Yale university convened a Committee on Trust in Higher Education which, in April 2026, proposed an updated Mission statement for the university:
2026 Mission Statement: Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.
Yale pursues this mission through the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Yale College, and its graduate and professional schools, each with its own distinct contributions.
This replaces the 2016 MIssion statement of:
“Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice. Yale educates aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society. We carry out this mission through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.”
Many on our YBG board felt that this revised 2026 Mission Statement represents a retreat from Yale’s historic sense of its role and responsibility in civil society that has guided its mission throughout the years. We recognize that the current administration appears to be challenging the direction and focus of many of the leading universities including Yale and we do support and approve many of the recommendations offered by the Committee on Trust in Higher Education.
The letter below was signed by many members, but not all, of the Yale Blue Green Board of Directors:
President Maurie McInnis
Office of the President
3 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
president@yale.edu
May 14, 2026
Dear President McInnis,
The undersigned are Yale College alumni from classes in the 1970s and 1980s. We happen to serve on the Board of Yale Blue Green, one of Yale’s alumni shared interest groups, but we are writing to you today in our individual capacities.
We appreciate the considerable effort and thoughtful care on the part of the distinguished members of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education in their letter to you of April 10, 2026, and we agree with many of their suggestions.
However, we take this opportunity to express our deep dismay over the Committee’s recommendation of a revised Mission Statement for the University, a recommendation which has apparently been accepted with little or no opportunity for comment from the Yale community.
The 2016 Mission Statement, adopted under the leadership of President Peter Salovey, provided:
“Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice. Yale educates aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society. We carry out this mission through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.”
The Committee characterizes these words as a departure from Yale’s “traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge.” That is not so. In fact, the 2016 Mission Statement represented only the most recent articulation of the goals expressed at Yale’s founding and reaffirmed by its leaders over many
generations. Yale began its life in 1701, as the Collegiate School, dedicated to the education of students in order that they “may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State.” Almost 250 years later, President Charles Seymour in 1949 reiterated “[t]he central aspect of Yale’s educational mission cannot be too emphasized: that is, the training of youth for citizenship, for service, no matter what their calling, in fostering the welfare of the community and nation. Towards such a purpose every activity must be pointed.” Fifty years later, in 1999, Richard Brodhead, then the Dean of Yale College (and later the President of Duke University), adopted a Mission Statement that anticipated the 2016 iteration in affirming that the aim of a Yale education “is the cultivation of citizens with a rich awareness of our human heritage to lead and serve in every sphere of human activity.”
Throughout all of the many statements of Yale’s purpose over the centuries there is a consistent recognition that the acquisition of knowledge, however gratifying and pleasurable for us as individuals and useful in our private affairs and ventures, should not be the end purpose of a Yale education.
The revised 2026 Mission Statement represents a retreat from Yale’s historic sense of its role and responsibility in civil society. We can only speculate – perhaps unfairly, though we are at a loss for any other explanation – that the Committee was motivated by a species of what Timothy Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience”: a concern that, in our present moment, we should shy from pronouncing our collective ambition to apply our Yale experience to making the world a better place, for fear that somehow that might further contribute to the atmosphere of mistrust that presently envelops Yale and its peers. As Professor Daniel HoSang pointedly notes, however, Yale and other elite institutions in fact help to cultivate that lack of trust precisely because “they seem to hold no value important other than their own preservation, and sway to the political winds.”
In your charge to the 2026 Committee you made particular note of the issue of individual self-censorship on campus in light of increasing intolerance for views that do not align with those of the political majority. The 2026 Mission Statement seems to us, ironically, to constitute institutional self-censorship.
Our times are not the first in which Yale has had to address concerns with its reputation and standing. In 1971, the Study Commission on Governance, convened at the behest of President Kingman Brewster, observed that “[i]n our day, dissatisfaction with social institutions is increasingly apparent…Whatever the causes, the university comes under attack both for society’s defects and for its own, which are many and increasingly exposed.” But while the 1971 Commission made constructive recommendations for improving University governance – as does the 2026 Committee – it reaffirmed Yale’s mission to harness the cultivation of “knowledge, quality of intellect, aesthetic and ethical discrimination…to fuel personal
development and, in addition, give to society men and women competent to play the most demanding civic roles.”
We urge you to adopt a mission statement that is consistent with Yale’s long-standing values. These have been an evergreen source of pride to generations of students and alumni. The present historical moment will pass. Yale will endure. Its commitment to ensuring that its alumni are “fitted” for positions of civic leadership should, as well.
Respectfully,
David Bergman YC 1978
Becky Bunnell YC 1978
Paul Chapman YC 1970
Maureen Kline YC 1986
Robert H Smith YC 1975
Chip Spear YC 1974
Anne Crawley, YC 1976
Lauren E. Graham, YSE 2013
Cameron McKenzie, YSE 2023
Margot McMahon, MFA 1984
Uma Bhandaram, YSE 2015
Cc: Yale Board of Trustees