Dean Pericles Lewis, who is up for review this year, is the victim of mob outrage with no basis in the facts.
Dean Pericles Lewis speaks to students at a Buckley Institute event in 2024. (Credit: Buckley Institute)
Jason Cao
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
One of my earliest Yale experiences was stepping foot on cross campus as a freshman for the matriculation ceremony. Other than the dramatic collapse of a Berkeley College tree limb, the only part of that ceremony I recall is the speech of the Dean of Yale College, Pericles Lewis. Referencing William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus, a poem that famously inspired Nelson Mandela in his struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, Dean Lewis exhorted the young minds before him to be “the master of [their] fate” and the “captain of [their] soul.” His words were the first dose of inspiration that propelled me on my Yale journey.
Imagine my disbelief and confusion then, when I saw the headline that the Yale College Council (YCC) passed a statement of no confidence in Dean Lewis, recommending against his reappointment, a statement sponsored by various advocacy groups on campus. Of course, the YCC is a highly politicized body more concerned with virtue signaling than substantive work, as my colleague dutifully notes, and the various advocacy groups are dominated by left-wing activists. Nevertheless, I still hoped to find out what specifically their concerns were in case there were merits to their claims.
The philippic written against Dean Lewis contains a long list of grievances, but the main critique is that he cut too much funding that students liked, including the sustainable food program, summer experience funding, and summer storage support.
These may be valid critiques, but they too easily dismiss the difficulty of maintaining a balanced budget following the endowment tax hikes. In the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) passed last year, the tax on endowment income for private colleges was raised from a flat 1.4% to a progressive system with rates between 1.4–8%. A tax hike this size means that Dean Lewis needed to find parts of the budget to trim down, a process that is bound to disappoint some students regardless of which program he puts on the chopping block.
The YCC statement floats targeting administrative bloat as a better way to balance the budget, a project which I wholeheartedly support. However, that is already a way that Dean Lewis has set out to address the budgetary shortfall, including staffing cuts and retirement incentive plans. The criticism that Dean Lewis has overlooked this is simply not true.
More importantly, discussions over Dean Lewis’ shortfalls too often drift into political polemics. When interviewed by the Yale Daily News about the summer storage funding cut, Dean Lewis stated “my recommendation is not to buy too much stuff.” This is in fact, quite a reasonable suggestion, since most of us are guilty of spending too much on items we barely use.
However, detractors immediately jumped on these remarks, citing them as incriminating evidence towards Dean Lewis’ alleged elitism and racism. As reported by the Yale Daily News, students against Dean Lewis were quoted as alleging that these funding cuts indicated his willingness to “disregard and dehumanize Latine students” who are disproportionately first-generation or low-income students.
These accusations against Dean Lewis show that many students have a fundamentally distorted idea of the purpose of an institution of higher education. A college is not a welfare state. The primary objective of a college should not be to administer transfer programs so that every aspect of college life is free or subsidized. It should be to provide a liberal education that cultivates the minds of students and enables them to flourish.
As such, prioritizing the integral parts of Yale like the teaching faculty over subsidies is not at all a dereliction of duty, nor does it indicate some sort of racial prejudice. That is precisely Dean Lewis doing his job. Cashiering Dean Lewis for a dispute over the curriculum may be understandable, but doing so over programs unrelated to the pedagogy of the college, his main responsibility, is ridiculous.
In fact, compared to the accusations in the YCC resolution, I am more concerned over how the funding cuts have impacted Yale’s curriculum, namely the termination of some non-tenured faculty members. I am afraid that the discussion over the future of Yale’s curriculum following the endowment hike has been overshadowed by these unfounded claims of racial prejudice. If we are to seriously discuss how Yale should respond to the budget cuts, we should do so by evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of each proposal from the administration, not engage in emotionally charged, reality detached rants towards a single dean.
While I have never personally met Dean Lewis, I can speak to my own experiences, and for me, his call to action during the matriculation ceremony had been nothing short of inspirational. By dismissing his stewardship of this campus over trivial funding matters, Dean Lewis’ detractors are ignoring the very purpose of a university and making a grave mistake.