Campus Clips

A pause in hiring across the university, implemented on June 30, was lifted September 30. The pause was one of several measures Yale is taking to address the impact of an increased federal tax on its endowment income, from 1.4 to 8 percent. It will cost Yale an estimated additional $255 million annually, for a total tax payment of about $300 million a year, when it takes effect in 2026. That’s about 4.25 percent of the university’s operating budget. All units of the university have trimmed their non-salary budgets by 5 percent, and some capital building projects have been put on hold. The university is offering a one-time retirement incentive program for managerial and professional staff. 

A name change took effect this summer for the former African American studies department; it is now known as Black studies. Chair Erica Edwards says the faculty voted to change the name because “Black studies engages the global context of the Black diaspora, recognizing that not all people racialized as Black are of African descent.”

Yale jumped from 155th to 58th in the 2026 College Free Speech Rankings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Among Ivy League schools, only Dartmouth ranked higher (35th). The rankings are based on student surveys, administrative policies, and free-speech campus controversies and their outcomes.

Mid-career professionals will be able to get an advanced degree from the Yale School of the Environment in one year starting next fall. The school’s new on-campus master’s programs will include an executive master of environmental management degree and an executive master of forestry degree. 

The shelves of the library in Pauli Murray College have been mostly empty since the college opened in 2017, but they now house a special collection: around 10,000 books from the personal library of Harold Bloom ’55PhD, the Yale professor and literary critic, who died in 2019. Bloom’s wife Jeanne Bloom ’63PhD donated the books.

“It happened at Yale” reads a legend on the screen at the beginning of the new movie After the Hunt. And the sight of stars Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri in such familiar locales as Beinecke Plaza and Old Campus makes the claim especially convincing. But the film, a psychological drama involving a student’s sexual assault allegation against a professor, was in fact shot in England; the actors and the New Haven locations apparently share the screen by way of digital effects.