First, I caught Pulitzer Prize-winning professor Beverly Gage pacing down the steps outside of the Humanities Quadrangle. In 2021, after the controversy unfolded about her resignation from the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, she donned a characteristically determined look on her face for a photo accompanying the piece written about her in The New York Times. Tess Ayano photographed Gage that day, Gage’s hair blowing away from her face which was pointed across the lens of the camera. The caption: “‘It’s very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in a situation where you are being second-guessed and undermined and not protected,’ Beverly Gage said in explaining her decision to resign,” seems to have greater resonance today than it did then.

Second, I caught Pulitzer Prize-winning professor John Lewis Gaddis as he came into the Hogwarts-style seminar room on the fourth floor of the Humanities Quadrangle. When Gaddis entered, I was the only student who had arrived at “Time Machines: Reimagining the Past,” one of the seminars Gaddis is teaching this semester. Before the rest of the class appeared, Gaddis and I exchanged jokes about the impending “Liberation Day,” set for Wednesday, April 2, when another slew of the Trump Administration’s tariffs went into effect.

After cutting our seminar an hour short to give us additional preparation time for our final projects, Gaddis bid the class adieu and sent us out into the crowded landing atop the stairwell in HQ and back out into our daily lives to begin thinking about how we might travel back in time to preserve bygone events for “posterity.” In the meantime, we spilled out onto York Street, dodging pedestrians, peddlers, Porsches and Priuses.

Next, I needed to make it to Rosenkranz Hall for my “Politics of Fascism” seminar, which starts promptly at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesdays and is taught by professor Lauren Young. 

Cutting through Schwarzman Center and past Commons, committing a kind of time travel to get to Prospect Street and in the vicinity of Rosenkranz Hall, I hustled through the flurry of hungry “Commoners,” making it down to the street corner where Grove Street separates College Street from Prospect Street. 

That’s when it happened. I saw a red vehicle in the street that radiated sunlight like the one that Prince wrote about in his song, “Little Red Corvette,” which is about ambivalence, vulnerability and fear. But my immediate impulse as an audiophile had apparently obscured my vision, because the car was actually a Tesla and the color, according to Tesla’s website, is not red but midnight cherry. A familiar blonde woman was behind the wheel: President Maurie McInnis.

In disbelief, my eyes defied the commands doled out by my occipital lobe, darting between her face and her navy blazer, which was trimmed with white piping on the lapel and each of the garment’s cuffs. The blazer — in line with article five of the 20-article dress code, a sartorial version of Marcus Aurelius written by the Yale Dress Study Group in 1965, which strived to stipulate students’ style — embodied the Ivy look captured by Teruyoshi Hayashida in “Take Ivy.” That look was later refined by brands like J.Crew, J. Press and Ralph Lauren. McInnis dresses with a sophistication that feels preppy and collegiate — if not elegant.

But as quickly as I realized that McInnis was speeding away from campus behind the wheel of a vehicle manufactured by an egomaniacal, possibly Nazi-sympathizing firebrand, she was out of sight. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I made a split-second decision that was made in the interest of blind curiosity. Realized irony beamed from ear-to-ear across my face as a smug grin, I discarded my scuffed-up backpack on the sidewalk and sprinted down College Street, catching McInnis rolling toward the stoplight ahead of Old Campus and the New Haven Green.

The light was still red when I got there. 

I stopped in my tracks, completely out of breath and feeling a kind of lactic acid build-up that I hadn’t experienced since JV track in high school. Obstructing the sidewalk paved between Grace Hopper College and the traffic on the street that McInnis’ commute away from campus was being actively impeded by, I pulled the battered iPhone 13 out of my pocket and snapped away. The impulse to capture a photo of her may seem an unusual one, but I was overcome by disbelief at what I was seeing — and I wanted proof of what I was witnessing in broad daylight. It made my momentary scrutiny of our university’s chief unchangeable. The photo had been taken. 

McInnis didn’t appear to touch the steering wheel, implicating her as either a casual driver or a technocrat who has opted for a Tesla equipped with driverless technology. Instead, she stared straight ahead, her hands fidgeting with one another. Grinning at the image of McInnis on my screen, I looked up from my phone right as she gazed back at me, flashing me a grimace and speeding away once more.

She did not seem keen on having her photo taken. 

Next, I retraced my steps to collect my backpack from the sidewalk. My stuff was well-preserved and intact, but my mind began to race about the scene I had literally chased and its humor that seemed destined for political cartoon fodder.

Then, in the midst of my fatuous thinking about what Clay Bennett, a cartoonist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the recipient of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, would do with the kind of image now neatly situated within the Photos app of my iPhone, I thought about its broader implications.

