What these videos show is that, far from being some sort of outlier among the protesting Yalies, the childish hysteria displayed by the shrieking student in the original video was only slightly more intemperate than the behavior of her peers; indeed, another student (at around 3:00 in Part IV) can be seen calling Christakis “disgusting” to his face just moments before the young woman who became infamous across the country and around the world screamed the same thing.
Nor are Yalies outliers among college students nationally. A recent Knight Foundation survey on campus attitudes to free speech finds that the kids are anything but all right: 27 percent of college students believe administrations should restrict “offensive” political speech, 63 percent favor schools banning costumes, and half believe that news reporting on campus protests should be prohibited. Another poll conducted last year, meanwhile, found that more than half of all students nationwide support campus speech codes.
In June, the Times asked Nicholas Christakis to write a piece on the subject of “teaching inclusion in a divided world.” What he wrote was a simple endorsement of Yale’s mission to bring “light and truth” unto the world. “We must demonstrate that we cannot be a community of searchers and learners if we do not share the same principles at the core of our universities,” Christakis wrote. “And so the faculty must cut at the root of a set of ideas that are wholly illiberal. Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words—even provocative or repugnant ones—are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.” Reading these words now, it’s impossible not feel a sense of shame at how my alma mater betrayed not only Erika and Nicholas Christakis, but itself.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member