Daniel HoSang discusses his work with the group “Stand Up For Yale,” which has circulated petitions on campus and urged Yale President Maurie McInnis and the Board of Trustees to reject a pending settlement between Yale University and the Trump administration—as the dean of the Yale Law School, students and other faculty members are working to stop the deal. HoSang’s most recent book is titled, A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right now I’m very happy to welcome to our program, Daniel HoSang, professor of American studies and political science at Yale University and president of the Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors AAUP. Professor HoSang, thanks so much for joining us on our Counterpoint program tonight.
DANIEL HOSANG: Well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
SCOTT HARRIS: I understand that you share common concerns with the group Stand Up for Yale faculty and students about the Trump administration exerting pressure on Yale University to sign a settlement agreement giving federal officials broad oversight over Yale’s academic and admissions policy. And I would ask you to just initially tell our audience about the current situation at Yale where the Trump administration is threatening Yale with litigation, major federal funding cuts, and withdrawal of tax-exempt status over the allegations they’ve made that Yale’s admission policies unlawfully discriminate against white and Asian American applicants in favor of black and Hispanic candidates. The initial target of the Trump Department of Justice Investigation targeted the Yale Medical School, but since has expanded to include Yale College and the Yale Law School.
DANIEL HOSANG: Yeah. I mean, the first thing to know about this, Scott, is that it’s something that’s not just about Yale. It could affect dozens of universities moving forward. It’s about access to healthcare, the quality of healthcare, training doctors, the kinds of research that universities are allowed to do and so much more. The short background is about two months ago, the Department of Justice sent Yale what’s called a letter of findings. It’s supposed to be based on an actual investigation. So one might expect interviews and extensive reviews of documents if you’re trying to prove a pattern that a college or university, a similar institution has broken federal civil rights law. But this letter alleged with the thinnest, thinnest of even evidence introduced that because the number of black and Latino students at Yale School of Medicine did not go down significantly after the Supreme Court ruled in a decision around affirmative action in 2023, that Yale must intentionally be breaking the law.
So there’s something quite odious about just that, just a pause on that contention right there. Simply the presence of robust numbers of black and Latino students in the medical school proves intentional discrimination because why else would they be there? So that forms the basis of this finding. We were shocked to learn that our university, rather than saying, “We stand by our admissions policies, we fully abide by the law and have updated our procedures.” Instead, it was disclosed through a reporting in the New York Times that they had entered settlement negotiations and that those settlement negotiations didn’t just concern admissions policies in the medical school, but concerned admissions policies in other schools on campus. And once they start negotiating, anything can be put in those agreements as we learn from the experiences at places like Columbia, University of Pennsylvania and Cornell. So it was quite startling to learn what’s happening.
And I think the encouraging part is this really broad coalition of students and faculty and community members and elected officials is really calling on the university to tell the Department of Justice, you can’t strong arm us into agreements like this. If you think the law has been broken, that should be proven in court. Otherwise, you have to allow institutions of higher education to have their autonomy respected.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor HoSang, what do you believe the ultimate goal of the Trump administration is in their threats to some of the most prestigious universities in the country in an effort to change these institutions’ internal policies? What part of the authoritarian playbook is this part of?
DANIEL HOSANG: Yeah. Well, I mean, I should point out, I mean, this is obviously the highest profiles. The ones that get the most attention are Harvard, what’s happening at Yale. But this particular round of investigations is also targeting a broad range of public and state medical schools. So the University of California, Los Angeles, University of California Davis, the University of Illinois in Chicago. And for all the challenges that medicine faces now and people’s concerns over the healthcare system, medical schools really have made significant advances in the last say. three decades. Medicine and being a physician used to be a career only for white, affluent, generally applicants from middle and upper class backgrounds. The kind of stereotypical way we understand what a physician used to be. And there’s been broad recognition that that’s not good for people. If we’re going to be able to serve the communities that deserve healthcare—and this includes in rural areas, includes in underserved urban communities, you need broad people to have access to this training.
And I think that’s really what this round of attacks is after—efforts to make medicine more accountable, more responsive, thinking about broad public health programs. That’s what’s really at risk here if their vision of how medical school should work, which is really only to admit students based on small distinctions in test scores and grade point averages.
SCOTT HARRIS: Negotiations between the Trump Justice Department and Yale University President Maurie McInnis, as well as the board of trustees—these negotiations are being conducted beyond closed doors. What are your concerns about specific concessions that the university may offer regarding changes to admission policies, academic freedom, free speech on campus, content of courses. The hiring of faculty is another example of things that have happened in other universities, as well as the targeting of foreign students. And I would just add this. Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal recently said earlier this month that Yale had twice made offers of a settlement without any demands of the Trump Justice Department. And Sen. Blumenthal described the situation as Yale effectively negotiating against itself.
DANIEL HOSANG: Yeah. I mean, Scott, you’ve described many, many of the provisions in the settlement agreements that other institutions have been forced to sign. And what’s really disturbing is you would think that the government would have to actually have concluded and proven in a court of law or in other environments that actual violations of the law have taken place and that the remedies are suited to those violations, but that’s often not how these agreements work. The government comes in with a broad, broad set of allegations that may or may not have any evidence behind them and then really uses those, plus the threat of funding terminations to extract political and in many ways, ideological concessions. And universities facing very, very uncertain funding climates and concerned about the foundation of their futures have too often conceded to these. What’s really startling about Yale’s decision to do this—as Sen. Blumenthal has pointed out—is this was very, very early in the stage of this process.
