The YLS faculty didn’t say a word about the confirmation ‘process’ until the scandal arrived at their door in the form of student allegations that the faculty knew about and even actively enabled Kavanaugh — so this should be seen in large part as an exercise in reputation management. If Ford’s letter hadn’t leaked they would have been silent, because the upside — another one of their own joining Thomas and Alito on Supreme Court — would have outweighed the downside, namely the result for the country and, indeed, for history.
(Yale Law School open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee)