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Yale's next steps

On the eve of her inauguration, we talked to President Maurie McInnis '96PhD about Yale’s future.

May/Jun 2025

After Maurie McInnis ’96PhD had been in office for nine months, Yale brought out its pomp and ceremony to inaugurate her on April 6 in Woolsey Hall. The 24th person to preside over the institution in its 324-year history, McInnis sat in a wainscot chair that belonged to founding rector Abraham Pierson. She was presented with the university’s charter, its seal, and a set of ceremonial keys. She also wore the presidential collar, a necklace that features the shields of all of Yale’s component schools.

It was a show of continuity over the centuries at a time when higher education is in a state of great uncertainty, the result of actions taken or contemplated by the new administration in Washington. Six days before the inauguration, YAM’s acting editor-in-chief Peggy Edersheim Kalb ’86 and executive editor Mark Alden Branch ’86 met President McInnis in her office in SSS to talk about those challenges and her plans for Yale’s future. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.


YAM: Being a university president is not the most enviable job right now. There is a lot to react to. What is on your agenda, other than the need to respond to the constant stream of news?

Maurie Mcinnis: I am constantly focused on Yale’s mission and thinking about how we best shape Yale’s future. So even though there’s a lot happening externally to the institution, that in no way is slowing down the work that we are doing, not only to deliver on Yale’s priorities, but also to begin the conversations about Yale’s future. That is why, since I’ve been here, I’ve held more than 100 public listening sessions, open Q&As, and conversations with faculty, staff, students, and alumni, to hear what their hopes and aspirations are for Yale’s future. Those conversations will be ongoing. It’s the beginning of a process.

YAM: What are some of your priorities?

MM: We have as an institution put in place a number of really important priorities, some of them part of the capital campaign For Humanity, whether it’s the new buildings on Science Hill and what that will enable us to be able to do, or other plans. A lot of the work that our leadership team continues to do is to make sure that we are not only planning the buildings, but also recruiting the people who will be part of delivering on that mission. We have been making dramatic and significant investments in the sciences at Yale, and we haven’t done that for a century, and we have invested significantly in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

YAM: The university is urging caution in the budgeting process for the next year. And, of course, there is talk about an increase in the endowment tax, and dramatically reduced NIH funding. How tough a hit is this likely to be for Yale?

MM: Let’s step back a minute and just talk about the history of the relationship between the federal government and higher education. In 1945 Vannevar Bush published “The Endless Frontier,” and that began a long-standing partnership between the federal government and America’s universities. It has allowed for unbelievable growth in the American economy, new innovation, new discoveries, and advancements in science and technology and health care that are unparalleled anywhere else. For the first time, we are seeing the public begin to question that partnership, and that is coming in a number of different forms. As you mentioned, an increase in the endowment tax and the reduction in facilities and administrative costs at NIH are two that have been proposed. There could be many others.

So we sent a budget memo earlier this month to ask our community to do scenario planning for a dramatic increase to the endowment tax and a dramatic cut to facilities and administrative support from NIH. That allows us to begin to do the kind of budget planning that, if we needed to make major cuts, we will have thoughtfully understood where we can reduce our budget. We’ve made contingency plans that would allow us to slow down other projects that would be following in the pipeline. The good news is Yale is right now in very strong financial standing. Yale learned a lot after the 2008 downturn and has done a better job of being ready for future downturns by budgeting conservatively, giving ourselves a little wiggle room.

YAM: How are you working to prevent these things from happening? You have said there are times when you might not be speaking publicly, but in fact, there are things going on behind the scenes.

MM: All of the presidents and the Association of American Universities (AAU) are engaged in this. Cuts in facilities and administrative costs hit hundreds of universities, academic medical centers, independent scientific research entities, so we’re all very much working on that topic. On the endowment tax, there are about 66 institutions currently paying the endowment tax. It was first introduced in 2017 in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that expires at the end of 2025, so we knew that this was going to be a topic that would come up in this session no matter who won the election.

The AAU universities that are paying the endowment tax have been working together. I’ve made multiple trips to DC, and I’m meeting with people in both parties in order to advocate for the central mission that universities play in driving discovery, economic development, national security, creating jobs, and preparing students for their futures.

YAM: Last year, you adopted a committee’s recommendation that university officials refrain from making public statements on issues unless they pertain to Yale’s core mission. Do you feel like that policy is working?

MM: It was a very broadly engaged effort. And as you can imagine, there’s a heterogeneity of opinion out there on this topic. The report they presented put forth the presumption generally not to speak, except in cases when there is something directly related to the university’s mission, or in matters of transcendent importance to the university community, and those were considered to be extremely rare.

My sense has been that there is a much deeper understanding of the issue across our campus because of the process that we used to get to a report. You wouldn’t believe the amount of support that we have received from people who really understand.

