Reading between the lines of Maurie McInnis’s commencement speech—and the painting that accompanied it.
In May, twenty thousand spectators watched as Maurie McInnis stepped up to the podium to deliver her first commencement speech as President of Yale.
She projected an image of a painting from the Revolutionary War on a screen next to her: The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill by the American “patriot-artist” John Trumbull.
“British forces have breached American lines,” McInnis narrated from her rostrum. “The fate of a young nation hangs in the balance.”
That was May. In March, the Trump administration had canceled $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University. In April, the administration froze Harvard’s federal funding, and Harvard sued. By May, universities everywhere were nervous.
But McInnis did not mention any of this context in her speech.
As the Trump administration has ramped up its attacks on higher education, McInnis has stayed quiet. Not silent: in April, she and 200 other university presidents signed a letter against the administration’s “intrusion” into higher education policy, and in May, she emailed students railing against the endowment tax proposed in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” But months into Trump’s second term, she has avoided saying anything potentially provocative, or anything whatsoever.
Yale has mostly been spared so far. No one knows exactly why, although there has been speculation. “McInnis’ Trump strategy: quiet in public, busy in Washington,” reads a January Yale Daily News headline.
She’s certainly no Alan Garber, the Harvard president who has made several public statements opposing the Trump administration’s policies, citing the university’s “moral imperative” to speak up. University presidents elsewhere, especially at Princeton and Wesleyan, have also been outspoken.
There was no requirement for McInnis to make a statement about politics in her speech, and she didn’t, not directly at least.
But her choice of painting—a scene from the Revolutionary War—and her discussion of “partisan antipathy” and “American ideals” points to present-day political polarization in the United States.
“When I began my academic journey at Yale as a graduate student, I never imagined that I would become an academic leader,” McInnis wrote in an email to me. Before assuming her first administrative role as Associate Dean of the College at the University of Virginia in 2010, she had spent twelve years teaching there as an art history professor.
But McInnis is not just an art historian anymore. As president of Yale, she is not an observer of the battle but a participant in it.
. . . . .
McInnis sent me an email about the painting and her background in art history in response to a request for comment about the speech.
“I loved my time in the art history classroom, and very much miss the regular interaction with students standing in front of works of art,” she wrote. “I was always drawn to art history because of the insights it provides into our shared humanity.”
McInnis said she saw the painting while strolling through the Yale University Art Gallery. The work hangs in the gallery, across from Trumbull’s portrait of George Washington. McInnis chose to feature the painting in her speech, she said, because next year marked the 250th anniversary of American Independence.
“Of course,” she wrote in the email, “today’s partisan divides do not parallel what they were experiencing in 1775.”
In her speech, she celebrated characters who acted with bravery and compassion during the Revolution, urging her audience to heed their examples of heroism today, “even when the stakes are as significant as life and liberty.”
The men in the painting have “these sort of deep interconnections,” Yale history professor Mark Peterson said, “even though they’re now on opposite sides of the conflict,” like Major John Small and his friend General Joseph Warren, who stand in the center of the painting.
The two men had fought for the British in the French and Indian War. Small remained loyal to the British. Warren eventually became one of America’s Founding Fathers.
In the painting, Small saves Warren from another Brit’s bayonet to the reproach of his fellow redcoats.
“One man preserves the dignity of a dying foe with an unexpected gesture of compassion amid chaos,” McInnis said of Small, emphasizing the importance of our “shared humanity,” a phrase she repeated throughout her speech and her email.
Though McInnis avoided comparing America in 1775 to 2025, she read the painting as an allegory for what partisanship should look like today.
“When you entered Yale,” McInnis told her audience, “partisan rancor had reached historic levels.”
But by the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, the colonists no longer saw the Crown as another party with a king they did not favor. Instead, they viewed it as a Parliamentary body attempting to restrict their rights.
There is more to the painting than a message about “our shared humanity.” McInnis might have compared the British tyrants in the painting to the Trump administration, which has been withholding federal funds to force universities to bend to its will. But McInnis kept her interpretation of it vague and open-ended. The takeaway for the audience was to be compassionate, even “amid chaos.”
But she never explains what she means by “chaos.”
Today, McInnis finds herself in a battle for the independence of Yale as an academic institution. The lines have been drawn; the “fate of a young nation” is at stake. Her strategy—silence—has been effective. As far as we know, Yale hasn’t had to concede as much to the Trump administration as other universities have.
McInnis is no Warren, no Small. Perhaps she is the barefoot man in the foreground of the painting, cradling Warren as he dies. Without a coat, a flag, or a weapon, he’s nameless and not affiliated with any cause. No one knows who he is, but Trumbull immortalizes him anyway. ∎
Adele Haeg is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College and an associate editor of The New Journal