12 Minute Video: What Yale Has Become

Last updated on: March 27, 2017 at 6:38 am by Nancy French

12 Minute Video: What Yale Has Become 2017-03-27T06:38:19-05:00 Nancy French

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In 2015, a video of a shrieking girl on Yale’s campus went viral, because Americans were stunned at the reason she was screaming. It all started when Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email explaining the kinds of Halloween costumes that were and weren’t appropriate for Yale. However, one professor thought the Halloween costume guidelines were unnecessary.

Professor Erika Christakis thought this was preposterous, so she wrote an email that read:

I don’t, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others. I can’t defend them anymore than you could defend yours. Why do we dress up on Halloween, anyway? Should we start explaining that too? I’ve always been a good mimic and I enjoy accents. I love to travel, too, and have been to every continent but Antarctica. When I lived in Bangladesh, I bought a sari because it was beautiful, even though I looked stupid in it and never wore it once. Am I fetishizing and appropriating others’ cultural experiences? Probably. But I really, really like them too.

Even if we could agree on how to avoid offense – and I’ll note that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin-revealing costumes – I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?

The email ended with:

Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.

Protests erupted on campus over Ericka’s email. When Americans who saw the viral video, they wondered what on earth has happened in the Ivy League. Just one year later, neither Dr. Christakis and his wife are still at Yale. In a new mini-documentary, filmmaker Rob Montz went to Yale to figure out what exactly is going on there. The video is described:

Is it still a university designed to seek knowledge and truth? Or primarily a full service destination for privileged students? A place where upper class students can add to their resumes in a cushy, unchallenging environment before taking elite jobs? Is the role of the bloated college administration to further academic objectives or their own careers and purview? Was the “screaming girl” at Yale wrong when she insisted that Nick Christakis’s job was not to teach but to make her home comfortable – or was she right?

This documentary focuses on Yale, but it has implications for colleges nationwide. With incidents from Brown to Middlebury to Berkeley, universities are grappling with issues of free speech and free expression amidst student demands for inclusive environments — as well as students and administrators who are afraid to say anything controversial or interesting for fear it will negatively affect their job prospects. With numerous concerned students too afraid to speak on record in the documentary, the silence is deafening.

Watch the eye opening twelve minute video below. And by the way…

The annual total cost of tuition, fees, room, and board at Yale? $70,570.

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