The 2019 Harvard-Yale Game Protest

This post is part of my series “God and Man at Yale Divinity.” For the full series, see the index page.

In November 2019, during my first semester at Yale Divinity School, I watched the Harvard-Yale football game from home. What I witnessed became the most talked-about moment of the season—not because of the game itself, but because of a halftime protest that revealed everything wrong with elite campus activism.

While the near end of the semester was certainly exciting enough, the most memorable event of the week was clearly the Harvard-Yale game, which served to demonstrate how out of touch and pedantic the children comprising the student body at these top schools really are.

The 2019 Harvard-Yale Game

All year, I had intended to attend the Harvard-Yale football game. I have not gone to any of the athletic events this year, but this was “The Game.” I wanted to go and had planned on taking the whole family.

Even more, it was in New Haven this year, meaning I wouldn’t have an opportunity to attend the Harvard-Yale game without traveling to Boston for another two years.

My mother and sister, however, came to visit this weekend, and I could not get enough student tickets for everyone to attend. So, when I saw that it would be broadcast, I decided to watch it at home instead.

I’m glad that I did.

The Protest at the Harvard-Yale Game

The second half of the game was delayed for about forty-five minutes because student protesters ran out onto the field and refused to leave. It was like watching children collapse screaming in a supermarket aisle because mommy won’t buy them a treat.

The students were apparently protesting climate change—or “climate crisis,” or for “climate justice,” or whatever snooty buzz words the woke scold crowd has now coined for this season’s cause du jour.

They ran out with their chants and their sanctimony and their homemade signs.

(I never understood why these protesters make such low-quality, handmade protest signs—scribbled with phrases they no doubt consider clever. It costs almost $80,000 per year to attend Yale. You’d think they could afford to have some professional signs made up.)

A Really Futile and Stupid Gesture

“No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.” Otter, Animal House

After the protests, the self-congratulations began from these teenagers who think they know everything. Their opponents, in turn, will correctly point out the apparent pointlessness of their actions.

And, of course, their actions are pointless. They won’t actually accomplish anything. The reality is, however, that they don’t care about results.

I think most of them know that nothing will actually change as a result of their protests. China and India aren’t going to stop emitting because a bunch of clueless teenage blue-bloods of the American Ivy League makes demands while engaging in acts of generally benign jackassery.

The truth is that they don’t protest against anything but for something. That is, they protest for each other. They care about the virtue signaling, about demonstrating solidarity among one another with the leftist ideals that characterize elite culture in a manner that takes the fervor of a religion among a populace that generally skews secular.

Divestment: Harvard-Yale Game Protest

Their loudest demand is that Harvard and Yale divest from fossil fuels. This apparently means that the endowments should not invest in energy companies, except those promoting “alternative energy.”

So, the endowment is not supposed to invest in Exxon stock, I guess. I’m not sure what this would accomplish on a practical level. Perhaps a temporary decline in the stock price, but I can’t help but feel this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the stock market and the economy in general work.

The administrations may eventually cave in to these demands, but I frankly doubt it. It is foolish for many reasons.

The most basic problem with divestment is that it doesn’t actually hurt the target companies. When Yale sells its shares of Exxon, someone else buys them. The shares don’t disappear. Exxon doesn’t lose a dime of revenue, doesn’t lay off a single employee, and doesn’t alter its operations in any way. The transaction is between Yale and whichever investor picks up the shares on the open market. The company itself is completely unaffected.

What does change is the composition of Yale’s endowment. By excluding an entire sector, the endowment loses diversification—a foundational principle of investment management. Energy stocks, whatever you think of the industry, have historically provided returns and served as a hedge against inflation. Removing them doesn’t punish oil companies; it punishes the endowment’s performance, which in turn funds the financial aid, research, and facilities that these same students enjoy.

This is the part that strikes me as so absurd. These students are demanding that Yale take an action that would have zero practical effect on the fossil fuel industry while potentially reducing the returns that fund their own scholarships. It is a demand rooted entirely in symbolism, which is fitting, because symbolism is all that any of this is really about.

Update (2026): In the years since this protest, several universities—including Harvard, which announced in 2021 that it would stop making new fossil fuel investments—have moved toward some form of divestment. The practical impact has been debated. Proponents argue the symbolic effect shifts public norms; critics note that the divested shares simply transfer to less scrupulous investors who are even less likely to push for environmental accountability. The fundamental economic argument remains: selling shares on a secondary market does not deprive the underlying company of capital. Whether the symbolic value justifies the financial trade-offs is a question each institution must answer for itself. My view hasn’t changed.

