All magazines have their habits and cultures, and The Yale Review is no exception. Our commitment has always been to publish work that grapples, in its own time and manner, with the pressing questions of culture and politics. Unlike, for instance, Harper’s and The New York Review of Books, this magazine has not made a habit of publishing open letters; it has only rarely issued editorial statements. This political moment, though, is on our doorstep, and seems to demand a more immediate response—if only to let our readers understand where we are in our thinking.
Over the first hundred days of the Trump administration, higher education, along with the intellectual and imaginative freedoms it sustains, has become a central target of the government’s efforts to win the culture war and reshape America. The administration is not thinking small. Instead, it’s threatening to pull hundreds of millions of dollars—and in Harvard’s case, billions of dollars—of federal funding for universities in an attempt to force them into line with its ideological objectives. As I wrote recently in an op-ed for The New York Times, these threats could end higher education as we know it. Whether they will be realized remains uncertain. This week, in an act of welcome resistance, Harvard filed suit against the administration’s actions, arguing that it has failed to follow the procedures laid out in the law and, more broadly, that using federal funding as a cudgel to enforce a particular ideology constitutes a violation of the First Amendment. We may be looking at a legal power struggle that ends up redefining the future of American intellectual life.
In the face of all this, and given the uneasy silence only now beginning to break, it seems essential for The Yale Review to speak plainly: We stand with those who defend the independence of intellectual inquiry. This little magazine, which appears four times a year in print and publishes online at a deliberate pace, was never designed for the rhythms of reactive journalism. Yet the work we do—bringing readers imaginative literature alongside essays and criticism—feels more vital than ever in a climate of rising fear and repression. Our forthcoming summer issue, planned long ago, is a special fiction issue; to keep making space for art and literature is to sustain the pilot flame of our deepest values.
Still, we cannot simply say, “We care about literature,” and remain silent about the travesties unfolding around us. Nor can we allow fear to colonize our imaginations; as Czesław Miłosz reminds us in The Captive Mind, artists and intellectuals, like everyone else, adapt in advance to oppressive regimes. As Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, put it, “If we don’t speak up, it’s going to get worse. Much worse, much faster.” His words echo Hannah Arendt’s observation that the erosion of freedom begins with quiet acts of acquiescence.
Universities, like all institutions, seek to protect themselves; the generous, and I hope correct, view is that they believe they do so on behalf of their communities. Many schools have chosen strategic silence, perhaps believing that playing the long game—staying out of direct confrontation—might preserve their autonomy. But we at The Yale Review ask: What is the cost of that silence in a moment when intellectual and imaginative freedom on campuses across America is under direct attack? It is not even clear that staying quiet is effective. As M. Gessen observed this week in The New York Times, “We saw Columbia, which was the first university targeted, try to bend, apparently in the hope of preventing further attacks. It very quickly became obvious that it doesn’t work.”
The belief that silence can serve as a shield is also a dangerous one, because authoritarian tactics flourish precisely by testing boundaries, and making examples of those who dissent.
And so we believe that universities must not only speak but also remember what kind of institutions they are meant to be—not corporations mitigating risk, but communities of inquiry, committed to truth, critique, and the expansion of human understanding. Gessen has urged universities to stop acting like corporations. I would add: they must act like universities—perhaps not as they are right now, but as they originally aspired to be.
It’s important to say that what is happening now is not abstract to us. It has come into our offices and our classrooms. In recent weeks, four Yale students had their visas revoked. The typically slow, deliberate work of this magazine, and the work of the university more broadly, is now interrupted by urgent meetings about urgent questions: How do we support these students? How do we navigate the language of rights when those rights feel provisional? How do we respond to those who argue that the loss of democratic freedoms is the price of safety—or a necessary reform in the aftermath of campus excesses? And even: What will be the potential consequences of publishing a particular piece?
We find ourselves, then, gathered not just to discuss poems and ideas but to reckon with what feels like the narrowing of possibility around us. This, too, is what authoritarianism looks like—not only the state’s sweeping crackdowns, but the daily interruptions, the constriction of space for the work we do. We say this to remind ourselves, and our writers, to think deeply and against the grain—or as Miłosz once put it, “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people? / A connivance with official lies, / A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment.”
We will publish, as ever, timely pieces that speak directly to this moment, but we will also continue to publish poems, fiction, and essays that do not. Even as we make it clear that we see and name what is happening around us, we believe that our commitment to quiet, subtle, nonreactive thought—to those against-the-grain imaginations—matters. We continue to share essays and criticism that make us feel fully and wholly human, and to create spaces for the utopian and the intangible, or the not-yet-said. This, too, is how we resist. By using language to reveal the complexities and irreconcilabilities of the world around us, and by trying to see beyond ourselves. We hope the pilot flame of democracy, though it may flicker, burns on.
