Will Yale Ever Learn? Guess who just received awards from the Ivy League school.By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-yale-ever-learn-1495738941
You might expect Yale University President Peter Salovey to be hanging his head in shame after allowing radical students to run former administrator Erika Christakis off campus because she dared to defend free expression. Specifically, in 2015 Ms. Christakis suggested that instead of having the university ban Halloween costumes that some students didn’t like, perhaps offended students should simply try to ignore them. You would be wrong.
Mr. Salovey’s Yale not only chose not to support Ms. Christakis and her husband Nicholas in the face of screaming, threatening campus bullies. (The couple stepped down from their administrative posts in 2016.) Now the university has decided to underline its commitment to unwritten limits on free speech by handing out awards to two of Yale’s most prominent Christakis critics.
At its annual Class Day ceremony, Yale awarded its Nakanishi Prize, “to two graduating seniors who, while maintaining high academic achievement, have provided exemplary leadership in enhancing race and/or ethnic relations at Yale College.”
Yale stated that Alexandra Zina Barlowe “has focused her scholarship on issues of land usage, cooperative economies, and reparations in the American South.“ According to the university:
She is described as a fierce truthteller who illuminates the challenges affecting her communities, rooting them in history and context in order to promote a deeper understanding of them. Her peers say of her “Lex never fights for just one issue. Her moral imagination operates with the knowledge that issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. are all interconnected.”
Lex has also worked tirelessly to build bridges among organizations and individuals, pushing relentlessly for a more equitable and just campus — and world — through her activism. Serving as past President and Social Justice Chair for the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY), a Communication and Consent Educator (CCE), and an organizer for the group Fossil Free Yale, she brings womanist, feminist, anti-racist work to the fore with academic rigor and a deep integrity, and she has, by example, taught her peers, faculty and administrators about inclusive leadership.
Yale also honored Abdul-Razak Zachariah, claiming he “has worked to improve Yale’s racial and ethnic relations through his academic work, both within his Sociology major and in the Education Studies program.”
The school seems to view the events of 2015 as some kind of triumph, instead of the offense they represented against the basic idea of a university. And as Ms. Christakis has written, it is not just a problem at Yale:
For seven years I lived and worked on two college campuses, and a growing number of students report avoiding controversial topics — such as the limits of religious tolerance or transgender rights — for fear of uttering “unacceptable” language or otherwise stepping out of line. As a student observed in the Yale Daily News, the concept of campus civility now requires adherence to specific ideology — not only commitment to respectful dialogue.
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