Maya Lin Elected to Yale Corporation

Yale President Richard C. Levin announced today that Maya Lin has been elected the next Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation. Ms. Lin, a graduate of both Yale College and Yale’s Architecture School, will be the first artist to serve on the Yale Corporation and the first Asian American woman trustee in Yale’s history. She will replace David Gergen, commentator and adviser to four presidents of the United States, whose term is expiring.

In this Alumni Fellow election, 49,899 valid ballots were received, representing 44% of the electorate. This is two-and-a-half times the average turnout in elections during the past two decades.

Mellon Investor Services, an independent entity specializing in providing proxy services to more than 1,000 corporations and which counts over 15 million ballots each year, was retained by the University to conduct the election. All of the ballots cast were mailed directly to Mellon so that there would be no involvement by the University staff in the processing or the tallying of the results.

José Cabranes, United States Circuit Judge and former Yale Corporation member, and the Reverend Harry B. Adams, former Chaplain of the University, accompanied Linda Koch Lorimer, Secretary of the University, on May 29 to Mellon’s facilities to review the mailing and vote counting process, to interview Mellon officials and managers, and to review Mellon’s Certificate of Election Results and Statement of the Tally, which were presented to President Levin on May 30.

In view of the unprecedented attention among the alumni and the public and in the interests of openness and transparency, President Levin and Kurt Schmoke, Senior Fellow of the Yale Corporation, decided to release the Certificate of the Election and the Statement of the Tally by Mellon, the independent company supervising the election. President Levin explained, “Historically, we have not released the vote count, but we have never before had public attention focused on our alumni election. We have already received numerous requests for the tally; and had we followed our normal practice of not releasing the count, it was clear that there would have been continuing calls for us to do so. We decided to favor transparency and openness.”

The official tabulation by Mellon stated that Lin received 41,575 votes (83.3%) and W. David Lee, a graduate of Yale’s Divinity School, received 8,324 votes (16.7%).