By CHRIS POWELL
It shouldn’t be shocking that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating Yale University in New Haven for illegal racial discrimination in its admissions practices. Higher education long has been discriminating that way for years and helped concoct a euphemism for it — “affirmative action” — a euphemism that fortunately no longer intimidates the Trump administration.
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In 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s admissions policy discriminated illegally by race. So it’s a fair issue, and Yale says it is cooperating with the investigation and pursuing a settlement.
But rather than acknowledge the issue’s legitimacy, some people are getting hysterical. They say academic freedom is at stake, but there is no academic freedom to violate civil rights law.
A group of Yale professors has threatened to sue the university if it reaches a settlement with the government on admissions policy, as if some law says professors can run the university instead of its administration.
And now eight state legislators are actually trying in public to blackmail the university out of considering a settlement. In a letter sent last week to Yale President Maurie McInnis, the legislators said they might try to reduce the university’s state tax exemption if it settles with the Justice Department.
Apparently it’s of no concern to the legislators that the university might be breaking civil rights law and thus be incurring much liability in its governance and finances.
But there’s an even bigger irony in the legislators’ blackmail. For Yale’s tax exemption should be reduced irrespective of the admissions policy issue, and the General Assembly should have acted accordingly long ago.
About 56% of real estate in New Haven is exempt from city property taxes, and about 43% of that exempt property is owned by the university. The university recently agreed to increase the voluntary annual payment it makes to the city but this amount is a small fraction of the many millions of dollars Yale would pay additionally if its property wasn’t tax-exempt. The university’s tax exemption is a huge burden not just on city government but state government as well, since New Haven is an impoverished city and largely a financial ward of the state.
Of course the university’s contribution to the city and all southern Connecticut — in employment and spending — is huge as well. Indeed, without Yale, New Haven might slide into Long Island Sound.
Nevertheless, Yale’s property tax exemption is just too disproportionate, especially since the university’s endowment, worth around $44 billion, is the second largest university endowment in the country, second only to Harvard’s.
So it’s pathetic that those eight legislators can contemplate doing the right thing on the property tax issue only if can’t coerce Yale into taking a position that, while politically correct, might break federal law and incur great financial and administrative liability.
Historically the university has had a close relationship with government in Connecticut — beginning with the colonial government, which chartered Yale in 1701 and supported it financially in part to educate potential government officials. That close relationship endures insofar as Connecticut’s governor and lieutenant governor still automatically become members of the university’s Board of Trustees.
Governor Lamont and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz may not yet have taken their ex-officio trusteeships seriously, but now that those eight legislators — all Democrats, like the governor and lieutenant governor — are using their offices to blackmail the university into breaking federal law, a rebuke from the top of state government may be in order.
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REQUIRE ‘e-VERIFY’: If enforcement of federal immigration law sometimes seems too sudden and cruel, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Illegal immigration might be stopped quickly in Connecticut if state government required employers to use the federal government’s “e-Verify” system to confirm or deny a job applicant’s eligibility to work in the United States, and if employers hiring illegal immigrants were prosecuted vigorously and punished severely.
But strangely the people who protest the cruelty of immigration law enforcement oppose requiring use of “e-Verify.” They want illegal immigration all the same.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut overnment and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 