On October 28, more than 400 members of the Yale community gathered in Washington, DC, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to meet Yale President Maurie McInnis ’96 PhD and hear from Yale faculty and alumni whose work illustrates the impact of the ongoing For Humanity campaign. About 150 people also tuned in via the livestream.
After an introduction by university trustee Neal Wolin ’83, ’88 JD, McInnis took the stage. She discussed the declining trust in higher education, acknowledging the concerns of Americans about access and affordability. “The conversations about free expression are essential,” she said.
McInnis detailed the ways the university is addressing these concerns, including through the formation of a Committee on Trust in Higher Education, making Yale College tuition-free for students below a certain family income, and providing $564 million in financial aid across all of Yale’s schools. McInnis has also launched a strategic review of Yale College to ensure that Yale is doing everything it can to support students inside and outside the classroom.
“And in all that we’ve done, we’ve held onto a simple but powerful truth: universities have never been more important to the future of our nation,” McInnis said. A great university is “a place where debate and discovery go hand in hand,” she added.
From technology to medicine to the arts, McInnis said, Yale and other universities benefit people in this country and around the world on a daily, if not hourly, basis. “The contributions of higher education are undeniable, and much of them were made possible by the very type of government research funding now at risk,” she added.
After she spoke, presenters who embodied the breadth and depth of Yale’s impact on the world spoke about their work at Yale and beyond.
Leo Villareal ’90: For the Future of Art
Leo Villareal, a Mexican American light artist, combines software, light, and space in his work, which has involved installations at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland, and on bridges over the Thames River in London.
His most recent project is an installation at the top of the new JP Morgan tower in Manhattan, a striking new addition to the city’s iconic skyline.
His work was also recently displayed at Yale’s Schwarzman Center this fall. He created a site-specific installation for the interior of the center’s dome.
“It has been very inspiring to be able to make public work that connects to everyone, creating a sense of wonder and awe and bring out the best in us as humans,” Villareal said. “These projects bring us together around what I think of as the digital campfire. In a way, that is the power of a place like Yale—bringing people together around a sort of intellectual campfire: interdisciplinary, spontaneous, and inspiring.”
Priya Natarajan: For Curiosity-Driven Science
Priya Natarajan, the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics, has advanced our understanding of supermassive black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. She described how a supermassive black hole sits at the center of our galaxy, 4 million times more massive than our sun.
As part of her research into the formation of the first black holes, she proposed a new pathway for their creation, which predicted the existence of black holes that would have formed when the universe was quite young. The new James Webb Space Telescope, she says, has been discovering just such black holes.
“It’s been a thrilling time to see my abstract ideas correspond to very real objects that exist in the real universe,” Natarajan said.
But, she adds, because there are so many black holes in the universe, “nature must have multiple pathways to make them.” She continues to research other ways that black holes might come to be.
This research, while seemingly far-off from our daily lives, is actually intertwined, she said. “The way you probably arrived here tonight, via GPS, is directly connected: the same equations that govern black holes—the equations of the general theory of relativity—guide GPS.”
Yale, Natarajan said, is an intellectual playground and rich incubator for her ideas and the ideas of other researchers. “Science and technology consistently change our lives for the better,” she said. “Discoveries and breakthroughs translate into products and ideas that deeply impact our daily lives.”
Natasha Sarin ’11: For Evidence-Based Policymaking
Natasha Sarin is a professor at both Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management and the co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale, a non-partisan policy research center that provides in-depth analysis of federal policy proposals for the American economy. Previously, she was the deputy assistant secretary for economic policy and later a counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at the US Treasury Department.
After she returned to Yale following her work with the Treasure Department, she wanted to think about designing economic policies that better incorporated long-term impact as well as the short-term costs.
“Take something like the child tax credit,” she said. “We know what it costs, but what about the benefits? What about the return to society from investing in our children?” These kinds of questions inspired the creation of the Budget Lab at Yale.
“At the Budget Lab we go beyond simply estimating the financial and macroeconomic impacts of proposed policies, to exploring their effects on income distribution. Whether it’s the tax changes, deficit reduction, or universal pre-K, we want to help policymakers make more informed choices,” Sarin said.
She has found that members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have been interested in the lab’s analyses and findings. The Budget Lab’s work on the impacts of tariffs has been widely cited everywhere from Fox News to the New York Times to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. As tariff policy has shifted rapidly, Sarin and her colleagues have been able to quickly release updated analyses.
“As we all know, for democracies to be successful, policy needs to work for the people,” Sarin said. “We’re excited to be doing this work at the Budget Lab, and truly, there is no place that is better to do this work than at Yale.”
James Hatch ’24: For Teaching our Students to Face Darkness with Ferocity
James Hatch serves as a lecturer at the Jackson School of Global Affairs. In 2009, after a twenty-five-year military career, he was severely wounded in Afghanistan during a mission. He credits his teammates, the working dog on his team, and a helicopter crew with saving his life.
Ten years later and after a long recovery, Hatch became the oldest first-year at Yale, at the age of 52. He was admitted through the Eli Whitney Students Program, which brings nontraditional students from all walks of life to Yale.
“Although an Ivy League campus initially felt foreign to me, I sensed that Yale—despite the weight of the baggage I carried—could not only provide an extraordinary education, but also help me become a better human being,” he said.
Now, as a lecturer, Hatch feels that he has been given the opportunity to “help build human beings for the challenges ahead.” He strives to create environments where his students can have difficult conversations, and where disagreement is respected rather than feared.
“It seems to me that universities need instructors with experiences like mine as much as they need researchers in labs or scholars in libraries,” Hatch said. “I am profoundly grateful to belong to a community that still believes in, and delivers, education’s ability to shape the soul and serve the future.”
