The professor? There are 2 professors; the one who wrote the e-mail and the one in the video. Again, your response does not indicate what you are referring to in such a way as to be able to determine more specifically which professor and which statements you are talking about.
You call this clear?
nm
Yes…
A straightforward snarky comment about Professors having the right to post condescending and somewhat oblivious comments that will not be well received. Is this confusing?
More fairly obvious snark about condescending Professors encouraging tolerance of rude stuff in the interests of the student having a “transgressive” experience. Again, the point here is that this is not likely to be well received.
You may not agree with all his takes on the situation but his point is quite clear.
What in particular in condescending in the either of the professor’s remarks?
I did not see anything condescending in the remarks of the professors.
I only saw one side using personal attacks.
I am referencing the email … which is why I quoted from it. Can’t hear much on the video other than the student yelling and that professor saying he disagrees.
Seriously … it is pretty obvious since I quoted the exact words and phrases used in the email.
The university sent out a request for students to be considerate of each others feelings … essentially as you described it in post 4 Nylock … please take a minute and think before you dress up in Black face and the like.
The professor in her email despaired such “censure” from above (and no censure existed, it was a request) and argued that such offensive, regressive, and transgressive behavior is an important developmental stage for these young people to go through and that those offended need to just look away.
The students who were told that they as minority students just needed to look the other way and let these privileged kids have their fun at their expense got upset. One on the video was loud and obnoxious expressing her thoughts to the email author’s husband who disagreed with the student’s thoughts. He is entitled to disagree. If offended by that transgressive behavior he should perhaps just look away. It is what his wife stated college students should be doing … being offensive, regressive, and transgressive. Or are those only behaviors that are developmentally appropriate for the majority group students to be engaging in?
Again. I cannot find a call for either professor to be fired in that letter. Did you actually read it? It seems very clear in articulating why minority groups would be sensitive to being the butt of jokes in a historically very White university and why the request to be considerate reasonable.
I do find it amusing that some are so waving of the free speech flag for the right of students to dress in Black face and such, and for professors to tell other students to just grow up if they don’t like it, but call a letter identifying such as rude as speech that is unacceptable. Even the woman student yelling and swearing is still just as much just offensive speech. The professors - both of them - and any one else who is offended should just grow up and look the other way as well.
Free speech all too often means the right for others to say what I want to hear and how I want to hear it.
The university did not state that offensive costumes should be prohibited.
I did not read any statement saying the either professor should not be allowed to state their opinions.
I have read here that the students are garbage for expressing theirs.
Very good post Dseid IMHO. I think your points have a lot of validity.
You make an extremely good point that the letter does not actually call for anyone’s resignation - that is a critical point in the discussion. Interestingly enough, I read so often about that being the intent of the letter, that I lapsed in taking a critical look at it myself.
“A place of comfort and home” at a University? WTF? We certainly didn’t look for that when I went to college. A university is about being exposed to new, or at least different, ideas. You can’t expect the university to “comfort” you when you experience ideas, or Halloween costumes, that you find disagreeable.
“[L]ook away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other.” Rather than asking the school to do it for you. Not, “let them have fun at your expense.”
Btw I agree that the original request from the Intercultural Affairs Committee seems reasonable and non-censorial, if that’s the right word.
The email is below. By itself to me to me as a 57 year old white man it does not offer much offer much offense and is an admirable sentiment. To the minority kids at Yale and their supporters it comes across as an entitled white woman very politely telling them to stop being such emo pussies and try to buy into other peoples right to be a little bit transgressive. In this case I think the polite, solicitous, momsplaining tone where she states she’s drawing on her experience in dealing with toddlers and young kids is almost calculated to rankle students more than a direct blast against them.
College is different these days. You may wonder to yourself, “Where on earth do the kids get these ideas from?”
These ideas come straight from the adults in charge. “The purpose of the residential colleges is to provide an intimate and supportive community designed to promote the social, intellectual and personal growth of Yale undergraduates.”
I’m starting to see where some people are coming from.
The biggest issue I have is why the Erika K felt the need to write this e-mail in the first place. It doesn’t really seem necessary.
My first reaction to this whole story was that these professors wanted to bring the issue to a head and some students fell into their hands by making asses out of themselves. I’m not saying the idea is a great one, but it did come into my head; that’s a fact.
I hope no one involved at Yale is surprised by that student’s overreaction, since that’s what they are apparently teaching her. :smack:
The reason it’s fine to say “look what assholes these kids are” is because the bystanders said nothing. She gets to represent them all because they allowed her to, with their silence.
How could no one step in and say, “hey, that’s not how exchanges occur in the marketplace of free ideas”? Because they don’t want a free exchange, they want their way, and they want it now. Other people don’t get to talk.
Sounds about right.
This is not “political correctness run amok,” it’s the inevitable, logical conclusion of liberalism itself. And I have no sympathy for these college professors and administrators, since they’re the ones who have taught liberalism to these students. In the worldview these people have themselves promoted, Erika Christakis is a beneficiary of “white privilege” and does not have the right to tell nonwhites what to do, and it is in fact offensive for her to even attempt to do so.
