After 325 years of existence, why has it become so difficult for us to agree on the purpose of our university?
Campus of Yale University. (Credit: Buckley Institute)
Win Mordecai
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
As the Trump administration continues to investigate Yale for its allegedly discriminatory admissions practices, Yale administrators have employed diplomatic rhetoric to articulate the purpose of the university.
Yale President Maurie McInnis, attempting to draw a through-line from Yale’s founding principles to its current mission, said in her 325th anniversary address that “Yale was founded in a spirit of freedom, with the idea that liberal arts education can foster unfettered thinking and learning.” Yale, she continued, initially set out to “prepare students … for whatever they went on to do. 325 years later, that remains true.”
We might look at Yale’s new April 2026 mission statement, which replaced the DEI-aligned 2016 statement, in hopes of discovering Yale’s current purpose. The new statement reads: “Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”
Yale’s attempts to articulate its purpose do little more than reiterate that this is, yes, a university, and that, yes, you might learn things here. Or, if you are employed here, then you will likely engage in teaching or research.
These are not mission statements; they are mundane descriptions. Why does Yale, with its illustrious history and brilliant collective resources, default to whimperingly unimaginative language whenever it gives an account of its raison d’être? If we as students are going to spend years of our lives here, alongside investing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to be here, then we cannot be blamed if we are frustrated by the milquetoast language in these statements.
The unspoken issue here is straightforward: if Yale (or one of the many universities that describes its purpose with similarly vague, please-all-parties language) were to truly justify itself in terms of serving a higher purpose, rather than simply describing itself in terms of its day-to-day affairs, then it would risk being offensive— something that could either alienate its left-leaning faculty and student body or jeopardize its negotiations with the Trump administration. For a mission statement to be substantive, it must commit to some value hierarchy, and Yale’s value-neutral language prevents it from crafting mission statements with conceptual substance.
Yale’s charter, by contrast, explicitly committed to a Protestant-Christian value schema. Any such commitment to a certain conception of what the university project ought to be risks alienating those who disagree. It is impossible to justify any normative project without taking this risk— this is precisely what Yale’s founders understood 325 years ago.
Contrary to President McInnis’s recent 325th anniversary speech, there is little continuity between the Yale of 1701 and the Yale of 2026.
In 1701, Yale’s charter aimed at higher ends. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued in his classic work After Virtue that our concept of virtue would become empty when we abandon the idea that our practices serve some higher purpose. He thought that when we no longer agree that human life has a telos, there will no longer be a throughline that unites our pluralistic pursuits.
Yale’s founders thought that Christianity provided an obvious account of teleological virtues. The 1701 charter aims at the “Propagating of the Christian Protestant Religion” through “a succession of Learned & Orthodox men.” To accomplish this end, Yale would establish a school in which “Youth may be instructed in the Arts & Sciences” so that “through the blessing of Almighty God,” they might be “fitted for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State.” The clear-eyed, teleological language of our braver past transcends the vacuous, descriptive language of our modern mission statements.
Certainly, we moderns may find ourselves offended by Yale’s endorsement of Christian Protestantism— I would not want to attend an early 18th-century Yale.
But MacIntyre’s ultimate point is that we cannot construct some account of the good without also concluding that some ideas are wrong. If we want Yale to aim at some higher good, then we must risk offending those who disagree with the way that we have defined that good. In other words, any explanation of why we should come here must also conclude that some people should not come here. That is the cost of engaging in a normative project.
We cannot resurrect the Protestant Yale of three centuries ago. But if we want Yale to be something more than a collection of disparate classrooms, then we need to answer the question: what kind of people should an education produce, and toward what ends should their education be directed?
So, Yale and its fellow institutions in higher education have a choice. Their first choice is to concede that they no longer serve any higher purpose and admit that their role in the world is amoral and merely procedural. The second option is to reembrace teleology—to admit that there is some account of human flourishing that we as an institution ought to endorse.
Will Yale ever again have the courage to champion specific values and risk being exclusionary, or will it erode into nothing more than a collection of pedagogical procedures?