It’s Easy to Boycott Skull and Bones Until You Get In

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 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.