Heather Gerken, who presided over ‘trap house’ controversy, to succeed Darren Walker
The left-wing Ford Foundation has a new president: Heather Gerken, the scandal-plagued dean of Yale Law School whose tenure attracted national attention when administrators threatened the professional prospects of a second-year student for his use of the term “trap house” in an email.
Both Yale and the Ford Foundation announced the move in Monday morning emails. Ford Foundation board chair Francisco Cigarroa called Gerken “a thoughtful and innovative leader and a tireless advocate for equity, justice, and values of democracy,” while Yale president Maurie McInnis praised her work “to foster discourse across the political and ideological spectrum.” Neither message mentioned the free speech and anti-Semitism scandals that defined Gerken’s tenure and led Yale to pass her over when it named a new president in the spring of 2024.
Gerken made headlines in 2021 when Yale Law School administrators who reported to her spent weeks threatening a Native American law student for sending a lighthearted email invitation to classmates, asking them to a party at his “trap house” apartment for a Constitution Day celebration. Yale Law School diversity director Yaseen Eldik called the language “triggering” and suggested the student’s decision to serve fried chicken at the party could be “used to undermine arguments that structural and systemic racism has contributed to health disparities in the U.S.,” according to leaked audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon at the time. Eldik also suggested the student’s membership in the conservative Federalist Society could feel “oppressive to certain communities.” The blowback was so intense that Gerken was reportedly in danger of losing her job.
In another scandal, more than 100 Yale Law School students attempted to shout down a bipartisan 2022 panel on free speech, causing so much chaos that police were called to escort the panelists out of the building. The school’s associate dean was present at the panel, hosted by the Federalist Society, for its entirety but did not confront the protesters for violating Yale’s free speech policies. Gerken did not formally discipline the students and went on to bar press from a similar panel held months later.
In 2018, the man Gerken is slated to replace, longtime Ford Foundation president Darren Walker, published an essay on free speech in which he lamented “plenty of instances when our speech can perpetuate injustice and harm.” On “many college campuses,” he wrote, “students are testing and contesting where free speech ends and hate speech begins.” The foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it thinks the term “trap house” is permissible on college campuses or an instance of hate speech.
Gerken also came under fire for her handling of campus anti-Semitism. In 2021, for example, Yale Law school retained a diversity trainer who has argued that the FBI intentionally inflates the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes to conduct a mandatory “antiracism workshop.” Roughly two years later, in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Gerken rebuffed Jewish students who urged her to take a more forceful stance against anti-Semitism, instead referring them to counseling services to get through the “deeply challenging times.”
Gerken led the law school, meanwhile, as it brought on Iranian national Helyeh Doutaghi to serve as deputy director of its Law and Political Economy Project. The school fired Doutaghi in March after reporting revealed that she is a member of Samidoun, the “sham charity” that the U.S. government sanctioned in October for serving as a “front organization” for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group.
In this regard, Gerken appears to be a good fit for the Ford Foundation, which has faced anti-Semitism scandals of its own.
Under Walker, the foundation sent millions of dollars to foreign organizations whose employees, events, and projects celebrated Oct. 7 and decried the “Zionist entity,” a Free Beacon review found. The executive director of one grantee, the Jordan-based Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development, has expressed “gratitude to the martyrs of Palestine.” One month after the Hamas attack, the group hosted a panel in which participants rejected the idea that Palestinian “resistance” constitutes terrorism, calling it a “lie marketed by the United States and the occupation.”
The foundation began disbursing that money shortly after Oct. 7, with Walker announcing an effort to bankroll “immediate humanitarian relief efforts” in Gaza. Walker’s statement referred to “tragic events” that had occurred in Israel and Gaza but made no mention of who was behind them. Instead, Walker lamented the “anguish, pain, and suffering that countless families are experiencing in Gaza at this moment.”
In addition to the foreign grants, the Ford Foundation has sent at least $1 million to TheHistoryMakers, a left-wing education nonprofit that once employed Capital Jewish Museum shooter Elias Rodriguez.
Yale did not respond to a request for comment.
Gerken’s departure from Yale comes one year after the Ivy League institution tapped McInnis as its president, a job Gerken was in the running for. That consideration came despite pushback from more than a dozen federal judges, led by James Ho of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, who stopped hiring clerks from Yale Law School over its intolerance for conservative views under Gerken.
Yale has long occupied the number-one slot in the U.S. News & World Report‘s law-school rankings. In 2022, Gerken announced that the school would stop cooperating with the publication, which at the time produced its rankings largely using internal data provided by the law schools it ranked. Though Gerken framed the move as an altruistic one motivated by the publication’s “profoundly flawed” system, it came as Yale started to slip in the single most important factor in the rankings: the “peer assessment” score, which measured how deans and tenured professors across the United States rate a law school’s quality. U.S. News & World Report now largely bases its rankings on public data.
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