The Ivy League is doubling down on Woke. As the shrill and often incoherent din of radical demonstrations roils US college campuses, Yale University has named a new president. Maurie McInnis becomes the first non-interim female leader at the famed institution. While that may in itself indicate a commitment to progressive “diversity” stylings, her track record leaves no doubt in the matter.
McInnis, 58, was hired on May 29 from Long Island’s Stony Brook University, where she had served as president since 2020. One does not need to minutely pick through her time at SBU to find the academic flavor Yale desires.
How I Got to Yale
“I have spent my career researching and writing predominantly about the 19th century American South – the institution of slavery in the pre-Civil war period and the memorialization of the Confederacy in the post-Civil War period,” McInnis told the university in a published interview as she began her tenure at Stony Brook.
“What strikes me, as a historian, is how the issues we are discussing today are deeply rooted in America’s enslavement of Africans,” she continued. “Systemic racism, economic inequality and extreme acts of brutality toward black Americans are all connected to the forced enslavement of Africans four centuries ago when in 1619 the first ship of Africans forced into bondage arrived in Virginia.”
These words do not need interpretation for anyone who has followed the credentialed academic assault on US history in recent years. Perhaps the most notorious example is The New York Times’ 1619 Project spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which declares that America was founded as a Slave Nation.
McInnis stresses she has “spent my career” obsessing about racial divisiveness from two centuries ago. Fashionable takedowns of the Confederate flag are a hallmark of her “scholarship.”
“The notion that the flag is a symbol of Southern heritage and nothing more is an ahistorical one,” McInnis sweepingly asserted in an article she penned for the leftist publication Slate in 2015, when she was vice provost for academic affairs at the University of Virginia. “From the moment it was designed it was intended to convey the South’s reliance on the institution of slavery. When it has been revived by later generations, they, too, have imbued it with meaning. But it has always been a symbol of white power and racial oppression.”
As is readily apparent from this excerpt, the entire piece reads more like ideological diatribe than rigorous historical research. In other words, perfect future Ivy League material.
‘Expanded Mobilization of a Critical Social Movement’
At Stony Brook, McInnis emphasized the university’s commitment to the struggle for radical social change. The 2020 Summer of George Floyd sparked many a rash hot take as racial tensions were intentionally stoked to a boiling point. But McInnis was every bit as agitated nearly a year later as the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was approaching a verdict.
“Last summer, George Floyd's death elevated awareness of systemic racism and inequity in our country, and the need for policing and judicial reform,” read an April 16, 2021, Stony Brook “message” to the “community” signed by McInnis in her role as president. “The past year has seen the expanded mobilization of a critical social movement demanding equality, accountability and a reevaluation of a judicial system that has a long history of inequitable outcomes.”
As she fully hinted she would do in her 2020 introductory interview, McInnis was seamlessly blending her academic work with the higher cause of progressive social activism.
“As a great public research university and academic medical center, we maintain a responsibility to foster an environment of critical thinking and care, and to prepare our students to become effective leaders who can address the challenges our society faces,” the SBU missive continued. “We take seriously our charge to create opportunities to learn from these events and to engage with our community in contextualizing, understanding and strategically reacting to culture-defining moments such as this.”
It's no surprise, of course, that Yale would find all this enticing. Along with its Ivy League comrades, the university plays a crucial role in the progressive ruling establishment’s utilization of authoritative credentialism to advance and solidify its agenda.
In March 2023, Yale Law School posted an astonishing document the university authored in partnership with radical organizations heavily funded by globalist billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. It was meant to serve as a guide for Soros’s radical district attorneys in toppling laws against prostitution.
“The Yale Global Health Justice Partnership and the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center have jointly released a handbook on district attorneys’ policies of non-prosecution of sex work-related charges,” Yale Law wrote. “The handbook supports advocates for sex worker rights, prosecutors, policy makers, and other stakeholders to develop, influence, track, and assess the operation and impact of district attorney non-prosecution policies.”
Soros is not merely in the background here. He is front and center, side by side with Yale.
“The handbook is one product of the long-standing collaboration between SWP and GHJP. This collaboration is supported by the Gruber Project for Global Justice and Women’s Rights and the Open Society Foundations,” the document states.
This is what an Ivy League education entails in 2024. Students who accept their indoctrination are rewarded in the form of highly coveted degrees that serve as passports to successful careers within a deeply embedded progressive establishment nexus that dominates much of academia, corporate America, media, medicine, science, government staffing, and any other credentialed job title one can think of in our tottering nation today.
