Yale Maenad Shrieks At Administrator: It's Not Your Job to Create an Intellectual Space, It's Your Job to Make Us Feel Comfortable and at Home

There was, among the Social Justice Warrior crowd, get this, a controversy over Halloween costumes.

A lecturer at Yale wrote an email in which she said that, while he understood concerns about allegedly "insensitive" costumes that indulged in "cultural appropriations," censorship and official punishment were not the correct response; telling that person you were bothered by the costume was the correct response.

The lecturer's husband, who's a dean of the Sillman residential community (I guess part of the Yale campus), agreed with his wife, which I thought was what you were supposed to do, because Women Are Always Right, Always.

But what this particular woman was saying was Racist Or Something.

Unpleasantness and hysteria then, get this, ensued.

The associate master, Erika Christakis, wrote to the campus community criticizing efforts to proscribe certain types of dress, particularly for young people, while also noting: "I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation."

"I don't, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others. I can't defend them anymore than you could defend yours," wrote Christakis, a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center and the wife of Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician and the master of Silliman College. “Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society."

Students at Thursday's protest said the e-mail ignored the way people of color experience such insensitive characterizations, and they recounted how students have faced threats of physical violence when they have questioned their classmates’ costume choices.

Below is what happened when a man calmly attempted to explain free speech to hysterics and barbarians. You'll get profanity, a screamed "BE QUIET!," a pronouncement that college is not for intellectual freedom and trial but for "comfort" and feeling "at home," and yes, an actual foot-stomp.

The Queen Maenad does not like his Racist suggestion that "other people have rights too."

By the way, as this hysterical head-case is shrieking, someone seems to yell "Re-Tweet" in approval.

So that's where we are now -- "Retweet" is now used, non-ironically, as an "Amen."

Quote: "Moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing an idiot with dignity." -- Marshall McLuhan, shared by craig henry

Correct video now embedded. Sorry, YouTube played through to the next video, and I stupidly put in that code.

One of the ninnies at the protest -- perhaps the Queen Maenad herself -- penned this histrionic piece to explain All the Feelz She Haz.

Review the Lukianov/Haidt theory, which is that colleges and the SJW left is now engaging in a very massive negative cognitive behavioral therapy session, which, instead of teaching people to control their feelings and remain in command of themselves, is instead conditioning them to be hysterics and neurotics who scream and foot-stomp over anything at all.

They are being trained -- sort of deliberately -- to be mentally unsound individuals.

Speak of the Devil and So He Appears: Greg Lukianov was actually the guy videotaping that.

He works with FIRE. FIRE's own write-up is here.

Recall that Yale is the source of one of the most glowing statements in support of free expression in higher education. The statement, based on the university’s 1975 Woodward Report, demonstrates the need to be free to "think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable." It even goes so far as to inform Yale students that "when you agree to matriculate, you join a community where 'the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox' must be tolerated. When you encounter people who think differently than you do, you will be expected to honor their free expression, even when what they have to say seems wrong or offensive to you."

posted by Ace at 05:09 PM

| Access Comments