Mass Faculty Exodus Strikes Yale: Amar, Ayres and Whitman to Columbia; Hansmann and Romano to NYU; Donohue, Gerken, and Jolls to Harvard; Ackerman, Ellickson and Schwartz to Retire;

In a rather stunning reversal, eleven senior and, in several cases, longtime Yale faculty have either announced their retirements or that they are moving to schools in New York City or to Harvard.  According to one of the professors, the timing of the decision was not entirely accidental:  "We were at a faculty meeting," according to the source who asked to remain anonymous, "when Bruce Ackerman said, 'you know, we are so great that we could be anywhere, isn't it odd that we're all stuck in this dump of a town?'  From there, the meme spread." 

Students reported seeing Akhil Amar wandering the halls muttering, "What am I doing in New Haven?  I could be in Palo Alto, in New York, in London.  How could this have happened?  How could this have happened?"  Faculty who regularly commute from New York City, like Hansmann and Whitman, soon reported their despair at being the only people on the train commuting to New Haven.  "Even the conductors sometimes snicker at us," Whitman was heard to say to a colleague at Columbia.

Robert Post, the Dean at Yale, and his partner, Reva Siegel, have vowed to remain on the Yale faculty, as have several Yale faculty who apparently can not get offers from Columbia and NYU, notwithstanding the traditional bounty that attaches to such prey.  Solicitor General Elena Kagan, upon hearing the news, took time out from an oral argument to say, "Hah, hah.  No more #1 for Yale!" 

Happy April Fools' Day!