to voters.”

Another corporate-brass blind spot: More than 60% of voters said “companies only speak out on social issues to look better to consumers and are not being sincere,” but 57% of execs said companies “speak out on social issues because they want to achieve real change.”

In his 2021 book “Woke, Inc.,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a Yale Law graduate and wildly successful entrepreneur, detailed the leftward lurch in American business. This lurch is inculcated by Yale SOM and other business schools producing the nation’s executives. Encouragingly, Ramaswamy just launched a brand new financial firm, Strive, to take on the wokeness of investment funds like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard.

Yale Insights claims it “poses questions that examine important issues . . . that require a depth and breadth of perspectives that are not easily captured through conventional business press outlets or the academic literature.” Sadly, Yale and many other colleges embrace a biased, narrow concept of diversity driven by race and gender rather than true intellectual diversity. No wonder corporations are veering sharply left.

Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice.

‘ A mere 3% of Yalie donors gave to ’ Republican federal candidates [in 2020].