Now, you might recall that after the decision related to NIH F&A costs—something that is very much about the university’s mission and very much about our ability to continue to deliver on our mission—I did send out a statement that spoke to what we knew about the facts and what we were doing about it.

YAM: You have talked about the importance of restoring public trust in institutions of higher education. What do you think is responsible for that loss of trust, and how do we get it back?

MM: That is very much the question of the hour, without easy answers. If you look at a Gallup poll, 68 percent of Americans think higher education is moving in the wrong direction. I believe the polling tells us that there are many factors. Certainly, many Americans are worried about the cost of higher education. Even though a university like Yale can offer extraordinary financial aid, it doesn’t mean everybody understands that, because it’s a very confusing, complex thing to explain. And so people look at sticker prices for universities, private or public, and they think, oh my gosh, my family could never afford that. So cost is one, access is another. So an institution like Yale that has an acceptance rate lower than 5 percent has many looking and thinking, I could never get into a university like that, and that is also enormously frustrating to many people.

The third is a concern about viewpoint diversity. If I hold opinions that are different from my classmates, will I be free to express that? While many people are very focused on that as a problem of higher education, I would argue it is a problem of America today, and actually the world. We do not spend as much time with people who have differing political beliefs as we used to. People are moving throughout America into places that fit their set of beliefs, and therefore they are coming into less contact with people with differing viewpoints. I think it’s a conversation we should be having nationally: How do we do a better job of engaging with people who see the world differently than we do? And fourth, is higher education doing a good job of readying people for the new and differing jobs that we don’t even know exist yet?

Repairing trust, that’s a much harder answer, right? It is super important work we need to do with humility, listening to the criticisms and being thoughtful about ways that we respond on campus. And we need to continue to advocate for the extraordinary things that happen on this campus, the lives that are transformed by this place. Some of the great joys of my job are the interactions I have with our broad and diverse alumni community across many decades. Person after person, I hear how Yale transformed their life: their exposure to different ideas and different people and different perspectives, the great faculty who taught them to think in ways that were just so different from what they had experienced before they got here. But it’s not as simple as telling our story better. There is a piece of work that we need to do there to respond to those critiques and really deliver on our mission.

YAM: You’ve been on the job for nine months. What have you learned about Yale that you didn’t know before? What are we doing right; where do we need to improve?

MM: We do so much right. I mean, this really is just such an extraordinary place. And, you know, I knew it at a high level as a trustee, and I certainly sensed it when I was here as a graduate student. But the life of a graduate student tends to be rather narrowly focused. Now I get to meet faculty and students all over campus and walk through our labs and talk to people who are really leading the world in what they do. We have the advantage of a relatively compact campus, which has led to our faculty and students collaborating, not just across departments, but across schools. Things like the Wu Tsai Institute, where we’re thinking about the brain and cognition from cell to human behavior. Or Planetary Solutions, which is not just the science, but also the communications and the policy and the law and the business. Yale can do that in part because we are physically close enough and have a culture of collegiality and collaboration. We also have a budget model that makes that possible, that actually sort of incentivizes people to think in new and creative ways.

YAM: What role do you see for alumni in Yale’s mission?

MM: I’ve never known an institution where the alumni are as active in their volunteering, on advisory committees, the University Council, or the Yale Corporation, or who volunteer to help raise money for our campaign and for the priorities that we have articulated in the campaign. It is, you know, dozens and dozens, hundreds, keeping their Yale club strong in their community, keeping their affinity groups strong. It is extraordinary, the hundreds of alumni who are giving back to this place, and Yale is so much stronger because of it.

YAM: What’s it like being back in New Haven? Does the city feel different?

MM: New Haven feels very different than it did when I was a student in the 90s, in wonderful and beautiful ways. What did The New York Times say? “A home to tinkers and rebels.” And I just love that. And it does feel that way, like you can really feel a creative spirit here, whether it is the arts or the restaurant scene or just the vibe in the city. It’s really experienced something of a renaissance in the last 15 to 20 years that’s really great to see, and I think it continues to be on an upward trajectory.

I’m really proud of Yale’s partnership with New Haven. And I’m super excited about the teaching fellowship that we created working with our partners at Southern Connecticut State, New Haven Promise, and the New Haven public school system. One of the biggest challenges is having really highly qualified teachers in the classroom to invest in New Haven’s future. And this program gives talented people who would love to become teachers but can’t afford to quit working the financial means to get their degrees and certification.

YAM: Thanks for talking to us. Your optimism is encouraging in the face of what we’re seeing in the news right now.

MM: Yale has faced many challenges in its 324-year history. It is an amazing place, and it will continue to be amazing.  

 

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