The government had just issued this letter of finding. There’s often a much longer process. There’s provisions for appeals to it. So it was unsettling and confusing as to why early, early in the stage, according to Sen. Blumenthal and reporting in the New York Times, Yale would offer to settle at this stage. As faculty, we read about this like most of the other rest of the public in the newspapers. We have no idea what’s happening behind closed doors. And this is … obviously people have concerns and criticism about the Trump administration, is raising familiar alarms, but this should worry everyone. If the government is just allowed to put forth allegations and then again, strong arm institutions enclosed door negotiations, what an affront to any basic definition of democracy that is.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Well said. We’re speaking with Daniel HoSang, professor of American studies and political science at Yale University. And we’re talking about closed door negotiations between the Trump administration and Yale University over allegations of discrimination and admissions, discrimination against white and Asian students. And I should remind our listeners, this is WPKN in Bridgeport, 89.5 FM, wpkn.org. Professor HoSang, what are opponents of a Yale-Trump deal doing right now such as the group Stand up for Yale? And that, of course, includes faculty, staff and alumni. What are some of the things that you’re doing to influence the decision-making of the president of the university?
DANIEL HOSANG: Yeah. It’s not easy. I’ll say this for a couple of reasons. One, it’s summer break. And so many faculty, students, others are not on campus. So it’s actually taken really extraordinary efforts to try to reach out to our colleagues, to students on their summer break to help them understand what’s happening, what’s at risk, the harm that we could potentially face. But this amazing group of alumni Stand Up for Yale has collected more than 4,000 signatures of Yale alumni urging the university not to settle. A set of elected officials have members of the state legislature and Sen. Blumenthal has issued a really careful and strongly worded letter to the university pointing out the limitations and hazards of entering into a settlement like this. Faculty, we’ve held press conferences. We’ve had a outside counsel produce a legal analysis so that our colleagues can understand what’s at stake.
So it’s very difficult because the university has a whole office of attorneys and public relations staff and government affairs staff. This is their full-time job. We’re scrambling as faculty to both try to understand the underlying issues to educate ourselves and to try to think together about what we lose when we allow, again, tactics like this to dictate policies in the university. So that’s what we’ve been doing. Ultimately, it’s been frustrating to get the sense from our leadership that they, regardless, it’s their decision and their decision alone. If we’re trying to say the threats to democracy are both, they come from the places like the Trump administration, but we also have to insist that our institutions hold democratic principles dear and exercise them in practice, which means robust, robust ways to get a broad, broad range of ideas and feedback. And so that’s also what we’re insisting upon, too, that we really have real venues to share ideas, concerns, to get information and to maximize the kinds of transparency that are going to be applied in making decisions like this.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor HoSang, if an agreement is signed off by Yale, what are your fears of the consequences for Yale’s independence, integrity and reputational damage? And I’ll just add that as you said earlier, what Yale does in this situation will affect decisions made by other universities and colleges across the U.S.
DANIEL HOSANG: Yeah. I mean, just on that very more specific point, at least 15 other medical schools are allegedly under investigation. All of these schools very carefully worked with legal counsel to make sure that their admissions policies do not violate the 2023 Supreme Court decision, which banned and found unconstitutional race-based affirmative action. And look, there is justices, a minority of the justices also dissented from that, but that’s the law of the land and we have to follow it.
But the court was very, very clear then. That does not mean that something that’s in admissions called holistic admissions where you treat individual applicants as individuals. You take into account the broad context and circumstances of their lives because you’re trying to put together a class, let’s say of future doctors that’s able to meet the needs, the broad needs for a medical professional and a physician. So that’s also what’s at risk is losing the ability for schools to make decisions like that and for law schools to make decisions, nursing schools, etc., to think about how these schools can best serve the public interest.
I think also about the forms of stigma that are attached when the federal government is effectively saying you have large numbers of your students who should not be on your campus. They’re unqualified and undeserving. Not because with any evidence they’re delivering poor care, something their supervisors they’re not matching with residencies, only because of their race. That’s offensive. It’s odious. And this is why leaders have to stand up for that. And we finally, we don’t know what else could be in a decision like this. It could have monitoring agreements that could actually bind and require not less supervision—you don’t sign a deal and then evade or rid yourself of further scrutiny and oversight—it actually increases it. And that’s what we’ve seen at other campuses too. So it really could change the tenor of decision-making and make it much more subject to the political partisan and ideological scrutiny of the federal government.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that. In closing, Professor HoSang, I wanted to mention that you’ll be part of an online event Sunday, July 26 to discuss the Yale-Trump negotiations and the status of academic freedom at Yale. You want to say a quick word about that event? Is the public invited or is it just for those on the campus?
DANIEL HOSANG: This is an event that the alumni group Stand Up for Yale is organizing so the faculty aren’t organizing it. And I think the people can look up Stand Up for Yale online. If you are a Yale alumni, I definitely encourage you to get involved in this group. I’d encourage you to reach out and send an email to our leadership of our campus and President McKinnis urging her to stand together with faculty, with students, with elected officials, with community members in saying that if the federal government thinks any university has broken a law, then they should have to prove that in court. They should not just be allowed to kind of make up to trumped up allegations and then force and coerce universities into deals behind closed doors. That’s just not something that any fair-minded person should be consenting to now. And university leaders need to hear that from the public.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Professor HoSang, thank you so much for spending time with us and talking about this critical negotiation that we all need to know more about. So thanks for spending time with us.
DANIEL HOSANG: Thank you. Really appreciate the time, Scott.
SCOTT HARRIS: Take care. Good night. That’s Daniel HoSang, professor of American studies and political science at Yale University and president of the Yale Chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
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