Students demand name change for Calhoun College

The campus paper, the Yale Daily News, cited the same example in a strongly-worded editorial that ran on Friday: “In a week following two major racially charged controversies, it is unacceptable that the University has not issued a formal response”. Copy may not be in its final form.

But while Missouri’s protesters and its laws have moved in the right direction, Mizzou’s campus police department didn’t follow. The protests at the University of Missouri come as a similar dynamic is playing out at one of the nation’s top Ivy League schools.

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds recently addressed students at Yale who were offended that college administrators failed to agree to censor insensitive Halloween costumes and University of Missouri students whose racial inequality protests are being met with doubts. Monday’s crowd of a thousand chanted slogans including, “We are unstoppable, another Yale is possible”. And with social media and the Internet, we can spend all day long in a flawless bubble in which our own views are repeated back to us. Then, a swastika was smeared on a dormitory wall and, weeks later, the school’s black student government association wrote an open letter sharing its members’ experiences with racism.

LEX BARLOWE: Absolutely. Thank you so much.

A new video shows a student at Yale University screaming at one of the school’s professors for allegedly failing to make the campus a “safe space” for students. “I defend the right for people to speak their minds”. Yet you respond not with an apology.

These tensions led up to a confrontation on Thursday, as students surrounded Nicholas Christakis in an open area on campus and criticized him. “I’m happy to see the amount of support from not just black students, but a whole array of diversity coming out and supporting students that are affected at this University”. We feel like we have to yell in order to make our voices heard.

“Finally, if this doesn’t work then I would simply ask you to get the hell out of the country. We want to be able to go home at night in a place where we feel welcome and wanted”. So, my question is: Are you going to say that or not?

“I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community”, e-mailed Erika Christakis, a lecturer on early childhood development and associate master of Yale’s Silliman College, lauding “a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense” in such costume guidelines. Lex, if you could explain what the letter was that his wife sent out about Halloween costumes? While they offered no evidence of this, Yale President Peter Salovey humored them anyway, promising to strive for “greater inclusion, healing, mutual respect, and understanding” – all the politically correct boilerplate. “Do not wear anything that is not your own culture”. Pretty simple and pretty polite, to be honest.

Adams told FoxNews.com he has his limits when it comes to freedom of speech, but they are the same boundaries enforced by the Supreme Court. Christakis’ husband Nicholas, the master of Silliman College, and Dean Jonathan Holloway were castigated for failing to provide a “safe space”. This is especially true for a place like a college campus, which ideally shapes society instead of reflecting it. College students exist to learn from the institutions they attend, but the reverse is also true. And so, it really did create a completely unsafe atmosphere on campus. Students were crying. People were telling their stories about the ways in which these events just pointed to broader issues of Yale not being a safe and welcoming environment for students of color.

And Dean Holloway came out to Cross Campus to look. But their lack of curiosity about the origins of the supposed incidents on both campuses prior to reporting them bodes very ill for the prospects of an awakening to the threat to liberty. There was not even an email. Where is our email? “Those protesters who called me a “white colonizer” and posted on Facebook “unfriend me if you disagree” are creating a campus culture that is hostile to free expression and the exchange of ideas”. So, while university administrators may not wholly believe that black lives matter, it does matter to them that certain black lives are on the football field.

This week, University of Missouri’s president and chancellor stepped down after protests over campus racism.

When students marched in the wake of Kipnis’s article, they were carrying pillows to echo Emma Sulkowicz’s protest of the administration’s handling of her alleged rape at Columbia-which felt like an overwrought piece of symbolism considering the gulf between Kipnis’s words and an act of actual sexual violence. “By sending out that email, it goes against your position”. I want them to see us as flawed peers, fellow grown-ups – not as mom and dad.

Additionally, Next Yale is demanding these centers be staffed with more mental health professionals who are of color. Beyond doubt, Mizzou is but one of many U.S. universities that suffer from racism.