The day after Hillary Clinton was nominated by the Democratic National Committee in 2016, Yale Law School congratulated Clinton, class of 1973, "on her historic nomination for President of the United States." Eight years later, it is refusing to congratulate J.D. Vance on his actual election.
The school has made no statement about the vice president-elect, who graduated from Yale Law in 2013, since he and Donald Trump scored a landslide victory on Tuesday. And according to Debra Kroszner, the law school’s chief of staff, it doesn’t plan to.
Kroszner told the Washington Free Beacon that the school would include "this news" in the next issue of its alumni magazine—which is only published twice a year—but would not congratulate Vance publicly, citing a new policy against issuing institutional statements.
She declined to direct the Free Beacon to the text of that policy or explain why congratulating alumni would violate it. In just the past 10 days, the law school has publicly recognized three alumni, including federal judges from both parties, for their accomplishments, and promoted the work of a student group devoted to "immigrant justice."
Yale Law also stayed mum when Vance secured the vice presidential nomination in July and was elected to the Senate in 2022. By contrast, Ohio State University, Vance’s undergraduate alma mater, congratulated him on Wednesday hours after the race had been called.
The silence from the law school is conspicuous given the outsized role Yale played in Vance's life. The son of a single mother addicted to heroin, Vance burst onto the scene in 2016 with a best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, that grew out of a paper he wrote at Yale Law. There he met Usha Chilukuri, his future wife, and Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who would bankroll his 2022 Senate campaign.
He also chafed at what he saw as the school’s elite monoculture, developing the beginnings of a populist critique that would define his political career.
"Despite Yale’s transformative role in his life," the New York Times wrote in July, "Vance’s relationship with the school could be summed up as conflicted."
The law school’s relationship with its conservative alumni could be summed up the same way. On the one hand, Yale Law maintains ties to right-of-center judges and has congratulated conservative alumni, including Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, in the past. But it has also taken flack for those encomia—students and faculty derided the school’s praise for Kavanaugh after he was accused of sexual assault—and has become more reticent to honor figures deemed objectionable by the school’s activist class.
The double standard has manifested in which alumni have, and don’t have, their portraits displayed in the law school. In 2018, Yale Law School commissioned a painting of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas with funding from Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire, who donated over $100,000 for the portrait. Six years later, it has not been hung up.
The law school does display paintings of Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic lawmaker who refused to concede the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, in its largest classroom. Other portraits include Abe Fortas, the former Supreme Court justice who resigned in 1969 amid allegations of corruption.
Two conservative student groups, Yale Law Republicans and the Yale Federalist Society, are now asking the law school to add a painting of Vance, who, at 40, will become one of the youngest vice presidents in history.
"Vice President-elect Vance has distinguished himself as a Yale Law alumnus and exemplifies the best of the next generation of conservatives," the groups wrote in a letter to Heather Gerken, the law school’s dean. "We hope the Yale Law School administration will join us in congratulating Vice President-elect Vance and honor this extraordinary achievement by commissioning a portrait at the law school, as it has done for many distinguished alumni."
Thus far, the only acknowledgment of Vance’s victory has come from the university, not the law school. The Nov. 7 edition of Yale Today, a daily newsletter, linked to a USA Today story about the incoming vice president, adding a short blurb—"JD Vance ‘13 J.D. elected one of the youngest vice presidents in U.S. history"—that did not explicitly congratulate him.
There is little love lost between Vance and his alma mater. In Hillbilly Elegy, he described feeling like an "awe-struck tourist" when he arrived at Yale. But by 2021, the enchantment had worn off.
After law school administrators were caught pressuring a student to apologize for his use of the term "traphouse"—a scandal that became national news and briefly imperiled Gerken’s deanship—Vance told the Free Beacon that Yale Law was betraying its mission.
"The only reason this institution exists is to promote interesting thinking," he said. "What it actually does is train people to be boring and provincial thinkers who harass other people for having original thoughts."