https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/06/11/yale-racial-grievances-university-bows-diversity-enforcers/
On the university’s latest kowtow to the diversity enforcers
Once again, a college president has chosen to fan the flames of racial grievance rather than to calm them. This time, that president is Yale’s Peter Salovey. No surprise there, since Salovey has rarely missed an opportunity to signal his racial virtue by declaring that he presides over a campus harboring “hate,” “exclusion,” and “discrimination.” Yale’s response to a recent incident of petty dormitory tyranny is a textbook example of how not to lead a university.
On May 8, at 1:40 a.m., a female graduate student at Yale turned on the light in the graduate-dorm common room and found another woman sleeping there, amid books, a laptop, a pillow, and a blanket. The first woman allegedly told the second woman that she didn’t have the right to sleep there and called the Yale police to report an unauthorized person in the common room. Three Yale Police Department officers showed up five minutes later.
For the next 15 minutes, two of the officers and the erstwhile sleeper, Lolade Siyonbola, a 34-year-old MA candidate in African studies, interacted warily on the landing outside Siyonbola’s dorm room, as the cops tried to corroborate her identity. On another floor, the third officer questioned the caller, Sarah Braasch, a 43-year-old Ph.D. candidate in philosophy. Confirming Siyonbola’s identity took longer than usual since the name on her campus ID did not match the name she had chosen to use in Yale’s student database. Once the discrepancy was resolved, the officers admonished Braasch that Siyonbola had every right to be in the common room and left.
As captured on Siyonbola’s smartphone video, Braasch appears to be an officious control freak, believing herself empowered to enforce her own private code of dormitory conduct. Ordinarily, this trivial incident would have passed without notice. But because Braasch is white and Siyonbola is black, the episode has become an international scandal, and Yale has gone into crisis mode.
First out of the gate with a racial mea culpa was the dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerken. In an email to the “Law School Community” on May 10, Gerken claimed that the police check of Siyonbola represented a “corrosive” pattern: “We are well aware that this is not the first time that people of color, and African Americans in particular, have been questioned about their right to be in a building on the Yale campus. Similar incidents have happened over the years here at the Law School.” Gerken is right: Such questioning has happened at the law school — to black and white students. Several black law students complained on Facebook after the Braasch episode about being asked for identification when their family was visiting and taking pictures. A white Yale law student has had the identical experience: “I’ve been asked for my ID at the law school when I had my family enter the building with me to take pictures,” he told me via email. He has been asked for his ID when a substitute security guard was at the building’s front entrance and when walking into the library. All of these potential “incidents” occurred during the day, not in the middle of the night.
