Yale University under fire for handling of racially charged incidents

This is the same campus that conservative icon Buckley, one of its most famous alumni, savaged in his seminal 1951 jeremiad, God and Man at Yale.

Trouble began around Halloween, after the Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email asking students to avoid wearing racially insensitive Halloween costumes.

In response, Erika Christakis, a faculty member and an administrator at a student residence, wrote an email to students living in her residence hall on behalf of those she described as “frustrated” by the official advice on Halloween costumes.

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.

It’s Halloween. As a person of Korean descent, I’ve never been offended by terrible costumes, even ones that violated so-called cultural appropriation standards of America’s progressive left.

Hard to know where to begin with this one, since the piece by Liam Stack uncriticially accepts the entire Marxist premise of the story itself – that racial minority students, many of whom are necessarily affirmative-action students, now find the university setting “profoundly difficult” and therefore (here comes the hidden premise), it’s Yale that should change and not the students.

According to The Washington Post:”Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people?” “American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition”, she wrote. It specifically advised them to steer clear of outfits that included elements like feathered headdresses, turbans or blackface.

‘Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society’.

Soon after, all hell broke loose in New Haven. The four-hour meeting concluded a dramatic day on this Ivy League campus, as students confronted administrators about a series of recent events that have laid bare long-simmering racial tensions at the elite school.

One of the latest shticks among college liberals is the need to create “safe spaces” on campuses.

Christakis responds, “No, I don’t agree with that”, and the woman loudly heaps abuse on him.

“Be quiet!”, she screams. If that is what you think about being a Master, then you should step down. It is not about creating an intellectual space! “It is not!” she cried out.

This essentially amounts to making the suggestion, “Don’t be a dickhead” – a request that is, admittedly, apparently beyond the capacity of large swathes of today’s student bodies, but a reasonable one nonetheless.

Calls to Luther by The Daily Caller News Foundation were not immediately returned. “Both asked to remain anonymous because they were afraid of attracting backlash”. Yale has the resources to hire black psychologists at Yale Health. He taught me that there is a time for debate, and there is a time for just hearing and acknowledging someone’s pain. Another way to dissolve consent. I hope you will join me in this effort. Students on this campus are smart and creative; we can create new communities that possess all the positive components of a fraternity, without defending the legacy of these bigoted institutions. The leadership of Yale College and the university are working on next steps. Title IX officers Elizabeth McGrath of Cornell and Sheila Johnson-Willis of Syracuse also shredded the Constitution when given the chance. “I think we have to do a better job”, he said, according to several students in the room who were taking notes. In their muddled ideology, the Yale activists had to destroy the safe space to save it. The student pleaded guilty to using a threat of force to intimidate African-American students and school employees by helping hang the noose and drape an old Georgia state flag that incorporated a Confederate battle emblem on the statue of James Meredith.

April 1, 2015: After a month of protests, University of Maryland at College Park President Wallace Loh declared that a student’s racist and sexist 2014 email to fraternity brothers was “hateful and reprehensible”, but was constitutionally protected speech and didn’t violate school policies. It is entirely possible a few of the events complained of – largely name-calling – were fabricated or staged by the activists themselves.

“It is a culture in which students and faculty are afraid to voice their opinions”, he added.

Christakis said that as a childhood development specialist, she felt it is important for young people to make mistakes and correct themselves, and it isn’t the place of the university to prod or police students on the subject of expression. In one case a swastika was drawn in feces in a campus bathroom.

This was not the “apology” the students were demanding.

Yale University President Peter Salovey and Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway sent university-wide emails Friday addressing students’ concerns about a pattern of discrimination on campus.