(Young Conservatives have a really good post on this) This comes via Gay Patriot’s commentary on “a generation is raised to believe that they are so wonderful and so special that anything that offends them…”
- They were mad because a professor said in an email that if someone’s Halloween costume offended them, they should try and act like adults about it. (The longer version can be found here)
I would like to say that this is the typical act of the left… that is: yell, scream, take off a jacket to fein violence ~ and then leave rational discourse — quickly. Here is a portion of HotAir’s post on the topic:
Robby Soave at Reason brings us another depressing tale of students at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities who clearly have been herded into a climate where nobody should ever be made to feel uncomfortable or have their own world views challenged. This time it’s at Yale, where students want some administrators fired because they didn’t speak out strongly enough about potentially off-putting Halloween costumes and a frat party.
Students are demanding that Yale University fire two administrators who failed to speak out against offensive Halloween costumes. This is just one of the grievances of activist students—many of them people of color—who claim Yale is not a safe space for them.
On Thursday, the students surrounded Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway—a black man—in an outdoor space and chided him for failing to take action against a fraternity that had allegedly prevented black women from attending its party.
So the students are upset about an email in which the wife of Nicholas Christakis, master of Silliman College, dared to opine that it was inappropriate for the college to tell students how to dress. Oh… the horror. I’ve yet to see a photo of anyone in a costume that involved blackface (one of their concerns, apparently) or wearing a “feathered headdress” which might offend Native Americans….
Prager introduces us to the proclivity of leftist to be infantile in their existence:
HotAir then quotes Reason.org’s post on the topic… of which I quotye a bit more:
…It is not about creating an intellectual space, the students claim; it’s about creating safe spaces. This is as clear an articulation of students’ desires as they come, and it summarizes everything that’s wrong with the modern college campus.
Students should of course feel free to challenge university administrators—this is the essence of free speech. Students have every right to publicize their concerns and work to make Yale a more welcoming place for marginalized people (and administrators should listen). But a great many students, it seems, don’t actually desire a campus climate where such matters are up for debate. By their own admission, they want anyone who disagrees with them branded a threat to their safety and removed from their lives.
If these students get their wish to turn Yale and other campuses into zones of emotional coddling, they will succeed only in destroying the very point of college.
Powerline recaps for us:
The story starts with the wife of Nicholas Christakis, Silliman College’s master, sending out an email addressing the subject of Halloween costumes, which, as we have noted before, has taken on a sudden importance at colleges and universities. The email suggested that if students didn’t like someone else’s costume, they should “look away, or tell them you are offended.”
This was seen by many students as soft on Halloween costumes. They accosted Professor Christakis and unleashed the fury that is characteristic, these days, of unstable college students. In the video below, a young woman, presumably a Yale student, screams profanities at Professor Christakis for reasons that appear unintelligible…
[….]
Fourth, what happened to the girl who screamed at the professor? When I was in college this would have been unthinkable. But if someone had not only thought of it but done it, he surely would have been expelled from school. Somehow I suspect that won’t happen here.
Fifth, the controversy over offensive Halloween costumes is generally couched as a free speech issue. To me, it seems like more a question of mental health. The young woman in the video became hysterical and behaved bizarrely not because she had been offended by a Halloween costume, which would be bad enough, but because she imagined the hypothetical possibility that such a costume might someday exist. She needs help. It sounds like quite a few other Yalies do, too.
Roger Kimball has more on free speech at Yale. It, too, makes the university’s students appear ridiculous….