Diversity, equity, and inclusion are all the rage on elite college campuses these days (not to mention on Bill Ackman’s Twitter, where he wrote, earlier this month, “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people”). And understandably so, given how white and male these institutions have been for most of their existence. One of the small miracles performed by a university admissions office is completely remaking the campus population in four short years.
So it’s not particularly surprising that a place like Yale has a much more diverse student population now than, say, when it was founded, in 1701, or than in 1870, when the first Black student, Edward Alexander Bouchet, enrolled, or than in 1969, the year Yale admitted women for the first time. (The last of these events, not unexpectedly, met with considerable controversy.)
The fastest-growing population of students at Yale, reportedly, are those of mixed race. “There’s a whole different population here than there once was, and that informs everything at Yale. Everything,” explains one longtime professor in the humanities. And few people object to that—except when it comes to the school’s most storied secret society, Skull and Bones.
A Bone to Pick
With the demographic shifts at Yale, big changes have also taken place in the college’s secret societies. There are eight aboveground societies at Yale, meaning they own seemingly impenetrable, fortress-like buildings on or near campus and the land underneath them.
The clubs are for Yale seniors—who are “tapped” each year as juniors by the outgoing class of seniors in a variety of mysterious ways—and are owned and operated by nonprofit corporations, with boards comprising alumni trustees who provide much of the annual financial support. That gives the alumni a certain amount of ongoing control, too.
Aside from Skull and Bones, which was founded in 1832 and is the most well known of the bunch, the societies have names such as Scroll and Key, Book and Snake, and Berzelius. Because they are private nonprofits, they are immovable forces on campus—the Yale administration can’t do anything about whom they select or what happens inside their hallowed halls. Most of the eight secret societies, which are known as the “Ancient Eight,” have Yale faculty members who loosely mentor the senior students, to the extent that they’re willing to listen.
It’s among alumni of the storied, prestigious Skull and Bones that concerns are most acute about how far the diversity pendulum has swung.
The club has an impressive and powerful roster of alumni, including many who have gone on to run the world, from George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, to John Kerry, William F. Buckley Jr., and Blackstone Group C.E.O. Stephen Schwarzman. Other Bonesmen include the former Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin and his Yale roommate, the billionaire hedge-fund manager Eddie Lampert.
More recent Skull and Bones members include Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Tali Farhadian Weinstein, a former state and federal prosecutor who ran, unsuccessfully, for Manhattan district attorney in 2021. (Women weren’t allowed into Skull and Bones until 1991, nearly 25 years after Yale went co-ed.)
Back in the days when Skull and Bones comprised white men and only white men, there were bizarre, if not mythologized, initiation rituals, including drinking a liquid that resembled blood out of a skull, and masturbating in a coffin while confessing secrets to other members.
“There’s a whole different population here than there once was, and that informs everything at Yale. Everything.”
It’s fair to say that what used to be true of Skull and Bones—that it was a preserve of white men—is decidedly no longer the case. Of the 14 Yale seniors in the Skull and Bones “Club of 2023,” (last year) it seems that only one, Lukas Flippo, was a white, cisgender, straight male. He hails from rural Mississippi—a “first-generation, low-income student,” who “dances around his room to Taylor Swift, and searches for the perfect chocolate chip cookie,” according to his biography in the society’s Club of 2023 roster. Among Flippo’s more diverse colleagues were a Black woman from Kenya; the son of Korean Presbyterian pastors from the Midwest; and a woman who grew up in Jeonju, South Korea. There is also a Diné woman who was raised in Tonalea, Arizona, on the lands of the Navajo Nation.
Of the 15 members of the current class—the Club of 2024—it appears that only 32-year-old Bobby Atkinson, from Janesville, Minnesota, is a white man. A self-proclaimed fan of the writing of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Atkinson served multiple combat deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan before attending Yale as an undergraduate. He also likes coffee, according to his Club of 2024 bio. His fellow Class of 2024 Bonesmen include 24-year-old Nathan Chen, the Olympic champion figure skater, and Aster Aguilar, from Wilbraham, Massachusetts, who is majoring in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, with a focus on contemporary trans playwriting. (Not surprisingly, given the club’s history of secrecy, none of the four members of the Club of 2024 whom I contacted by e-mail responded to an interview request.)
