On March 4, Connecticut’s State Supreme Court denied consideration of a lawsuit filed by two Yale alumni, which sought to overturn a 2021 decision by Yale’s President and Fellows to end alumni’s election eligibility to Yale’s board of trustees via petition. Both plaintiffs, Victor Ashe and Donald Glascoff Jr., told Inside Investigator that they felt “disappointment” regarding the denial.
“The choice of the six alumni will be determined solely by the Yale Alumni Association, which is owned and operated by the Yale Administration,” said Ashe. “In other words, there’s no independent voice or mechanism for Yale alumni to choose any member of the Board other than who the administration wants.”
The suit was first filed by Ashe and Donald Glascoff Jr., both of whom are Yale alumni, in April 2022. The two accused the President and Fellows of Yale College, referred to in the suit as the Corporation, of violating Yale’s charter as amended by the state legislature in 1872. The complaint alleged the Corporation of three legal violations: ultra vires action (a corporation acting outside of its authority), and two breaches of contract.
“The Corporation was unabashed in its reasoning for eliminating the Petition Process: to prevent alumni perceived by the Corporation as holding problematic or dissenting views from being elected to the Corporation,” reads an excerpt from their complaint.
Yale’s charter dictates that six of the Yale Corporation’s 19 trustees be alumni, who are elected by other alumni. In 1929, the Corporation laid out two methods by which alumni could earn trustee candidacy: nomination by a committee of Yale Alumni Association board members and earning enough signatures of fellow alumni for a petition. Per the complaint, the number of signatures required of alumni seeking ballot eligibility was increased over time, from 250 signatures in 1965 to 4,397 in 2020, before the pathway was done away with entirely in 2021.
Yale attorneys initially moved to dismiss the suit, arguing Ashe and Glascoff lacked standing to bring their claims.
“The Charter and its amendments gave certain alumni the right to vote in alumni trustee elections, but there is no dispute that Plaintiffs—like all eligible alumni—still have that right to vote,” reads Yale’s motion to dismiss. “Giving any of the qualifying alumni (there are over 130,000 living Yale alumni) the power to file suit over the regulations chosen by the President and Fellows would not serve the purposes of the Charter and its amendments, which explicitly give the President and Fellows the power to ‘prescribe’ those regulations for the election of alumni trustees.”
The court agreed to dismiss two of the counts, but allowed the suit to proceed on one due to the finding that Ashe and Glasscoff “may well” have standing. However, on Feb. 26, 2024, that court ruled in agreement with Yale’s finding that Ashe and Glascoff lacked standing to sue. The two appealed the ruling to the appellate court, which ruled in agreement with the Superior Court on Dec. 2, 2025.
Both Ashe and Glascoff Jr. admitted that they knew consideration by the State’s Supreme Court would be unlikely.
Ashe, who was the former mayor of Knoxville from 1987 to 2004 and U.S. Ambassador to Poland from 2004 to 2009, said that the removal of petitions “takes [Yale’s] slogan of ‘lux et veritas’ [light and truth] and makes a mockery of it.”
“If I tell you the two candidates you could vote for for the Governor of Connecticut are only the two I handpick, that would be fundamentally wrong,” said Ashe.
In 2021, Ashe received ballot eligibility for a trustee position after amassing over 7,000 petition signatures. Ashe ran on a platform that vowed to make Yale more transparent, but ultimately lost to Alumni Association nominee David Thomas, then President of Morehouse College. Ashe criticized not only Yale’s revocation of the petition eligibility process, but also the inability of alumni to submit write-in votes or to see how many votes each candidate received after elections close.
“Can you imagine that in a real election?” asked Ashe. “What kind of deal is that? How do you even know it’s accurate? And their excuse is, ‘Well it might be embarrassing to the person that ran.’ I ran for mayor of my city 4 times and I was elected — if I lost, the votes I got should be announced.”
Shortly after Yale did away with the ballot petitions, Senior Trustee Catharine Hill released a statement which argued the decision was made as a defense against candidates being propped up by special interest groups.
“In recent years, petition candidates have been supported by well-funded organizations, sometimes with paid, professional staff, who ‘sponsor’ petitioners, communicate on their behalf with university offices, and support public relations efforts on the candidates’ behalf,” said Hill. “Trustees who arrive with these commitments will be challenged to do the work of a fiduciary-to represent all of Yale’s constituencies, to be open to changing one’s mind, and to participate in the deliberative process that yields the best decisions, in the service of all of Yale.”
Furthermore, Hill said the “tenor, cost and time required” of “cause-based elections” could dissuade otherwise qualified candidates from accepting their nominations.
“The resulting politicization of Alumni Fellow elections is likely to discourage many alumni who might make excellent fiduciaries from agreeing to be candidates,” said Hill. “At the heart of the matter is the vital distinction between an elected representative of a cause or movement and a person elected without any agenda other than to bring independent judgment to the varied and complex issues facing the university.”
Glascoff Jr. told Inside Investigator that he disagreed with Hill’s arguments, calling them “self-judgmental and self-condeming.”
“It shows that Yale, at that time, had no respect for a lively dialogue and dispute within the academy,” said Glascoff Jr. ““I believe that expression of views and opinions, and advocacy for them, is essential to a vibrant First Amendment landscape.”
Glasscoff Jr. said Hill’s statement was “completely inconsistent” with the ideas laid out in the Woodward Report, a 1974 report issued by Yale historian Vann Woodward, then-chairman of Yale’s Committee on Freedom of Expression. The report states that “the paramount obligation of the university is to protect their [members of the university community] right to free expression.” Per Yale’s own website, it “adopted” the report in 1975 as “providing the standard for university policy.”
Glascoff Jr. said he is “bowed and bloody, but not quite finished yet,” and that he has been considering other means by which to challenge Yale’s 2021 decision. Glascoff Jr. said he has even “hired a lobbyist in Washington to advise us on the political framework within which decisions such as this are made by universities.”
He said he was sure that “several other alumni on the same side of the question as Victor and I” would be disappointed by the Supreme Court’s denial as well. In October 2021, over 1,100 alumni signed a petition requesting that the university reinstate the petition process.
“Yale sends the message to its alumni, ‘ We value your donations, but we don’t have time for your opinions,’” said Ashe. “That’s a terrible message for an institution that says they stand for ‘lux et veritas’to practice.”
Inside Investigator requested comment from representatives of Yale’s General Counsel and Public Affairs and Communications Department, but did not receive a response.
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