Yale unjustly terminated Lee after 17 years of service, based solely on a complaint by Alan Dershowitz regarding her public speech; her actual academic performance evaluations remained the highest to the end. After failing to elicit a response from Yale about its actions, she appealed to the courts, only to experience an Orwellian world of power protecting power (Yale’s choices themselves can be seen as protecting the power of Donald Trump, up for reelection at the time and who shares commercial conflicts of interest with Yale’s chair of psychiatry). More information can be found here. Below is a timeline:
May 17, 2020: Yale terminated Lee without warning or due process, for last date of June 30, 2020
March 22, 2021: after attempting for ten months to dialogue but failing, at the advice of former Yale Law School dean, Lee filed a lawsuit
December 22, 2021: top constitutional scholars of the country agreed Lee “has an excellent case”; however, the senior judge ruling in Lee’s favor for nine months was replaced without cause or explanation
August 30, 2022: after eight months of silence, the newly-appointed junior judge ruled against Lee, dismissing her case on specious grounds
September 23, 2022: the newly-appointed junior judge was instantly promoted, surpassing even the senior judge, to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals
October 6, 2022: in hopes to correct the junior judge’s error, Lee filed an appeal, but it went to the Second Circuit, where the junior judge was newly presiding
June 20, 2023: the Second Circuit upheld their new colleague’s decision, without addressing the federal question of free speech, despite being a federal court, compounding error upon error
September 20, 2023: a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court was deemed unworkable, precisely because of the Second Circuit’s failure to address the federal question of free speech
Even though top legal scholars all agreed that Lee’s case against Yale was “excellent”, it never entered into discovery, due to poor legal decisions that only compounded errors with each stage. Shockingly, in order to dismiss the case, Yale stated on the record that it had no obligation to academic freedom: it said that its renowned Woodward Report was merely a “statement of principles” and “not a set of contractual promises”—in other words, it was willing to abandon its principles in order to “win”. This became, in part, the reason for Yale’s earning the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) “Lifetime Censorship Award.” Lee warned, presciently at the time, that the attack on academic freedom presaged authoritarianism. She was right: she was only the first in a new era of academic repression unseen since and exceeding the McCarthy era.
Lee’s and others’ reactions can be read here.
Lee’s resolution can be read here.
Click here to view select letters of support
Click here to view select media coverage
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“This is a disgusting way for any university to act. Dr. Bandy Lee should never have been fired.”
– Prof. Lawrence H. Tribe, Harvard Law School
“Yale blundered badly by siding with the APA’s gag rule rather than the right—indeed responsibility—of its faculty to speak out against a dangerous president.”
– Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University
“I wholeheartedly stand in solidarity with Bandy Lee, a brilliant and wonderful sister and professor!”
– Prof. Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary
“Lee has played a constructive and necessary role in warning about the consequences of vesting political power in persons who might abuse it.”
– Prof. Richard W. Painter, University of Minnesota
“I simply want to thank you, Dr. Lee, for your courage and your honesty and your sense of duty to others—to your fellow citizens. Every time I read you, then followed your trials and travails at Yale, I thought of Jefferson: ‘for I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’”
– M.R.S., Fellow Citizen
“I say so as a Jew myself. Three Jews—Jeffrey Lieberman, John Krystal, and Peter Salovey—silenced you for trying to prevent another Hitler from rising.”
– R.S.W., Fellow Citizen
“Judicial proceedings in the U.S. have become quite odd. Some suits with no discernible legal merit get right up to the Supreme Court, while others with merit are disposed of with a wave of the hand.”
– M.B., Fellow Professor
I filed a lawsuit with a heavy heart because I never imagined that Yale, my alma mater and institution for 17 years, would not uphold its principles. The lawsuit can be read via this link.
Other than some training I received at Harvard Medical School, I have been devoted to Yale since 1990, and in fact turned down a Harvard faculty position to return to Yale in 2003, precisely for its principles. These principles reflected those of my grandfather, a renowned physician and inspiration for my entering medicine, who held medical ethics to be of utmost importance—and spent his career caring for the poor and fulfilling his obligation to society as much as to his patients.
I spoke up when I believed my country needed me. The book I edited went on to become a New York Times bestseller, and the ethics conference I held to deliberate its launching drew thousands of mental health experts to my side and invited me to the halls of the U.S. Congress. I have been called a whistleblower, first for warning against the dangerous psychology of the president, who subsequently caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and the near-loss of our democracy, and second for exposing the American Psychiatric Association’s distortion of ethics to silence all mental health professionals, unlike any other medical specialty or any other field of expertise. Yale silenced me, too.
I tried to serve my nation and my profession by protecting the public’s health. I would like to emphasize that, unlike the accusations against me, I have not broken “the Goldwater rule” by diagnosing. I do not even believe diagnosis is possible without full medical records; however, on matters where we have more than enough information, I do not believe it is ethical to withhold it, either, especially when danger is involved.
Further, I should not be subject to “the Goldwater rule,” since I have not belonged to the APA since 2007. After being active as a fellow at one time, I resigned after learning that it took a third of its funding from pharmaceutical companies. I believed that its stances reflected this, heavily emphasizing drug treatment over patient interests. See the following article on its ties with the pharmaceutical industry:
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/washington/12psych.html
See this article on its previous principles I had admired:
https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/pn.40.16.00400003
With the Trump presidency, I learned that the APA strengthened “the Goldwater rule” to protect its federal funding, as noted in the article below:
It is noteworthy how the APA boasted only once about increases in federal funding in press releases in the four years preceding its intervention (when it accused us of “armchair psychiatry” and “the use of psychiatry as a political tool” for “self-aggrandizing purposes”—without examination or consent from us, when we were already in the light of public attention). It boasted of the same a half-dozen times in the three years since. Additional evidence of government funding playing a role is here:
https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/04/muzzled-psychiatry-time-crisis/
It has also insisted that we were misapplying a “duty to warn” in the narrow Tarasoff sense (warning non-patients when a patient is dangerous). To be clear, we were warning society as our primary responsibility. Should a psychiatrist not protect her patient when the patient is in danger? It is the same with society, since the APA itself says in its ethics code that we are to recognize a “responsibility to patients … as well as to society” (Preamble). I have also taken seriously its mandate that psychiatrists “recognize a responsibility to participate in activities contributing to the improvement of the community and the betterment of public health” (Section 7), and that we “serve society” (Section 7.1).
So when Mr. Alan Dershowitz complained about my speech about him and the president he was defending, and Yale dismissed me, I filed the lawsuit. If I can be silenced, then professionals and intellectuals are imperiled everywhere. I care about Yale, and it is a matter of academic freedom, the obligation to share our knowledge in our civic contribution to society, and freedom of speech that is our protection against authoritarianism and dangerous leadership.