Yale admins bow to pressure from students and apologize over Halloween ‘safe space’

[caption id=”attachment_145010″ align=”aligncenter” width=”1302″](Associated Press)

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Students are not only fierce in demanding their ‘safe space,’ they’re unruly and unapologetic about it. That these students come from the prestigious Ivy League school of Yale University seems to have no bearing.

Recently, Hot Air pointed to incidents affecting Yale campus.

As Reason reported, students are actually calling for the firing of two administrators, because they apparently did not create a safe enough space for students during Halloween. They also surrounded the college dean Jonathan Holloway, who is black, for not taking action against a frat which allegedly denied entrance to a black woman. The allegation is in dispute.

During a closed door meeting then, administrators actually caved in and apologized. The Washington Post reported it happened Thursday night, the same day Holloway was confronted. The president even told students “we failed you.”

Students weren’t just angry, they were unruly, obscene, and ridiculous. In their reporting, the Washington Post also detailed the “controversy” surrounding thoughts from one of the residents of an undergraduate residential college at Yale:

“Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that,” wrote Erika Christakis, an early childhood educator and the wife of Nicholas Christakis, the Silliman College master. Both later took to social media to defend the e-mail, incensing students by tying it to debates about free speech and trigger warnings. At a Wednesday night forum hosted by the Afro-American Cultural Center, Erika Christakis sought to leave the meeting during a discussion of her e-mail, further provoking student anger.

Following the encounter with Holloway, students moved to Silliman, where they staged a similar confrontation with Nicholas Christakis, who grew frustrated at times with the students’ arguments, at one point responding to a request for an apology by asking why students were not apologizing to him for keeping him from “other obligations.”

Students grew distressed, with one shouting at Christakis to be quiet and questioning why he took the position at the university. “You are a poor steward of this community,” the student said. “You should not sleep at night.”

In an e-mail, Christakis said it is his job “to help students to speak for themselves, rather than to speak for them.”



Hot Air shared further insight about the incident:

So it’s no longer good enough to admonish the actual practitioners of controversial speech (assuming there’s anything controversial actually taking place.) Now the faculty needs to go on the chopping block if they don’t proactively go out and squelch any offensive thoughts. This is the price we’re paying for generations of liberal thinkers encouraging the coddling of students and stamping out any competing ideas. One of the students who was screaming vulgarities at Christakis and asking “who the **** hired you” informed him that Yale was not a place to create an intellectual space. It’s supposed to be a home.



Because the Christakis’ dared to speak their mind and challenge students to think about what they were really asking, students have now called for them to be fired.

Once upon a time you wouldn’t expect students from such a prestigious institution to behave in such a manner. But such may be the result of what happens as a result of obsessing over “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

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