Yale Awards Student Bullies who Forced Faculty Members into Leaving

Have you seen this video that documents the weird happenings at Yale, surrounding — of all things — Halloween costume protocol?  M. J. Randolph has the story at Truth Revolt:

The story began in October 2015, when Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email broadly outlining the kinds of Halloween costumes that were and weren’t appropriate. In response, Professor Erika Christakis – the wife of Nicholas Christakis, head of Yale’s Silliman college – penned a response, citing complaints from the students in the residential college that the list was arbitrary and restrictive. Pointing to other examples of adults long fostering overblown fears about Halloween, she suggested that open dialogue about costumes was a better way for students to learn than through restrictions imposed from administrators.

Students responded in days of protests — culminating in the viral courtyard incident of Nicholas Christakis trying to engage students in conversation about the topic. Instead students insulted Christakis and yelled at him to apologize, resign, or cave to their demands. While other administrators were in the courtyard, nobody stood up for the ideals of academic freedom, free speech or open dialogue. A year later, Nick Christakis stepped down from being the head of Silliman and Erika had left Yale. The school created more administrative posts to placate students – yet nobody in the administration had vocally backed Yale’s supposed core values of academic freedom and open dialogue outlined in its own Woodward Report, a gold standard of academic principle.

There were two students involved in the very long altercation.  The Tablet has more:

Of the 100 or so students who confronted Christakis that day, a young woman who called him “disgusting” and shouted “who the fuck hired you?” before storming off in tears became the most infamous, thanks to an 81-second YouTube clip that went viral. (The video also—thanks to its promotion by various right-wing websites—brought this student a torrent of anonymous harassment). The videos that Tablet exclusively posted last year, which showed a further 25 minutes of what was ultimately an hours-long confrontation, depicted a procession of students berating Christakis. In one clip, a male student strides up to Christakis and, standing mere inches from his face, orders the professor to “look at me.” Assuming this position of physical intimidation, the student then proceeds to declare that Christakis is incapable of understanding what he and his classmates are feeling because Christakis is white, and, ipso facto, cannot be a victim of racism. In another clip, a female student accuses Christakis of “strip[ping] people of their humanity” and “creat[ing] a space for violence to happen,” a line later mocked in an episode of The Simpsons. In the videos, Howard, the dean who wrote the costume provisions, can be seen lurking along the periphery of the mob.

But here’s the shock.  Yale has a Nakanishi Prize, which is “awarded every spring to ‘two graduating seniors who, while maintaining high academic achievement, have provided exemplary leadership in enhancing race and/or ethnic relations at Yale College.”  Guess who got those awards this year?  You guessed it.

Of Yale’s graduating class, it was these two students whom the Nakanishi Prize selection committee deemed most deserving of a prize for “enhancing race and/or ethnic relations” on campus.

You can’t make this up, folks. The bullying bigots who verbally assaulted a professor at Yale have been given an award as the two graduating students who did the most to improve race relations at Yale.  

Everything on that campus is now officially Orwellian.

Watch this for more info on the climate at Yale:

Image Credit: Screen cap