One faculty member who spoke about the McInnis elevation reports disappointment. “It feels like an appointment made from fear, one which simply wanted to continue the past 10 years, which have not really been very successful, have they?,” asks the professor. “Where is the charisma, wisdom, and leadership needed to address the threats our elite universities are facing? Is this the person who will invest in the sciences, including computer science? Rein in the runaway bureaucracy? Support freedom of expression?” To this source’s knowledge, no senior Yale professors were interviewed for the position, presumably because they lacked administrative experience.

“It’s preposterous” that McInnis’s scholarship is even thinner than Claudine Gay’s, notes the faculty member. That judgment of scholarly “thinness” is based on citation counts (i.e., the number of times any given book or article is cited by other researchers). Arguably, such counts are a dubious measure of academic worth, at least in the humanities. They are, however, the currency of the realm. ...

Contrary to McInnis’s opening exhortation, universities have no mandate to undertake social change and no competence to do so. They exist to preserve and pass on the greatest accomplishments of human civilization and to develop new knowledge through peer-reviewed scholarship. Government provides favorable tax treatment on the presumption that university faculty are disinterested seekers of truth, not partisan proponents of any particular worldview. Yale would have set off an earthquake in higher education had its next president been tasked with removing politics from the curriculum and with making excellence and academic promise the sole criteria for faculty and student selection. Instead, it appears to have opted for the status quo.