Aaron Sibarium’s reporting on Yale and other Ivy League schools suggests conservatives are right not to trust them
The first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem. The very fine people at Yale University appear to recognize that falling public trust in higher education is a problem, but they don’t really understand where they went wrong. University leaders are so flummoxed, in fact, that they’ve taken the extraordinary step of inviting a Washington Free Beacon reporter to help explain it to them.
Free Beacon staff writer Aaron Sibarium will appear on the New Haven campus next week for a panel discussion titled “Bridging the Divide: Trust in Higher Education and Media Through Conservative Lenses.” The event, hosted by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, will also include commentary from free speech lawyer Robert Shipley of FIRE and conservative journalist Jonah Goldberg of the Dispatch.
“I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to educate the Yale Community about the value of pluralism, free speech, and anti-discrimination law,” said Sibarium. “Doing the work is never easy, but I’m glad Yale has decided to hold space for these difficult conversations.”
Yale, one of the few remaining Ivy League schools that has yet to face threats of funding cuts from the Trump administration due to anti-Semitism and general wokeness, needs all the help it can get. For example, the university website notes that Sibarium works at the Free Beacon, “where covers law [sic],” which suggests the university should divert resources from its massive DEI administration budget to hire some competent copy editors.
Sibarium, who graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 2018, has a unique perspective on the problems facing elite universities. His reporting forced the resignation of an Ivy League president, Harvard’s Claudine Gay, who stepped down amid a series of scandals involving blatant plagiarism and a failure to condemn anti-Semitism on campus. More often than not, Sibarium was responsible for exposing the egregious behaviors that have eroded Yale’s standing among conservatives (and many others).
In 2021, for example, Sibarium reported that Yale Law School had pressured a Native American student to apologize for sending a lighthearted party invitation that included the term “trap house,” slang for a place to buy and use drugs, and noted that Popeyes chicken would be served. The student recorded a meeting with the law school’s associate dean, Ellen Cosgrove, and diversity director, Yaseen Eldik, who complained that the “fried chicken reference” was problematic because it “is often used to undermine arguments that structural and systemic racism has contributed to racial health disparities in the U.S.”
Eldik went on to explain that the student’s membership in the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group founded by Yale Law students in 1982, was “very triggering for students who already feel like FedSoc belongs to political affiliations that are oppressive to certain communities.” Cosgrove warned that the situation “may escalate” if the student refused to apologize, appearing to imply that the student could face problems with the “character and fitness” reviews required to pass the bar exam. “I worry about this leaning over your reputation as a person,” Eldik said. “Not just here but when you leave. You know the legal community is a small one.”
It is unclear if Sibarium’s presence on campus will be similarly triggering for students given his own oppressive affiliations, which include the Free Beacon, a notorious purveyor of neocon propaganda and right-wing “misinformation.” Among other things, the Free Beacon has been condemned by fact-checking experts for “falsely … insinuating that [Joe Biden] is becoming senile.”
Yale student Jack McCordick denounced Sibarium’s reporting on the “trap house” scandal in a column for the Yale Daily News, where the editorial standards have declined substantially since Sibarium left his post as opinion editor. He described the Free Beacon as a “conservative website whose penchant for beating the anti-woke drum is only matched by its hyper-nationalist saber-rattling.” McCordick, who graduated in 2022 (but not magna cum laude), currently works for the New York Times as an assistant to columnists Ezra Klein and Tressie McMillan Cottom, the UNC-Chapel Hill professor who accused government officials of having “deputized all white people” to murder black people during the George Floyd riots of 2020.
Since then, Sibarium has written numerous articles on Yale’s refusal to crack down on anti-Semitic rhetoric and behavior following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists. Last year, he reported that the university spent over a year investigating a Jewish professor who published an op-ed about anti-Semitism on campus. He has covered the lawsuits that Yale and other prestigious universities are facing for refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the use of racial preferences in admissions, and in November, he broke the news that a sudden and mysterious policy change had prevented Yale Law School from publicly congratulating one of its alumni, J.D. Vance, on his election as vice president of the United States.
Notwithstanding the decision to invite Sibarium, recent developments suggest Yale’s willingness to consider criticism is somewhat limited. The university reportedly considered making Heather Gerken, the law school dean who presided over the “trap house” scandal, the next president of Yale. She didn’t get the job. The woman who did, Maurie McInnis, is a cultural history scholar who specializes in the relationship between art and slavery. She was recently denounced for driving a Tesla in a Yale Daily News column that quotes the poet Dylan Thomas and an “economic sociologist” who specialized in “disadvantaged social groups.”
Yale’s Poynter Fellowship in Journalism is hosting a number of other politically charged events over the coming days, including a conversation with Yale graduate Rebecca L. Davis, a gender studies professor at the University of Delaware who cohosts a sexuality podcast with “a national expert on gender-affirming care.” On Thursday, NPR correspondent Adrian Florido will give a speech on “Reporting on Identity, Race and Immigration in Turbulent Times” at an event cosponsored by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Next Wednesday, the notorious anti-Semite, respected Democratic operative, and “journalist” Al Sharpton will discuss his “Career of Righteous Agitation.” Sharpton, who has yet to face consequences for accepting $500,000 in donations to his nonprofit from the Kamala Harris campaign before interviewing the candidate on MSNBC, recently used his show to promote a DEI-related boycott of PepsiCo.
A forthcoming conversation on “Political Reporting in an Age of Polarization” with CNN host Kaitlan Collins has been postponed.