I have long been hesitant to jump on the anti-McInnis bandwagon because her tenure is still quite young. Back in the fall, I remember an early morning when I was coming home from an Old Campus affair when I saw her reporting for duty at her office long before the sun, or presumably university administrators, had risen and started the day. I was immensely proud to see her grit approach to doing the work necessary to lead Yale; it made me even prouder to be a Yale student.

But as I walked away from the moving scene I had chased down College Street, I played “Little Red Corvette,” listening through my wired, Apple-issued earbuds. I could not stop thinking about McInnis’ ownership of a Tesla, because aside from being the University president, she is an art history professor — something she emphatically told my class during her address at our opening assembly in August. She understands that visuals are important. But unrelated to McInnis’ choice of car, or Prince’s politically-agnostic intention in writing his hit song, I began to think about ambivalence, vulnerability and fear.

Those are not only Prince’s themes, but the themes that have tested McInnis’ leadership as she has operated this university during one of its most daunting eras. There has been institutional neutrality — which is, effectively, ambivalence about anything important. 

Few things reek of vulnerability more than the threat of losing nearly $1 billion in federal funding, simply because of who occupies the Oval Office. But that, as nearly every member of the Yale community knows, is our reality.

About fear: the Yale Daily News’ Tuesday, April 1 newsletter included the subject line, “Department leaders told to report all DEI initiatives.” There was also the recent departure of two of Gage and Gaddis’ colleagues in the History Department — and a third in the Philosophy Department. There has been chatter echoing around campus about the residential college deans’ clandestine, eleventh-hour emails ushering international students to the safety of the campus under the protection of its wrought iron gates and gothic arches. And, as of Monday, academic buildings on campus require an ID swipe.

Few people have forewarned the dangers of succumbing to these forces — ambivalence, vulnerability and fear — as saliently as economic sociologist Charlie Eaton, who recently argued in The New York Times’ opinion section:

“Universities sometimes call on the idea of intergenerational equity—that endowments should be preserved to provide comparable benefits for future generations—to limit spending their endowments. In this climate, intergenerational equity is little more than a fallacy. If those universities fail to defend free speech and scientific research now, future generations could lose their treasures to creeping authoritarianism.”

Mr. Eaton’s reference to “intergenerational equity,” can surely be substituted for “X.” That is, this country’s most elite universities’ leadership has led largely from a belief in the fallacy that if it just plays dead, a wannabe dictator might wane. Not so. 

As McInnis attends the formal ceremonies planned to give her rightful celebration for beginning a tenure atop one of the world’s premier academic institutions, I hope she will consider the following:

Sell your Tesla. Listen to “Little Red Corvette” by Prince and consider buying one, though you may want to avoid College Street. Reject fallacies — and certainly do not allow them to guide your leadership. Coalesce behind this campus or acquiesce before it. Read the words of a villanelle published by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in 1947, two years after fascism was impermanently defeated. Abide by them: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

ZACHARY CLIFTON is a first year in Benjamin Franklin College. He can be reached at zachary.clifton@yale.edu.

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It isn’t coincidental that Vance chose Jackson, a small town in Breathitt County, as the setting for his written-to-be-a-best-seller, “Hillbilly Elegy.” In 2014, The New York Times went around the country to index the quality of life in every U.S. county. When they got to eastern Kentucky, they realized it was a place with a different kind of poverty. While the 10 counties with the lowest quality of life were all in the rural American South, six out of the 10 were in a more specific region, eastern Kentucky. 

Breathitt County — where Vance spent his childhood summers — ranked the sixth lowest county in the country for quality of life. Clay County, declared the worst place to live in the U.S. by the Times journalist working on the project, is directly adjacent to Breathitt County. The region the two counties occupy was specifically said to be more difficult to live in than “the ghost cities of Detroit, Camden and Gary, the sunbaked misery of inland California and the isolated reservations where Native American communities were left to struggle.”

It is this reality that makes me most sympathetic to my poverty-stricken fellow eastern Kentuckians. I certainly do not deny their poverty and dire socioeconomic circumstances. Nor do I deny the poverty that Vice President Vance — who refers to poverty as a “family tradition” — experienced during his childhood. It is Vance, however, who is guilty of stepping on the necks of poor people vis-à-vis his association with the Trump-Vance Administration.

Last summer, when Vance became the VP nominee, Bobi Conn, a Kentuckian, wrote in Time: “He claims to be for the working class. But it’s now time to ask what he will actually do for us. After all, we know what the working class has done for him.” Trump’s first term in office saw devastation for the poor, and his second term has already inaugurated economic policies which economists say will not favor the working class either. 

