13 administrators
And then there’s Yale. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic:
[N]o fewer than 13 administrators took scarce time to compose, circulate, and co-sign a letter advising adult students on how to dress for Halloween, a cause that misguided campus activists mistake for a social-justice priority.
It’s easy enough to think of costumes one would really prefer students not to wear – minstrel show type stuff, KKK sheets, Nazi uniforms, you know. But does it take 13 administrators to say that? “A word to the wise, students: no racist costumes. You know what we mean by that. Thank you.”
Erika Christakis wrote and sent an email putting in a word for imagination and not stamping out every spark of it.
I wanted to share my thoughts with you from a totally different angle, as an educator concerned with the developmental stages of childhood and young adulthood.
As a former preschool teacher… it is hard for me to give credence to a claim that there is something objectionably “appropriative” about a blonde haired child’s wanting to be Mulan for a day. Pretend play is the foundation of most cognitive tasks, and it seems to me that we want to be in the business of encouraging the exercise of imagination, not constraining it.
And more in the same thoughtful vein.
That’s the measured, thoughtful pre-Halloween email that caused Yale students to demand that Nicholas and Erika Christakis resign their roles at Silliman college. That’s how Nicholas Christakis came to stand in an emotionally charged crowd of Silliman students, where he attempted to respond to the fallout from the email his wife sent.
And the students lost their shit.
“In your position as master,” one student says, “it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman. You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?!”
“No,” he said, “I don’t agree with that.”
The student explodes, “Then why the fuck did you accept the position?! Who the fuck hired you?! You should step down! If that is what you think about being a master you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here. You are not doing that!”
She ended by screaming at him, “You’re disgusting!”
She’s clearly correct that it’s not about creating an intellectual space. It should be though.
A *home*? How long does she intend to be a student there? And does she think the professors are her substitute parents? University is for being an adult and not expecting other people to make it home for you.
Samantha, using the words of Erika Christakis, I would say that learning how to “ignore or reject things that trouble you”, to “talk to each other”, sometimes also “to look away” and “to tolerate offence” is of crucial importance even at home.
From Erika Christakis again:
Ah, Erika, you don’t get it, do you? No, of course there isn’t. You are disgusting and you should step down.
[Seriously, it’s one of those cases where I feel intensely the width of the cultural gap. Even after all this time spent on the net in western social justice circles, I still can’t fathom the mindset. Reading about this feels like… I don’t know, maybe like studying courtship rituals in Papua New Guinea? Hopefully in the future it will remain as distant.]
In a word, yes. This is actually the message being given to many faculty. I have recently sat through a 2 day faculty meeting where the main message to professors at our school was to be “best friends” and “parents”. We talked a lot about making students happy, making them feel at home, about enhancing relationships, and zero about increasing the rigor of our courses, achieving high standards, or ensuring that our students got the education they came for. We ARE expected by our students and by our bosses to be substitute parents, substitute best friends, and personal life coaches/counselors. If we have any time left over, well, maybe we’ll get to teach them a thing or two before we leave. We are supposed to text them, tweet them, and friend them on Facebook.
I have heard students complaining about one of the English professors here who tells them up front he is not their friend, he is their instructor. As far as I can see, he is accessible, helpful, and a good teacher. But this is too much for them. How dare he? The fact that I don’t put myself out there as surrogate parent also gets some bad vibes from my students occasionally, even though most acknowledge that I am friendly and approachable, and that I do a lot to help them survive my class (Survive is not overstating in their world; I am told my tests are lethal).
The fact is, if education means being made a bit uncomfortable, we are supposed to move the other direction. After all, education is a business, and students are customers. That’s the current picture. Make the customers happy.
Oh my god…
[…] a comment by iknklast on 13 […]
A Yale college is “not about creating an intellectual space.” Damn. In the words of Kids These Days, I can’t even. Imagine my mouth opening and closing like a fish. I know that at least in my day, Yalies were by and large children of privilege, but that insistence on “comfort” as job one of the college flabbers my gast.
That said, a couple of things struck me. Interesting that in the committee’s email, the list of groups that have been offended in the past puts religious groups first and women next to last, just ahead of “Muslims, etc.,” who don’t seem to qualify as a religious group.
I doubt that most of the 13 committee members participated in the composition of the email beyond clicking “OK” to one person’s draft, though. The criticism about “taking scarce time” seems a bit of a cheap shot.
I don’t know about that. If my college is any guide, each thing done by a committee is written by one person, then picked apart endlessly (often for very trivial matters) to make sure every word is “just so”. I have never seen anyone here sent out a joint e-mail where everyone else just clicked “OK”. I’m sure some of them did – maybe most – but there are almost certain to be some of them that spent endless minutes quibbling over little details.
Your experience is more recent than mine, so I bow to your expertise. We do agree that there were probably some who quibbled on and on, but why didn’t they catch the redundancy of “religious groups …[and] Muslims,” as well as “women” near the end of the list? That hit me right in the eye on first reading. [i.e., the implied ranking]
Yeah, Pieter B., that is weird, since that is one of the things that always gets quibbled about. Most committees wouldn’t allow Muslims near the end of the list as an add on when religions had already been mentioned, but it strikes me as something that was added later – someone said, hey, we need to specifically mention Muslims, and then someone else said, hey, what about women. I don’t know that, but it does seem to indicate someone not willing to click OK to the memo until certain things were specifically addressed.
The video taught me the latest decade’s argot:
Methods of shouting approval from the crowd across the decades:
1960s: “Yeah, man!”
1970s: “Word!”
1980s: “Right!”
1990s: “Too right!”
2000s: “Cool!”
2015, Yale: “Retweet!”
Honestly, I lolled out loud.
It’s worth noting in fairness–the student talking about the role of a ‘master’ at Yale is talking about a specific title. http://yalecollege.yale.edu/campus-life/residential-colleges
While it clearly states that they are meant to add to the overall educational quality environment, the duties the student lists are, indeed, part of their official duties, too. They are essentially a professor who is ALSO a dorm monitor and social director.
Unfortunately, a lot of kids arrive at college these days with little prior experience with the idea that their actions have consequences. This leads to all sorts of genuinely problematic crap, often including a casual attitude towards racism and rape culture. The same students who think “Achmed the Mad Bomber” is a great costume idea also think that “No means yes, yes means anal” makes a good group chant. I can’t really blame the staffers who opted to try to head it off at the pass, and think it’s presumptuous to pre-judge how much of their time was spent on composing a single email. (I was also unimpressed by the excerpts of that response that I’ve seen. No, a preschooler [or even a college student] dressing as Mulan is not appropriation. But who was saying that it was? Not the email by the administrators, certainly.)
I also noted in an article about the protest to the response email, some minority students say that they have, upon trying to address people wearing racist costumes, been confronted by the threat of physical violence. If this is even sporadically true, I would suggest that the idea that they should be forced into the situation of choosing to lump it or risking an altercation is victim-blaming at its finest.
In the context of replying to an email about not wearing blackface et al., saying isn’t there room for a little offense is a racist dogwhistle, not a plea for the imagination. In the same thoughtful vein, I would tell the students to put their energy into their alternative spaces and not hope for anything from them. But I was just as naive at their age, and wasted a lot of time trying to discuss my experiences of racism with racists.