Chun to Remain

To the chagrin of this board’s followers, Vicky Chun has been reappointed as Yale’s Director of Athletics for another five years. The fact that President McInnis cited Yale football’s four Ivy League championships since 2019 as the defining accomplishment of Chun’s tenure demonstrates just how flawed the administration’s evaluation was. Tom Beckett made the career-defining decision to hire Tony Reno, and with the foundation already in place before Chun arrived, virtually any competent athletic director with FCS experience could have enjoyed the same success.

For football fans, the game-day experience has been steadily diminished by needless restrictions—clear bags only, no stadium re-entry, and no strollers—while the Yale Precision Marching Band has become a shell of its former self. Meanwhile, once-proud programs such as men’s lacrosse and men’s hockey have regressed, and Princeton continues to lap Yale in overall Ivy League championships across all sports.

The administration’s decision to hire Husch Blackwell to conduct a comprehensive review of Chun’s tenure is another embarrassment. McInnis entrusted the review to a firm led not by an attorney, but by a CEO whose academic background is in marketing at Rutgers University and whose legal education consists of Harvard Law School’s Leadership in Law Firms executive education program rather than a J.D. or legal practice. For an institution that prides itself on academic rigor and legal excellence, the choice only reinforces the perception that McInnis exercised poor judgment from start to finish.

Taken together, this athletics debacle, which will burden Yale for at least another five years, an administration scrambling to resolve federal scrutiny over its admissions policies, and the Yale New Haven Health system’s rapid descent into chaos make this one of the least proud moments in recent memory to be an Eli.