Around this time last year, a short video depicting an angry confrontation between a Yale professor and student came to symbolize the nationwide debate over campus political correctness. Four days before Halloween, a university organ called the Intercultural Affairs Council released an email to the entire student body warning them not to wear costumes that “threaten our sense of community.” In the absence of any recent incidents on Yale’s campus involving racist or culturally insensitive Halloween outfits, however, the missive struck many students as patronizing, if not entirely misplaced. Indeed, the email was nearly identical to one Yale’s associate vice president of student life had written to students at Northwestern University five years earlier when he held a similar job at that school. As one Yale professor would later tell me about the message, it “had no applicability to the culture and the actual history here at Yale.”
Sensing this incongruity between their own lived experiences and the prophylactic admonishments of a glorified residential adviser, some students brought their concerns to Erika Christakis, a professor of child developmental psychology and the associate master of Silliman College, one of Yale’s 12 residential houses. In a rejoinder email sent only to Silliman students, Christakis took umbrage with what she portrayed as a cosseting administration, asking, “Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?”