Sitting down with the News last week, University President Maurie McInnis discussed a professor’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, Yale’s financial strain and her response to the Brown University shooting, among other subjects.
University President Maurie McInnis has spent the last year navigating one of the most turbulent periods in Yale’s recent history, after President Donald Trump was elected during her first semester on the job.
In an interview with the News last week, McInnis denied credit for keeping the University out of the Trump administration’s crosshairs, compared to peer institutions that have been battered by funding freezes tied to Trump administration demands. But federal legislation passed last year included an increased tax on endowment returns for wealthy universities like Yale, leading the University to adopt budget cuts.
Amid those pressures, McInnis sat down last Wednesday for a 30-minute interview with the News. She fielded questions on her responses to the Jeffrey Epstein files and to a December shooting at Brown University. She also spoke about her priorities for the University’s future and her life outside the office.
When asked to describe her tenure thus far as Yale’s president in three words, McInnis offered “listening, collaboration and steadiness.”
McInnis has followed the Epstein revelations, including Yale ties
Asked about computer science professor David Gelernter ’76 GRD ’77 whose email correspondence with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was released by the Department of Justice in January McInnis called his conduct incompatible with Yale’s standards.
“I was very concerned with the statements that professor Gelernter made,” McInnis said. “They did not comport with our standards of conduct and professionalism, and so we have both initiated an investigation into that and removed him from the classroom.”
Gelernter exchanged emails with Epstein between 2009 and 2015. In a 2011 email to Epstein sent three years after the financier’s Florida conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor Gelernter described a Yale undergraduate as a “v small goodlooking blonde” while recommending her for a job. After the email surfaced, Gelernter defended it in an email to School of Engineering & Applied Science Dean Jeffrey Brock ’92, writing that he had kept “the potential boss’s habits in mind.” Gelernter has said he developed a close relationship with the student and does not regret his association with Epstein.
McInnis told the News that she has been following the recent release of the Epstein files “at a headline level” and has “paid attention to people with Yale affiliations” included.
“What we are all increasingly seeing is the extraordinary breadth of Epstein’s connections across many areas of influence in American life, including higher education,” McInnis said. “There have been increasing numbers of people involved in employment positions, either presidents of universities, who were interested in trying to raise money from him, or faculty members, many of whom themselves were interested in getting support from him in support of their research.”
Nicholas Christakis ’84, now a Sterling Professor of social and natural science, met with Epstein in 2013 and maintained contact with him until 2016. Christakis sought to raise funds for his Human Nature Lab from Epstein. Christakis told the News he had “very limited interactions” with Epstein, and University spokesperson Karen Peart wrote to the News at the time that Yale has no “record of any related financial gift.”
McInnis called layoffs ‘unfortunate’ but necessary
In July 2025, Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law, raising the tax on Yale’s endowment investment income from 1.4 percent to 8 percent a levy McInnis immediately warned would cost the University roughly $280 million in its first year alone. In response, administrators have reduced non-salary expenses by 5 percent and sought to shrink the University’s workforce, including through layoffs whose scope remains unclear.
When asked whether she had personally spoken with any staff members whose positions had been eliminated, McInnis said no.
Asked whether she felt regret over the layoffs, McInnis said: “Obviously, but the financial reality of any university is we can only spend the money that is available to us.”
McInnis called the cost of the endowment tax “a really significant amount of money” and said the University has been “pulling out a little bit across the many planning units of this University” to address it. She added that the layoffs are “unfortunate” but “a reality of modern life.”
In November 2024, McInnis told the News that she had heard complaints from Yale affiliates about inefficiencies in University processes and that she and her team were working to decrease the time spent on administrative tasks.
Last Wednesday, McInnis expressed hope that “over the next few years” the University can work to improve its operational efficiency “that is, how do we deliver the administrative work we do here at Yale in ways that we can hopefully save money from those activities in order to drive it increasingly towards our academic priorities?”
She added that some “good areas to think about” for cost-saving measures include procurement and construction, as well as “some of those administrative units.”
McInnis explained her response to a ‘tragedy’ at Brown
Following the December shooting at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, McInnis did not issue a statement, unlike three other Ivy League university presidents. Some students criticized her for not addressing the shooting.
At the time, McInnis attributed her silence to guidelines she adopted from the Committee on Institutional Voice in the fall of 2024. The guidelines advise Yale leaders to limit their public statements on “matters of public, social, or political significance,” except in “rare cases.” They also state that leaders can speak on matters that “directly implicate the university’s core mission, values, functions, or interests” or infrequently “make statements of empathy or concern in response to events outside the university.”
When asked on Wednesday why a shooting at a peer institution did not meet the criteria outlined in the committee’s report, McInnis said: “I could throw it back to you, to why would it?”
“Shootings happen on college campuses and high schools and schools, unfortunately, way too regularly in modern life,” she added.
McInnis described the actions she did take in response to the shooting, including verifying with Yale’s public safety officials that there was no threat to campus, heightening campus security and personally calling Brown President Christina Paxson to offer condolences and assistance.
“It is one of the most horrific things as a university leader that you could ever have to go through,” McInnis said, recalling a 2017 incident at the University of Texas at Austin, while she served as provost there, in which a student stabbed four people, killing one fellow student. “I understand the emotional difficulty of being a leader of a community in that kind of pain.”
McInnis said that she has offered help to Paxson many times “in the months since that tragedy happened.”
McInnis is prioritizing physical sciences and engineering
McInnis was quick to point to the physical sciences and engineering when asked to name her top priority for investment if Yale had more financial resources immediately available.
“Our top priority is and remains and needs to be but it’s going to take a decade to fulfill the vision is to strengthen our areas in physical sciences and engineering,” McInnis said. “We have been working to both plan the physical spaces, begin the construction of the physical spaces, and begin to add faculty. And so we’re kind of eight years into that, and we have another decade to go.”
McInnis told the News in August 2024 that she views investments in science and engineering as one of Yale’s top priorities. Two years prior, under then-Yale President Peter Salovey, the University announced an extensive 10-year plan to ramp up its investments of its science and engineering scholarship including by modernizing campus buildings and hiring new faculty members.
The University’s cost-saving measures in anticipation of the endowment tax increase have included plans to pause construction projects.
“Most of our construction projects have gone forward,” McInnis said last week. “We have slowed some of those in order to be able to make the sort of financial adjustments that we need to make and savings in those areas.”
