To Yale President Maurie McInnis, Provost Scott Strobel, and the Board of Trustees:

As Yale alumni, we call on you to reject any settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice that compromises Yale’s lawful commitment to building a diverse and inclusive academic community or constrains Yale’s ability to pursue lawful holistic admissions.

Yale has long maintained that excellence in education depends on assembling a class of students with a wide range of experiences, perspectives, and talents. The university’s Equal Opportunity and Nondiscrimination Statement affirms that Yale seeks to attract “qualified persons from a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives.” In the face of a politically-motivated Department of Justice, Yale must use every tool in its arsenal to defend its right to pursue this core goal through lawful means.

The May 14 Department of Justice Letter of Findings takes a set of raw Yale School of Medicine admissions numbers in isolation and treats them as evidence that Yale is engaging in deliberate unlawful discrimination. It goes on to make sweeping allegations about the admissions process and summarily concludes that Yale has willfully broken the law. It implies that test scores and grade point averages are the only metrics that matter, as if these data points alone can predict who will be an effective physician.

This is not civil rights enforcement. This is an effort to chill lawful efforts to build a diverse academic community, to undermine Yale’s academic independence, and to intimidate every institution watching this spectacle.

It is true that the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard made it illegal to give direct preference to students based on race. But the court explicitly wrote that universities may consider how race affected an individual’s life, so long as what is rewarded is the individual’s experiences or qualities — not their race itself. Yale should not allow the threat of litigation to pressure the university into a closed-door settlement that reshapes Yale’s admission policies without public accountability.

The stakes of Yale’s response are enormous. A settlement that constrains Yale’s ability to build a diverse student body will dramatically alter the future of the university, and encourage similar retrenchment at schools across the country. A settlement would also be a slap in the face to current students and generations of alumni, casting them as evidence of wrongdoing rather than evidence that Yale is doing something right.

And it will not protect the university from further intrusions by the Trump administration into its academic freedom. We have seen how this story plays out: the settlements struck over the past 18 months by law firms, universities, and others did not buy peace. They merely invited further overreach.

Over the past year, courts have consistently held that the Trump administration’s attacks on institutions like law firms and universities are illegal. Settling sends the message that Yale doesn’t stand by the work of its attorneys, the judgment of its admissions officers, or the brilliance of its students, and that it’s eager to betray its values for a dangerous illusion of security.

We therefore call on Yale to publicly commit that it will not enter any settlement that restricts lawful holistic admissions practices, undermines Yale’s ability to build a diverse academic community, compromises institutional independence, or allows political officials to dictate admissions policy. Now is the time for Yale to defend its autonomy and core values with the full weight of its institutional capacity.