Matt Lamb of The College Fix speculates that the long delay in hanging the portrait, donated by Harlan Crow, a friend of Thomas, was probably due to the fact that the justice is a conservative on the Supreme Court, and a black conservative as well.
Lamb also notes that the law school has faced criticism in the past several years for its handling of free speech issues.
“The six-year delay certainly suggests a bias against him, because he is known as a conservative. Yale has thousands of administrators. They have almost one for every undergraduate student. So it cannot be a lack of manpower to spend 20 minutes hanging a portrait."
Lamb also reports not only was Yale slow to hang the portrait he says that the school is slow to respond to media inquiries.
In 2023, a College Fix editor attempted to enter the law school to look for the portrait but was turned away, despite the school claiming to offer “visitor” hours.
The university has not responded to four inquiries in the past two weeks asking what took so long to get the portrait hung and what will be done in the future to prevent a delay.
"The College Fix recently emailed three times and actually spoke to someone in the public affairs office who suggested that the school would be responding. But, as of yesterday, I don't believe that they have responded."
Yale Daily News reported that some students oppose the hanging of the portrait.
“What lesson is YLS teaching by elevating Clarence Thomas in this political moment,” Saman Haddad told the student newspaper. He is the student body president for the law school.
“The answer is clear,” Haddad said. “Our institutional values are defined by power, not principle.”
Though portrait hangs next to portraits of other notable alumni of the Law School, including former president Bill Clinton LAW ’73, the administration was quiet about the addition. Thomas’s portrait was not on the walls when students left for the summer; new law students reported seeing it during their orientation, Yale Daily News reported.
