Divisive Yale law dean top prexy hopeful
The dean of the Yale Law School, who reportedly downplayed students’ antisemitic concerns on campus, is the “front-runner” to take over as president of the prestigious Ivy League university.
Heather Gerken has been immersed in a series of controversies since taking over the law school’s reins in 2018, but is reportedly at the top of a list of candidates being considered by a research committee, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Gerken most recently came under fire for advising Jewish students who were concerned about a spike in antisemitism on campus after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel to seek counseling, the outlet said.
“She would be the worst choice out of all the current faculty,” a student told the Free Beacon. “Her handling of campus politics has been abysmal.”
The controversy comes amid growing concern across the country over a rise in antisemitism on college campuses, which has already forced two high-profile university presidents — Claudine Gay at Harvard and Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania — to step down.
Current Yale President Peter Salovey is stepping down.
Gerken, the first woman to head the law school, faced calls to resign in 2021 for coming down hard on a Native American student who used the word “trap house” in a party invitation.
She claimed the term had “racial connotations,” and school officials even drafted a letter of apology that the student, Tret Colbert, was pressured into signing.
“I was told that things might ‘escalate’ if I failed to apologize,” Colbert blogged at the time. “I was told that an apology would be more likely to make the situation ‘go away,’ and it was implied there would be lingering impacts to my reputation because the ‘legal community is a small one.’ ”
Still, when conservative speaker Kristen Waggoner was shouted down at a campus appearance, Gerken took no action against the offending students, despite the school’s free-speech policy.
Gerken also feuded publicly with Yale law professor Amy Chua, who recommended promising students for clerkships with right-leaning judges, including Yale Law alumnus Brett Kavanaugh, who now sits on the Supreme Court.
The controversy prompted dozens of federal judges, including 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Ho, to refuse to accept clerks from Yale.
“Yale presents itself as the best, most elite institution of legal education,” Ho wrote at the time. “Yet it’s the worst when it comes to legal cancellation.”
According to a subsequent lawsuit, Gerken stripped Chua of a teaching spot and pressured students to provide false testimony against the professor.
Then last year, Jewish students urged the law school to take a stronger stand against antisemitism that blew up on campus following the sneak attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists.
Gerken’s response was to have her chief of staff draft a letter acknowledging only that “these are deeply challenging times” and counseling the students to seek counseling.
However, sources told the Free Beacon that Gerken has clout with the school administration because of her friendships with several wealthy alumni who are backing her push for the presidency.
Neither Gerken nor the search committee responded to requests for comment from the Free Beacon, the outlet said.