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Yale was ranked 5th best university in the nation by U.S. News in 2025, maintaining its position from the previous year.
Yale is one of several prestigious universities that have come under scrutiny in recent years for their punitive policies around student mental health, often banishing students from campus if they exhibited signs of mental illness. In response to a lawsuit, Yale updated its policy to allow students to take leaves of absences instead of withdrawing, and to allow students to continue receiving health coverage and maintain access to the community.
Yale has been hosting the annual Symposium for Disability and Accessibility since 2022.
“I left primarily because Yale could not keep me safe,” she tells EdSurge in an interview this month. Simmons says she wants others to learn from her experience, which she argues is part of a pattern of well-known institutions that are failing to value and protect employees of color. “This is a persistent and pervasive problem in academe—and in many other institutions that were founded on whiteness. Many of us leave silently, and in our silence we become complicit.”
Simmons had been at Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence for more than six years, starting off as associate director of school initiatives, then moving into a director of education role and finally becoming assistant director of the center.
Even before the Zoombombing, she says she faced abuses by colleagues on the basis of her race, including “constant non-consensual hair touching” that made her feel exoticized. She had become a prominent speaker at conferences—including giving a TED talk—but says she was also told by a supervisor that the only reason people wanted to hear her ideas was because she was associated with Yale.
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