Now some former Skull and Bones members are saying the secret society has gone too far in its efforts to remake its traditionally white-male identity to keep up with the times.
There’s nothing out of the ordinary about Skull and Bones alumni being upset at the current gender and ethnic makeup of the club. Something similar happened more than 30 years ago, when the Class of 1991 tapped seven women to be Bonesmen for the following year. The Bones alumni were incensed. The nonprofit that owns the club and the land underneath it—the Russell Trust Association (R.T.A.)—went so far as to change the locks to “the Tomb,” as the society’s windowless building on High Street in New Haven is known.
The matter of admitting women was ultimately put to a vote of the Bones alumni and passed 368–320. But William F. Buckley Jr. objected mightily. He claimed that the bylaws, which govern the club’s processes, had to be changed to admit women, and he obtained a temporary restraining order blocking any new members from induction into Skull and Bones. A second alumni vote, in October 1991, ratified the decision to admit women, and the lawsuit was dropped. Austan Goolsbee, who later served as the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, led the fight between the Bones alumni and the Yale seniors to admit women.
Skull and Bones wasn’t alone in opposing the idea of women joining its ranks. Henry “Sam” Chauncey Jr.—Yale class of 1957 and a legendary Yale administrator who was the right-hand man of Kingman Brewster, the school’s 17th president—later got canned from Wolf’s Head, one of the original eight secret societies, for being a vociferous advocate for co-education at Yale and for the admittance of more minority students.
When he was a Yale senior, Chauncey tried to get the first Jewish student into Wolf’s Head. “We did it because we liked him,” Chauncey said when I interviewed him recently, “but we also knew the alumni would be furious.” They were. They told him if he tapped the Jewish student and he accepted, they would shut the society down. The seniors tapped the boy, but he declined the invitation, without knowing what the alumni had threatened. “We were tweaking [the alumni] back then,” he said, “and I’m sure they tweak them today.”
It’s all part of the ongoing pas de deux between universities and society at large. “If you put a university in a plastic bubble, it would never change,” Chauncey says. “Universities are very slow to change from internal pressure. That happens but not very often. Society pressures institutions to change.”
While it’s true that the R.T.A. has the power of the purse at Skull and Bones, that control extends only so far. Can the alumni change the locks on the Tomb, as they reportedly did during the coronavirus pandemic because the incumbent Bonesmen supposedly infected their Black housekeeper? Or cut off the funding for the private chef who cooks their dinners? Yes. But maintaining the composition of the members is a longer shot, even for rich “masters of the universe.”
According to my sources, who did not wish to be named, the zealous push to diversify the current Skull and Bones cohort began a bit before, and in the thick of, the Black Lives Matter movement, when Skull and Bones members turned the portraits of former white, privileged, male members to face the wall. “Not defacing or destroying them,” said an alumnus of another Yale secret society, “just sort of sending a message.”
Then, in the year or so before the pandemic, the outgoing seniors at Skull and Bones decided to tap a new cohort consisting entirely of people of color—it was called a “protest club” or, more simply, “the Coup.”
One member of the Skull and Bones club of 2020, Cami Árboles, a pole dancer and yoga enthusiast, famously did a pole dance in her cap and gown on her Instagram story as her graduation was virtual that year. (The video of her dance went viral, naturally.)
“It was like flipping [the Bones alumni] the bird,” the alumnus continued, “and they’ve been wrestling with that ever since. The group that came in clearly knew and understood they were a ‘protest tap.’ And I think there’s been this tension since.”
“They refused to let in any white people, and it really was like a ‘fuck you’ to the alumni,” a recent Yale graduate told me.
According to my sources, Andrew Klaber, the president of the board of trustees of the R.T.A., has been leading the charge at Skull and Bones to temper the diversity initiative, if just a little.