Virtue Signaling at the Harvard-Yale Game

The most obvious reason to me is that the kids don’t really care about the demands being met. Since everything is about virtue signaling, they’ll simply move onto the next demand. There will always be something to fight about and label a matter of “justice.”

Besides, if they were really principled about it, these protesters wouldn’t attend Harvard or Yale. If they believed that these schools were engaged in some great evil, and they actually held to their professed principles, they wouldn’t be part of these institutions. They certainly wouldn’t accept scholarship money from the endowments they so abrasively decry.

But they want the elite privileges associated with attending a storied institution, of being a Harvard or Yale alumnus. So, they bite the hand that feeds them because such nonsense has been elevated among their peer groups and by those in the administration who are heirs of similar radicalism from the 60s and 70s.

But no matter how many times they bite that hand, they will continue to expect to be fed.

Real privilege, however, is the ability to demonstrate ingratitude with impunity.

This is the deeper problem with elite campus activism, and it connects to much of what I’ve observed during my time at Yale. There is a culture at these institutions that mistakes grievance for depth and protest for moral seriousness. The students who ran onto that field weren’t engaging with the genuine complexity of energy policy, economic trade-offs, or environmental science. They were performing—for each other, for social media, for the internal currency of their peer group.

And this performance is rewarded. It is rewarded by administrators who share the same ideological commitments, by a media apparatus that treats every campus protest as a courageous act of resistance, and by a broader culture that has elevated the language of “justice” to the point where merely invoking it is considered sufficient. The substance doesn’t matter. The posture does.

What’s lost in all of this is any sense of proportion, any awareness that the world is not arranged for the convenience of their moral certainties. The climate is a serious issue. Energy policy is a serious issue. But seriousness requires more than chanting slogans on a football field. It requires the kind of sustained, rigorous, and often unglamorous work that doesn’t make for a good Instagram post.

The Privilege of Ingratitude

What the Harvard-Yale game protest ultimately revealed was not the moral courage of a generation but its profound lack of self-awareness. Here were students at two of the wealthiest, most prestigious institutions in human history—institutions that have educated presidents, shaped nations, and produced more opportunity per capita than perhaps any other organizations on earth—and their response was to storm a football field and demand that the hand feeding them divest from the economy that built the very endowments funding their education.

I say this as someone who came to Yale later in life, as a 34-year-old veteran and lawyer who took a rather unconventional path to divinity school. I spent years in the Army. I went to law school on the GI Bill. When I arrived at Yale, I was genuinely grateful—grateful in a way that perhaps only someone who has seen a very different side of life can be. I walked through the Yale Art Gallery that semester and saw artifacts from Dura-Europos that have been preserved for thousands of years. I sat in seminars with world-class scholars. I had access to one of the greatest libraries on earth. Every day felt like an extraordinary privilege, because it was.

The protesters at the Harvard-Yale game didn’t seem to feel that way. Or if they did, they had a strange way of showing it. They took one of the great traditions of American collegiate life—The Game, a rivalry older than most nations—and turned it into a platform for the same performative grievance that has come to define elite campus culture. They could have organized a teach-in. They could have written op-eds. They could have engaged the administration in serious policy discussions. Instead, they chose the approach that maximized attention for themselves while contributing nothing of substance to the conversation.

This is what I keep coming back to in my “God and Man at Yale Divinity” series: the tension between the extraordinary gifts these institutions offer and the staggering ingratitude with which so many students receive them. I came to Yale with aspirations to do Ph.D. work and a deep appreciation for the opportunity I’d been given. Many of my fellow students seemed to arrive with a chip on their shoulder and a list of demands. The irony is that the very freedom to protest without consequence—to bite the hand that feeds you and expect to keep being fed—is itself the greatest privilege of all.

It’s a shame the protesters at the Harvard-Yale game didn’t realize just how lucky they are. Yale is a great place. I was thankful every time I got to step on that beautiful campus. I hope that, in time, some of those students who rushed the field will look back and feel the same way—not about the protest, but about the place itself, and the extraordinary opportunity they were given to be there.

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The weekly update that originally accompanied this post—covering final papers, exams, and campus resources—has been moved to Week 12 at Yale: Finishing the Semester.