Weeks of simmering racial tension at Yale University boiled over in recent days into a heated debate over whether the administration was sensitive enough to concerns about Halloween costumes seen as culturally offensive, students and adminstrators said.
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“Last week there was a lot of pain, and it was emotionally draining and traumatic for many people of color on campus, even though it was a necessary move”, student Alejandra Padin-Dujon a member of the cultural groups La Casa and the Af-Am House, told the student paper.
On Monday, about a thousand students at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, held a march over racial insensitivity on campus. And while students, undergraduate and graduate, definitely have a right to express themselves, we would hope that people would actively avoid those circumstances that threaten our sense of community or disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression.
Shortly after the email was followed up with a response from Erika Christakis, an associate master at Silliman College at Yale, claiming that students shouldn’t be told what they can and cannot wear. The note included guidelines of how to avoid offending people with a costume, like asking yourself if the costume mocks another person’s faith, race, or culture, and if anyone could take offense at what you’re wearing. “It’s not mine, I know that”.
Salovey and Jonathan Holloway, dean of Yale College, sent a separate email to students on Tuesday that emphasized the university’s commitment to respecting diversity. The fact Yale administrators seem hesitant to support Christakis is even more disturbing. Now a few students are demanding both she and her husband resign, after he came to her defense when confronted by several students this weekend.
“Then step down! If that is what you think about being a [inaudible] master, then you should step down”. When he tried to explain that it was part of his job to create an intellectual space at the college, one protester shrieked, “It is not about creating an intellectual space!…”
If were any lingering doubt that the NY Times, a once-great newspaper, is now entirely infected by the language of cultural Marxism, look no farther than this story about the Halloween-costume “controversy” at a once-great university.
TheFIREorg via YouTube A student yelled at professor Nicholas Christakis during the week of tensions. Instead, they have taken to Twitter and other platforms to defend free speech and argue that modern college students have become overly coddled. It is not! Do you understand that? “It is about creating a HOME”. As you talk to one another, listen to one another, and sometimes disagree, do this knowing that I will uphold your right to speak and be heard and that I will enforce the community standards that safeguard you as members of this community. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society. You are not doing that. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: “bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students”, she wrote. Now, Black students at the prestigious Ivy League school Yale University are in the news.
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The Black Student Alliance at Yale, a group that includes students from other African-American organization on campus, outlined ways that officials could improve their experience on campus.
