The Culture War Comes to Skull and Bones

One evening in 2019, in a windowless building known as the “tomb” in the center of Yale’s campus, the members of Skull and Bones snapped. There they were, having been granted membership to the most elite secret society at one of the most elite universities in the world—part of a rare group that for generations included individuals from the most powerful families on the planet. Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Buckleys have all been in Skull and Bones. Three Bonesmen would go on to become president of the United States. Their traditions (including oaths of secrecy upon admission) and antics (stealing the gravestone of Yale’s founder), and the rumors about them (that the Bones tomb contains several human skulls), are legendary—and an intense source of campus gossip.

But there in the tomb, surrounded by oil portraits of former Bonesmen—all white, all chosen by the society’s alumni board—the current members felt overcome not by the achievements of those who had come before them, or by the possibilities that lay ahead, but instead by the organization’s long history of exclusion. So the students did what they felt had to be done: They pulled the portraits down, and replaced them with homemade signs criticizing the secret  society’s record of keeping people of color out of its ranks. “Portraits is a relatively straightforward and easy ask,” one member who participated in the redecoration told me. “The way a space looks can have a large impact on a person’s psyche.”

This was not the only act of Skull and Bones rebellion in 2019. During an all-expenses-paid trip to meet with George W. Bush’s in Texas that year, one or more members confronted the ex-president— who wrote in his 1999 autobiography, “I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society, so secret I can’t say anything more”—and criticized him for leading America into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to several people familiar with the trip. More recently, young graduates of Berzelius, another of the “Ancient Eight,” Yale’s most elite societies, pressed to change the name of the society’s nonprofit legal entity from the Colony Foundation, on the grounds that it evoked slavery and colonialism. Students in Elihu, a society named for Elihu Yale, also tried to rechristen the organization over its namesake’s ties to the slave trade.

Secret societies have long been the purest distillation of what makes Yale Yale. They are famous for their mysterious rituals, their arcane symbols, and the imprint they’ve left on the broader culture. Skull and Bones shows up, variously, in The Great Gatsby (the 2013 film version), Gossip Girl, and The Simpsons. It is among the wealthiest, most exclusive, most well-connected groups at one of the wealthiest, most exclusive, most well-connected universities in the country. Contemplating their own rarefied status, members of Yale’s secret societies aren’t entirely sure what to do with it. They face the question roiling America’s elite campuses taken to its logical extreme: whether the modern social-justice politics advanced by college students can coexist with the staggering selectivity and privilege that benefit those same students.

Skull and Bones, the oldest of Yale’s senior societies, was formed in 1832. The other groups, composed mainly of Bones rejects, followed soon after. The Ancient Eight societies each own private buildings, known as tombs, where members meet twice weekly for dinner, debate, and “bios”—a ritual in which members share their life histories. Membership is for seniors only. Every spring, the current members “tap” a group of Yale juniors to take their place the following fall. The clubs were originally intended to prepare Yale men for leadership beyond the university. At this, they have found extraordinary success, producing a stream of C-suite executives, diplomats, and politicos. The reputation of society alumni as kingmakers and masters of the universe guaranteed that students would always be hungry to join.

[From the April 2021 issue: Private schools have become truly obscene]

Until they weren’t. In the 1960s, secret societies were criticized for elitism and discrimination. They faced pressure to disband. Instead, they adapted. Skull and Bones admitted its first Black member in 1965, and in 1975 tapped the head of Yale’s recently founded gay-student organization. The pattern repeated two decades later, as the societies feared they were becoming irrelevant by clinging to their all-male identity. In 1991, the Bonesmen tapped their first Boneswomen. (Alumni who didn’t want women in their secret society retaliated by changing the locks on the tomb.)

Today, many of the societies continue to resist students’ most progressive demands. When the Bones class of 2019 took down the portraits, some of their predecessors were aghast. It was “bad manners,” a former member of the Bones alumni board who graduated from Yale in the 1960s told me. (I interviewed 12 current or recent members for this article, along with several members from earlier generations; many of them requested anonymity, citing confidentiality agreements.) Given that the society’s former members were overwhelmingly white, he argued, it didn’t make sense to criticize Skull and Bones for accurately portraying its own legacy. “Their historical protest was silly,” he said. Still, the Bones board tried to appease students by putting up photographs of nonwhite alumni alongside the portraits. This year, the former board member told me, the board will unveil the society’s first portrait of a Black alumnus. Similarly, Berzelius agreed to rename the Colony Foundation. Elihu, however, is keeping its name.

Reports of alumni-student schisms within Yale’s secret societies are nearly as old as the societies themselves. Every decade or so, especially when a member of the Bush family runs for president (George H. W. Bush was also a member), opinion writers argue that left-wing students have trampled the values that sustained societies. That makes it easy to miss a much more significant shift within these groups. Picture a member of Skull and Bones, or any of the other Ancient Eight secret societies, and you’ll probably conjure a preppy white guy who summers on the Cape. In fact, in recent years, the demographics of Yale’s most elite organizations have been utterly transformed. In 2020, Skull and Bones had its first entirely nonwhite class. (Every year, the society admits around 15 rising seniors; selections must be unanimous, and members have final say.) Many of the societies now have only one or two students each year who aren’t from historically marginalized groups.

Today, the idea of Skull and Bones selecting someone whose dad was a Republican president seems inconceivable. The so-called tap lines—the tradition guaranteeing that the football captain and the student-body president would end up in Bones—are long gone, and few descendants of alumni members get in. Instead, the secret societies affirmatively select for students who are the first in their family to attend college, who come from a low-income background, or who are part of a minority group. This has created something of a diversity arms race. “People are, intentionally or not, thinking, ‘Does this cohort have too many white people?’” said Ale Canales, a member of the Berzelius class of 2020. “It’s definitely an undercurrent.”

I graduated from Yale last spring, and I didn’t belong to a secret society, but when it came time for members in my year to select the next class, a friend in an Ancient Eight society worried that the person she wanted to tap wouldn’t get in: He was a person of color but came from a wealthy family and was not the first in his family to attend college. (She was right to worry: The society rejected my friend’s pick, although a different one accepted him.) A history of progressive activism is an asset among secret-society hopefuls. One of the leaders of Yale’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter joined Scroll and Key, one of the oldest secret societies, last year. The Bones class of 2021 had “people from all kinds of backgrounds,” one member of the class told me—but no conservatives. (Unless you count centrists as conservatives, which some members do.) Like Yale’s student body overall, members of secret societies mostly range from far left to left of center.  

In short, Yale’s secret societies are now filled with students who, as a matter of political conviction, consider wealth and privilege indefensible—but who, as members of Yale’s most elite clubs, enjoy enormous advantages. Skull and Bones pairs students with alumni mentors in the field they hope to enter. It has an endowment of $17 million. Bones members spend a week in late summer getting to know one another at the group’s private island on the St. Lawrence River. Dinners at the Ancient Eight societies are prepared by private chefs.

In 2021, Caleb Dunson, then a Yale sophomore, published an op-ed in the school newspaper with the title “Abolish Yale.” In the essay, he described his discomfort attending an opulent holiday feast for students while homeless people suffered in the cold nearby. The school operates “under the assumption that only a small group of remarkable people can push humanity forward,” wrote Dunson, who is Black. “It started off excluding women and people of color from its student body and now parades them around for diversity photos and social justice brownie points.” Even if the university made marginal changes—which Dunson argued it had been reluctant to do—its nature would remain the same. “Since we can’t change Yale, we have to tear it down,” he wrote.

Today, Dunson is a member of one of the Ancient Eight societies. He knows how that looks. When I asked him about the apparent contradiction, he said he decided to join in order to make new friends and be part of a community, but acknowledged that he was attracted to the status that being in a society confers. “Once you get a tap for a society, it’s funny how quickly you get invested in the preservation of that society,” he told me. Ultimately, he said, given that his political views are at odds with attending Yale in the first place, “there’s already a bit of cognitive dissonance,” so joining a secret society wasn’t such a big leap.

The most common argument current and recent members give for preserving the societies is that, by opening them up to groups that have previously been excluded, they can help diversify the elite. Ale Canales recalls being tapped by a senior who wanted to “keep the Latino line going.” Once inside, Canales focused on a different diversity metric. “I chose three trans people,” Canales told me. “That was my specific goal.”

Today’s students believe that their values are better than those of the secret-society members who came before them, and thus that they will use their positions in more socially beneficial ways, even if they’re not yet sure exactly how. The member of the 2021 Bones class had been uneasy about joining, but was convinced by a student from the year above. “Yes, there is that baggage that we do have to reckon with,” the older student told her. “But the fact that you are reckoning with it, the other people in your class are reckoning with it, is a very good sign.” Her class included many students from low-income families, and they often talked about how they would leverage their new network to help their communities. One recent Bones member used an alumni gathering to fundraise for a nonprofit she ran. Nearly all of the current and recent members I spoke with said it would be better if secret societies didn’t exist at all; but given that they do exist, they decided they might as well join and try to make them better.

[From the September 2019 issue: Daniel Markovits on how meritocracy harms everyone]

The most full-throated critique of the societies tends to come from the people who didn’t get in. Isabella Zou, who graduated from Yale in 2023, felt confident in her odds to be tapped by St. Elmo’s, one of the Ancient Eight. But she spent tap day crying because she wasn’t chosen and comparing her qualifications against those of her friends who were. In a Yale Daily News op-ed, she argued that secret societies should be torn down rather than opened up. By including more students from marginalized backgrounds, she wrote, the society system merely “diversifies the ranks of the worthy without transforming the underlying structures that deem others unworthy.” And yet, she admitted, “I know in my bones that if I had gotten tapped by St. Elmo’s, I would have taken it and likely wouldn’t have developed a critical mode of participation.” (Zou declined to comment additionally for this article, directing me to her op-ed.)

This is the fight raging across so many of America’s institutions: change from the inside or blitz and build something new? Yale’s secret societies don’t appear to be going anywhere, but they certainly look different than they used to. And the same pattern is playing out across elite higher education more broadly: These institutions have become more diverse while retaining the trappings of extreme exclusivity. In this sense, the traditionalist grumbling over secret societies’ acts of rebellion is overblown. In everything beyond demographics, the societies have stayed true to their traditions. “Everyone talked a really big game,” one member of the Elihu class of 2019 told me. “In the first month of my time in the society, there were people like, We got to burn this place down. We need to mobilize the endowment to redistribute the wealth back to New Haven. And then, inevitably, we all just ended up doing exactly what had been done in years previous, which is doing the bios, hanging out with each other, and a few volunteer things. But it wasn’t anything radical.”

And so alumni and students seem to have settled into an uneasy truce. Sam Chauncey, who passed through Wolf’s Head—another Ancient Eight society—in 1957 before spending nearly a quarter century in Yale’s administration, told me that most alumni understand that their secret society will not always exist as it did in their day. Some older conservative alumni try to weed out “wokeness,” and others grouse that women were ever accepted, Chauncey said, but many more are content to change the demographics of the societies if that keeps the groups relevant and preserves their core rituals. As the 1960s Bones alumnus and former board member told me, “If you want things to stay the same, everything has to change.” In his view, the secret societies are thriving. When students and alumni meet for the annual Bones celebration in New York City, the old guard gives a hearty applause to the new members. “And the kids are thinking, There’s somebody in this room who is going to help me get a job.”