Yale Must Do More

(Opinion) Is ours a changed city in the time of COVID-19? Or is it, in some ways, a caricature of its former self? Precarious lives teeter closer to the edge. Non-profit services and city government remain under-resourced. The stakes of poverty and unemployment are increasingly dire.

There is, of course, a way out. An institution exists in New Haven that has access to public health experts, money, and thousands of rooms to address the city’s need for housing.

The institution has also amassed $30.3 billion, a total endowment almost entirely untouchable and protected by law due to its ​“charitable” status.

That status, along with legal restrictions imposed on endowment spending, ironically gives the institution footing to pretend it can do little more than help its affiliates. 

This is the tale of two cities: New Haven scrambles to house the homeless, and Yale frets that providing life-saving housing would tamper with students’ belongings left behind in the exodus from campus. 

Indeed, the university has so far responded to the crisis with dragging feet and half measures. Asked by Mayor Elicker last month to open its dorms to police officers and firefighters exposed to the virus, Yale demurred, changing course only after public backlash. (The University of New Haven immediately said yes.) New Haven residents have since clamored for the city’s wealthiest institution to make more responsible use of its resources, notably at a virtual budget hearing last week, where Yale was the object of collective indignation.

While Yale prepares 300 rooms for first responders and hospital personnel, hundreds more people live unsheltered, risking viral exposure that puts themselves and others in danger. As shelters and halfway houses incorporate social distancing guidelines, even people who previously had access to temporary housing are left in limbo.

While a two-month rent-freeze begins on ​“over 100 city businesses located in university-owned buildings” — according to an email from Yale President Peter Salovey to a member of our coalition — the university has yet to announce a freeze on its 500 residential properties.

While, in the same email, President Salovey states that members of the Yale Police Department are ​“maintaining public safety,” YPD continues to conduct arrests as usual, imperiling residents facing possible incarceration in overcrowded detention centers and prisons.

Perhaps the most striking symbol of the social gaps made cavernous by the pandemic is the conversion of Payne-Whitney gym into a reserve field hospital: rows and rows of black cots set up at neat intervals on the basketball court floor. University administrators say that if used, the makeshift facility will ease burdens on local hospitals. But the beds, intended exclusively for Yale affiliates, also represent a kind of swaddled security unseen in other parts of the city. 

The reach of Yale’s resources uniquely situates the university to prevent unnecessary death. We commend Yale’s choice to donate up to $3 million to relief efforts, but we challenge the reality — namely, the segregation and structural inequalities from which Yale has profited since 1701 — that gives the university grounds to presume a modest tax-deductible donation adequately responds to our crisis. 

A world in which private organizations hoard resources is not tenable. Though the Yale Board of Trustees might point to plummeting markets and falling returns on investments as ever more reason to safeguard Yale’s endowment, we maintain that Yale’s privileged perch in town endows it with the responsibility to take bold action. 

Let us use this occasion to reorder Yale’s priorities and build a more equitable, compassionate New Haven. Please join us in signing this letter demanding that Yale take stronger action to support city residents.

Cass Darrow and Talia Schechet are both Yale College graduates. Darrow studied Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale, and graduated in 2018. Schechet studied English at Yale, and graduated in 2019.