https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/26/the-molotov-diploma/
This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives, September 17, 2020.
Just before Halloween in 2015, Erika Christakis, a lecturer at Yale and associate master of one of Yale’s residential colleges, sent an email advising students to “ignore or reject things that trouble you,” rather than throw fits of rage. She was referring to Halloween costumes, which had suddenly become a major issue to supposedly mature Yale students and some Yale deans who had cautioned the students to avoid culturally insensitive garb. Christakis wrote as a specialist in child development and was counseling what most of us would consider common sense.
Yet some students at Yale erupted in overwhelming fury. In a now-famous video, a mob of students surrounded Erika’s husband, Professor Nicholas Christakis, and taunted him for over 30 minutes. Shortly after that, finding themselves lacking any public support from faculty colleagues or the Yale administration, Erika and Nicholas resigned.
This incident marked a turning point in America’s campus culture. But it was not the only one. Barely a week later, Melissa Click, a professor at the University of Missouri, was caught on video summoning brute force (“We need some muscle over here!”) to prevent a student journalist from photographing a protest in which she was participating.
Across the country in colleges large and small, a new race-themed grievance movement sprang to life after the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That movement had a shallow premise. The officer who shot Brown in self-defense, Darren Wilson, was acquitted, and the stories about Brown having surrendered (“Hands up! Don’t shoot”) were revealed as fabrications. But out of these sparse materials, a group calling itself Black Lives Matter was able to spread its narrative far and wide.
