Yale's Halloween Hustle

"Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher

Yale’s Halloween Hustle (Part 6). If there's one incident on a college campus in the last 20 years that you're likely to have heard about, it's the Yale Halloween costume controversy of 2015. That controversy began a few days before Halloween when an administrator warned the student body in an email about wearing offensive costumes.

When a teacher at Yale and an expert on early childhood education, Erika Christakis, questioned the need for such a warning, a firestorm erupted. Thanks to Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation For Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), we have part of that firestorm on film.

It might otherwise be hard to believe that a few days after Halloween, around 100 students surrounded, cursed, and tried to physically intimidate Erica's husband, Yale Professor Nicholas Christakis, for more than 3 hours.

As familiar as this scene is, there are two important points that most people have either forgotten or never knew. The first point is that there was no offensive costume. That is, no one had actually worn a Halloween costume that students complained about in 2015. In fact, no one had reported seeing an offensive Halloween costume at Yale for as long as anyone could remember.

But, the second point is crucial. What all 6500 undergraduates at Yale had seen just a few days before Halloween was probably the largest collection of racist images and film clips ever sent to a student body on an American university campus. That collection was not set by Professor Christakis or his wife, Erika, who ended up resigning from her job because of the controversy. That collection was sent as four internet links, in that first campus-wide email sent by the Ed School trained Vice President for Student Engagement, Burgwell Howard a few days before Halloween. This is just the sort of thing that ed school administrative culture encourages, of course: keep race front and center at all times.

Now, the stated aim of that email was to caution students against wearing costumes that might seem to mock someone's race, culture, or religion, and to remind students about the racist stereotypes behind all the costumes that they had not been wearing. The Vice President included links to an amateurish website that collected racist images.

Keep in mind, this album of bigoted insults was included in an email which, in good ed school fashion, warned students that it would be the impact of their Halloween costumes, not their intentions that mattered. So why wasn't Vice President Howard worried about the impact of all those racist images he'd sent to every undergraduate on campus? Was it because he knew that intentions did in fact, matter? That minority students considered him an ally and would just assume he had good intentions? Or was it because the racist images he sent, however insulting they were to minority students, indirectly implicated all non-minority students in those insults?

An actual real-life, racially offensive Halloween costume could have been used to accomplish that, but no one had been wearing those. Whatever the answer to those questions, we know that undergraduates decided not to blame the vice president for student engagement, for exposing them to those dehumanizing racist caricatures. They made the decision not to feel insulted by the dean's email just as surely as Yale undergraduates had been deciding for years not to wear costumes that might be perceived as insulting.

In other words, the students were doing exactly what Erika Christakis said they were capable of doing. In the email that would end her lectureship at Yale, she expressed faith in the capacity of all students to decide what costumes to wear and to regulate themselves. Yale students had been doing exactly that for years without a problem. She also expressed faith in the capacity of students to ignore and reject things that troubled them. They'd done just that when they ignored and rejected all those hateful, Jim Crow era cartoons, and racist caricatures that the Vice President of Student Engagement himself had linked in his campus-wide email.

So what was Erika Christakis's great sin? She told the truth. She suggested that students were neither as reckless nor as fragile as they'd been made out to be by ed school administrative doctrine. And in doing so, she implied that the Yale University campus, which is, after all, one of the safest places inhabited by human beings in all of recorded history, wasn't the racist threat it had been made out to be.

But as we know from the war on drugs and the war on terror, for those in the business of providing protection, high threat levels are bread and butter. Likewise, for those in the business of healing race relations, racial division is your sworn enemy but your secret friend—so much so that wounding and healing become part of the same operation, which explains why two of the students who were most critical of Nicholas Christakis that day back in 2015, one of whom tried to bully him physically were awarded Yale's 2017 Nakanishi Prize for providing, quote, "exemplary leadership in enhancing race relations." The committee awarding those honors was headed by none other than the Ed School-trained Vice President for Student Engagement who linked all those racist images in the email that started it all.

In the next video, I'll say more about the methods behind all this madness.

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Watch this video and all previous videos on YouTube, Odysee, or Rumble.

Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)