Cry-Bullies and what’s going on at Yale

In order to understand the uproar (Top story on Reddit for most of the day) happening at Yale over an email about Halloween costumes you’ll want to read the email that ‘triggered’ it and watch the video down below. Let’s back up a tiny bit.

On the Wednesday before Halloween, Burgwell Howard, a Yale dean, sent an email asking students to avoid costumes that might offend some people like, ‘feathered headdresses, turbans or war paint,’ and other “inappropriate cultural appropriation and/or misrepresentation(s).” (While the length of the email made some students think it was a new policy, this wasn’t the case. These were just “recommendations.”)

Here’s what happened next as reported by Fire:

Just after midnight on Friday, October 30, Erika Christakis sent an email to the Silliman community in response to the Intercultural Affairs Committee’s Halloween email. Christakis explained that she and her husband Nicholas had heard from a number of students who were frustrated by the committee’s email. Although the email was allegedly supposed to serve as a recommendation rather than a formal policy, to some, its length, tone, content, and the list of 13 signatories seemed to indicate otherwise.

Christakis drew on her experiences as a child development specialist to question whether a university should dictate what students should and shouldn’t wear on Halloween:

I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. 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.

In addition to expressing concerns about how policing students’ costumes can limit the exercise of imagination, free speech, and free expression, Christakis asked:

Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? 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.

The response to Christakis’ email was explosive. More than 740 Yale undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, faculty, and even students from other universities signed on to an open letter telling Christakis that her “offensive” email invalidates the voices of minority students on campus.

[End report from Fire.]

Some of the responses from students confronting Erika’s husband (who has supported his wife’s statements).

“As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman,” one student says. “You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that? …Who the f— hired you?” she asked, arguing that Christakis should “step down” because being master is “not about creating an intellectual space,” but rather “creating a home.”

Find more details and videos here.