Klaber is a former partner at Paulson & Co., a hedge fund that cashed in big-time during the 2008 financial crisis, and is the founder of Bedford Ridge Capital, an estimated $2 billion New York–based hedge fund. He has one of those gold-plated résumés: Yale (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Truman Scholar, multiple-award winner at graduation); Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar; Harvard Law and Harvard Business School. He’s run at least 12 marathons, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and bicycled across America for Habitat for Humanity. (He did not respond to a message left on his fund’s voicemail or his e-mail requesting a comment. Nor did any of the other Bones alumni who serve on the R.T.A. board of trustees.)
Klaber is reportedly unhappy with the extent of Skull and Bones’ diversity and “played a very, very active role,” according to a fellow Bonesman, in overseeing the most recent Skull and Bones tap—the first time ever that alumni of Skull and Bones have been actively involved in choosing new members.
Klaber supposedly stayed up until five A.M. with the outgoing class of Bonesmen as they selected the new class, trying to get them to be less bullish on diversity. His efforts apparently failed.
“He felt like he had no impact,” a former Bonesman told me. “They just did what they wanted to do anyway.” He said Klaber was “a bit frustrated, but he was not angry” about the outcome of the 2024 selection process. “He just sort of was like, ‘This is the way our group is responding.’ … He was trying to be constructive.”
David Alan Richards, a Skull and Bones member from the class of 1967 and the author of Skulls and Keys, an authorized history of his secret society, served on the R.T.A. board once upon a time, too. He’s happy to report that the secret societies at Yale remain popular among the students, in large part because of what they are not.
“They are not marred by scandal,” he told me. “They don’t hold parties the way the finals club did up at Harvard and got them in trouble with the administration for sexual assaults. They’re not primarily eating clubs, which the history of Princeton has called ‘a contact sport.’ They have intellectual purposes. They have programs. Many of them have faculty advisers—Bones does not—but many of the younger ones do. And so there are a panoply of types. But they are not toxic, and they are popular.”
Bones, for one, does not allow the drinking of alcohol inside the Tomb, although several of the other Ancient Eight do, and are said to engage in drunken debauchery while skimpily dressed undergrads run around.
Richards says, though, that some alumni of his vintage, or perhaps even those younger than he is, find the demographics of the club “clearly more difficult” today than it used to be during their era, when the demographic was “white and not very Jewish.”
Each year the club sends out a directory of the new club members, including their pictures and their biographies. Alumni, Richards says, can take one look and see that “whites and males generally are in the minority.”
However, he continued, if the alumni were truly bothered by the changes at the club, they wouldn’t have donated the $3.22 million to Skull and Bones—as much as ever—that they did in the past year or so, including gifts from Schwarzman, Mnuchin, and Lampert.
Richards says they used some of the money raised to construct a ramp at the Tomb so that the Muslim woman member “in a hijab and a wheelchair” could get inside. “These are the things we pay for and celebrate,” he said. (According to the R.T.A.’s latest Form 990 filed with the I.R.S., the organization has assets of $17.2 million.)
Each year, the Bones alumni and current club members have a meeting at the Yale Club, in Manhattan. Richards said the turnout is usually very good. “If what you’re suggesting would be the case, people wouldn’t show up,” he said. “People show up every year from classes older than mine.”
Unsurprisingly, nobody in the club wants to talk about what goes on inside. And why would they? Who would benefit from speaking up in the middle of our culture wars? Not the Yale seniors who have pretty painlessly achieved their goal of diversifying the secret societies, and certainly not the frustrated alumni, who, if they vent, will get ripped limb from limb.
Richards tells me that Andrew Klaber is not “leading any charge” to get more white men into Skull and Bones. “You may be hearing that from somebody who is projecting and thinks Klaber should be leading the charge,” he said. “Diversity is not our problem. It’s not a corporate problem. It’s not an undergraduate problem. It’s just not.”
Still unconvinced that feathers remained completely unruffled in the face of such great change at a relatively conservative club, I asked Richards whether Klaber is not upset in the least about how diverse Bones has become. “No, no,” Richards responded, sounding exasperated. “We’re attempting to manage it.”
William D. Cohan is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of such best-selling books as The Last Tycoons, House of Cards, and The Price of Silence. He is a founding partner of Puck. His latest book, Power Failure, is out now