The group’s founding commitments are:
Faculty for Yale:
- insist on the primacy of teaching, learning, and research as distinct from advocacy and activism, and on the centrality of the faculty to these core activities;
- confirm Yale’s commitment to robust free expression, including affirmative efforts to foster more open campus and classroom discourse, coupled with institutional neutrality;
- affirm the university’s commitment to the pursuit of excellence; critical thinking applied to all points of view; and a tolerant and broad-minded campus ethos and culture;
- urge greater administrative transparency and increased faculty oversight of all pedagogic and academic activities.
One important corollary is that Yale as an institution should not prescribe any moral or political positions as institutional orthodoxy or treat the failure to endorse such a position as grounds for sanction or exclusion, whether formal or informal. Doing so thins our collective knowledge and experience and diminishes the truth-seeking enterprise in which we are all engaged.