Another non-coincidence was where JD Vance found himself when the Times published “What’s the Matter with eastern Kentucky?” — not to spoil things, but you can be sure it was not eastern Kentucky. Given that Vance had graduated from this country’s preeminent law school a year prior, he was an apparently intelligent man, and I have to imagine that he read The New York Times investigation into the region he has long claimed as his home.

And then came his book. 

“Hillbilly Elegy” was not only a rags-to-riches story, it was written to be an educated, moderate Republican’s explanation of the 2016 presidential election and Donald Trump’s ascendance to the highest office in this land.

First on the “rags” of “Hillbilly Elegy.” It goes without saying that Cincinnatians are not often seen as “hillbillies.” In North America, Cincinnati is the 44th largest metropolitan area by population — roughly three times the size of the greater New Haven area. Since it was not the hillbillies of Cincinnati that Vance refers to in his bestselling book, which has sold over three million copies, it must have been the hillbillies that are closer to my neck of the woods he was referring to. Vance spent his summers there with his grandparents who meant a great deal to him. Does that qualify him as an eastern Kentuckian? 

My grandparents, who live in the Umpqua Valley of Southwestern Oregon, meant a great deal to me as a child, and I would often spend my summers at their farm, splashing in the creek and picking blueberries from their orchard. But I do not claim that Oregon is where I am from, even though I have more family there than Vice President Vance has in Kentucky. I take great issue with Vance’s casual exploitation of the region I am from to fulfill the “rags” component of his book. The place I am from has gotten little more than the “stepping stone” treatment by a man who has often adduced eastern Kentucky as evidence of his folksy, by-the-bootstraps upbringing. JD Vance must be the only man who gets counted as blue-collar while possessing a degree from what is arguably the most prestigious academic institution in the United States. As a Kentuckian, I am ashamed of Vance’s use of my home for the sake of accumulating a fortune as an author — he certainly did not accumulate his multi-million dollar net worth during his short, and fraught, career in venture capital. 

But as a Yale student, I am similarly ashamed of Vance for his use of this university to fulfill the second criterion of his rags-to-riches book. Yale, too, was used as a stepping stone for Vance. After his degree helped him complete the sequence of events he would use as material to write his book — which got the Hollywood treatment by way of Netflix, Glenn Close and Amy Adams — he now decries the kind of elite institutions he and his boss cut their teeth at. Convenient but not coincidental.

But what is most shameful is not Vance’s successful exploitation of my home and my university — rather, what he has done with the acclaim.

Vance was chosen to be the Republican vice presidential nominee by a man who, under the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment, should have never had the constitutional eligibility to be reelected to the office of the presidency. It is Vance who understood early on the dangers of Donald Trump. He was conscious of Trump’s similarities to Hitler. It was Vance who likened his would-be boss to the Führer, even when most Democrats weren’t willing to make that comparison. Vance debuted as an expounder and expositor of Trump’s danger, but it is Vance who has devolved into an enabler of Trump and his most fascistic impulses.

Yale did not take as kindly to the news of Vance’s ascension to the vice presidency as it did when William Howard Taft became the first alumni of the presidential kind, nor did it respond to Vance’s election with the same congratulatory spirit as Vance’s undergraduate alma mater, Ohio State.

But Yale students — and a good bit of society — take seriously this university’s role as a vanguard of democracy through educating students who become civil servants and civically-minded neighbors. In that sense, Vance’s vice presidency is not the success of a Yale student and it is most certainly not the success of this university either. 

JD Vance’s story was not coincidental or accidental. He explicitly juxtaposed a limited portion of his lifetime spent between Kentucky and Yale for the sake of publishing a best-selling book turned Hollywood hit. It is also this university, then, that has not coincidentally or accidentally disregarded his recent job promotion that exceeds any job promotion a Yale student has received since the election of former President George W. Bush, in 2001. 

Yale is ashamed of our 40-year-old law school alumnus who is enabling the most dangerous figure in American politics since Nixon. But not even Nixon caused a kind of chaos that warranted two impeachments, and he did not incite an insurrection. That was the man JD Vance is now beholden to for the foreseeable future — at least the next three years. 

When our school fit neatly as the setting of the second act of his bestselling narrative, he happily bandied the name about. But when a blue-collar became more fashionable than a white one, he hardly uttered “Yale” again. Whether or not he will try to squirm back into Yale’s good graces will no doubt be determined by his incessant desire for power. Just like it did when he ran for senate, and for vice president. 

In 2028, then, we will probably find out: Is JD Vance ashamed of Yale?

ZACHARY CLIFTON is a first year in Benjamin Franklin College. He can be reached at zachary.clifton@yale.edu. 

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