Yale's President is extremely confused about the role of academic freedom and his job

A propos the academic freedom violation at Yale noted last week, the Yale Daily News now reports the following:

[Yale President Salovey] further explained that the University has to balance its obligations both to its faculty and to its donors.

“There’s probably two principles that are really important to honor,” Salovey said. “The first is [that] academic freedom to teach and do scholarship in an unfettered way … is sacrosanct at the University.”

The second principle, he added, is that the University “[has] an obligation to our donors to meet the agreements to honor the agreements we make with them.”

The university has legal obligations to its donors, to be sure, but its primary obligation is not to take on legal obligations that violate academic freedom, as Yale clearly did in this instance.  Again from the article:

[History professor Beverley] Gage, who resigned last week [from the Grand Strategy Program], attributed her decision to leave the program to ultimately successful attempts by Nicholas Brady ’52 and Charles Johnson ’54 — who endowed the Grand Strategy program in 2006 — to pressure administrative officials to name a conservative majority to a newly-implemented advisory board to oversee program appointments.

President Salovey should resign--or be removed by the Board of Trustees--if he actually made an agreement that empowered rich alumni to meddle in academic appointments and program content like this.   I really find it almost unbelievable that a serious university would enter into such an agreement.  Some journalists need to dig into this, and also find out how many other "obligations" the University has undertaken to violate core academic freedom.