Yale is one of several prestigious universities that have come under scrutiny in recent years for their punitive policies around student mental health, often banishing students from campus if they exhibited signs of mental illness. In response to a lawsuit, Yale updated its policy to allow students to take leaves of absences instead of withdrawing, and to allow students to continue receiving health coverage and maintain access to the community. Also, beginning last year, Yale amended its regulations to recognize mental health issues as valid reasons for students to request a dean's extension.
One student, who has taken multiple leaves for mental health reasons, commented to Yale Daily News, "I have seen an upward trend of mental health advocacy groups around campus and a lot more conversations, articles, investigations and pushes for change so that’s really good."
Yale has been hosting the annual Symposium for Disability and Accessibility since 2022.
Yale was ranked 5th best university in the nation by U.S. News in 2025, maintaining its position from the previous year.
“I left primarily because Yale could not keep me safe,” she tells EdSurge in an interview this month. Simmons says she wants others to learn from her experience, which she argues is part of a pattern of well-known institutions that are failing to value and protect employees of color. “This is a persistent and pervasive problem in academe—and in many other institutions that were founded on whiteness. Many of us leave silently, and in our silence we become complicit.”
Simmons had been at Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence for more than six years, starting off as associate director of school initiatives, then moving into a director of education role and finally becoming assistant director of the center.
Even before the Zoombombing, she says she faced abuses by colleagues on the basis of her race, including “constant non-consensual hair touching” that made her feel exoticized. She had become a prominent speaker at conferences—including giving a TED talk—but says she was also told by a supervisor that the only reason people wanted to hear her ideas was because she was associated with Yale.
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Yale Police officers on Monday evening interrogated a black graduate student, Lolade Siyonbola GRD ’19, for more than 15 minutes, after a white graduate student reported Siyonbola to the police for sleeping in the HGS common room.
“You’re in a Yale Building and we need to make sure that you belong here,” one of the officers said to Siyonbola, according to a video of the incident Siyonbola posted to Facebook.
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“I deserve to be here; I paid tuition like everybody else; I am not going to justify my existence here,” Siyonbola told one of the police officers on video after she was asked to “sit tight” while they verified her student information. “I am not going to be harassed.”
A YPD supervisor told Siyonbola in the video that the investigation into her student status was “protocol.”
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