This whole episode is a veritable symphony of free speech. Everyone is getting the chance to state their opinion, even random people on the Internet who have no involvement in the situation.
Yes, many people’s opinion amounts to “Shut up! I hate you!”, but that’s just the human condition.
Colleges have been dealing with how much they take on, and how much they do not take on, the role of in loco parentis forever. Yale’s “residential colleges” approach is not different “these days”; it is the same approach they have been doing for over 70 years. It is different than what most of us experienced only because most of us did not go to Yale. We instead dealt with RAs and maybe random room inspections.
Exactly.
The context was a simple letter from administration, that was, “reasonable and non-censorial” (per Ruken) that clearly was in response to past issues. No edict was passed down. Just basically a “Please don’t be assholes: please think a bit before you put on something like Black face or other costumes that use minority members of our community as the butt of jokes.”
So what motivated Professor Christakis’ (the female) email taking issue with that request? What was she wanting to accomplish?
Maybe she was, as you seem to be suggesting, trolling, and that one student completely took the bait if she was, and the other roughly 13 to 14% of the student body that has so far signed the letter trying to politely explain to her why her email was offensive to them, took the bait to a lesser degree.
IF so then it is pretty damn poor form. And the student who was yelling and swearing while expressing it very poorly is indeed correct that Professor Christakis’ (the male) response defending such behavior is an abrogation of his role as Master of a residential college in the Yale system. IF she was trolling and he supports that then he should be removed as Master. (Whether or not we like their 70 year old plus Residential College system it has worked well for them for all that time and they are not changing it now. If you take the job of Residential College Master, you are taking the job of being “responsible for the physical well being and safety of students in the residential college, as well as for fostering and shaping the social, cultural, and educational life and character of the college.” Defending a staff member trolling a subset of the student body is a failure in that job.)
Maybe she misunderstood the request as a command, as an edict? Hard to believe that. She’s no idiot. But as your take on the open letter demonstrates, sometimes people honestly see and read what they are primed to see and read, not what is really there.
Maybe she really believes that making fun of minority members of the community is just part of the transgressive fun that White privileged kids at Yale are entitled to? And that if she speaks down to them enough the minority students will understand what their proper place is. She graduated from Harvard herself … maybe she resents that things are so different now that one can’t even make fun of minority students without people telling you that it is rude.
Maybe she has an issue with the whole microaggressions thing and misread this as an example of that as a result, taking the chance to try to sell students that a thicker skin will serve them well. If so it was a misfire. Aimed at something that is not an obvious “microaggression” but at some that are overt aggressions and that was a rhetorical fail.
I vote less for trolling than for an honest perception that making fun of the minority members of the community is the sort of “transgressive” fun that is developmentally appropriate for the White privileged kids to have, and a complete inability to view the world from any other perspective.
I got the impression her email was a response to emails she and her husband were receiving from students in their residential college.
I hate e-mails like this that imply that students don’t know how to behave if they’re not explicitly told how to by the powers that be. It has happened at the university where I work too:
Last year there was a big brawl in October last year on one of the three other campuses. There were very few university students involved, and certainly there were none involved from the three other campuses in the state. Yet what have kids (and staff) gotten repeatedly since then? Email “reminders” about proper decorum that cite that incident as example of what is not acceptable.
Scolding kids on three campuses who had NOTHING to do with the incident - and about three times so far! - really pisses me off.
This letter strikes me as similar - how many people dressed in the ways that it cites? Damn few, I’m willing to be.
Mass scoldings based on what a few people have done are not acceptable in school or at work.
I am a huge fan of free speech ACLU style. That is to say, I defend everyone’s right to it whether they are peaceful KKK marchers or a family putting up signs in their yard that say all white people should be tortured and deported. The key though is the “peaceful” part. Once you get into “shout-downs”, screaming and other disruptive acts, the violation to me isn’t what you are saying, it is simply disturbing the peace or even assault depending on the situation. It goes well beyond that when someone seeks retribution because of simple speech and may even demand that an authority enforce it based on their demands. All of this is context dependent of course but the general rule of thumb is that you can only go tit-for-tat. Feel free to raise your voice and scream if you ever find yourself in a debate with Donald Trump but don’t do the same thing with random people at your local park.
The professor in the video wasn’t wearing an offensive Halloween costume and probably never has. He didn’t even write the letter supporting common sense based on traditions that some people still can’t understand well at all apparently. His “crime” was supporting the ideas of the writer that advocated for mutual understanding for something that hadn’t happened yet and didn’t happen to the best of my knowledge.
The reaction he got was a girl went hysterical because he supported a moderate idea second hand based on something that didn’t happen. That is not a good example of free speech. That is closer to a hysterical psychological meltdown that was completely undeserved. I hope that she gets better but I also hope that people will learn that even legal adults sometimes throw tantrums and you cannot take them any more seriously in intellectual terms than you can debate rationally with a tired 2 year old.
Does Yale have remedial classes in Civics and Anger Management?