How would a university with vision act when such cultural institutions come under attack? In Yale’s case, several students began to agitate that the term “Master” had problematic racial connotations. In other words, “Master” was also what African-American slaves called their owners. In the case of authentic individual tensions—if a student had a difficult background where they had been forced to use the term—perhaps the university would find a reasonable resolution to make the student comfortable. But in the case of broader misunderstanding, perhaps it would be better to educate the students about their academic heritage. The administration could have explained that this term has nothing to do with slavery in America and actually derives from a rich history that makes Yale unique.
What actually happened? After some debate, the title was quickly changed to “head of college.” The suspicion is that this was done to appease the student body as a compromise for not changing the name of a dormitory. In the end, the compromise was rejected, a large number of students took to the streets, and both were changed.
But the appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative. It would be one thing if the students were polled and a majority said they wanted the name changed, or some other process was used. At least the university could say that it was making decisions based on some objective democratic process, and wasn’t just being pushed around. But this is not what happened. No polls were taken. There was no authoritative process. The school said no for a few months, then caved. If the school were actually confident in its position to resist, it could have easily pushed back on the protests. Instead, it folded on demands from a small number of students willing to make noise. Either the university administrators are spectacularly spineless, or the protests just provided a convenient impetus and excuse to do something they already wanted. We can look at several more incidents and notice a similar trend.
The Halloween Costumes incident also made national headlines. It was another test for Yale. The Intercultural Affairs Council wrote an authoritative email to the entire student body before Halloween, instructing students to be mindful about offensive costumes. A few students approached Erika Christakis, a professor, child psychologist, and wife of Yale Master Nicholas Christakis, and told her that they found it strange that the Council could just email the entire student body and tell it what to do. Erika took note and wrote her own email, proposing that Halloween costumes should be policed not from the top down with institutions instructing people on their behavior, but from the bottom up, with students having conversations with each other.
What happened next? If this were 2005, nothing would have happened. Erika’s letter was benign and non-confrontational, centering on her experience and research with children, and invoking notions of self-regulation and free expression. But this was 2015, so all hell broke loose. Students called for her to be fired. When her husband stood by her, he became a target, too. Both professors, with ambivalent and ambiguous support from the university, stopped teaching. It did not matter that Erika’s classes were so desirable that she had despairingly long waitlists.
In the Calhoun incident, people took to the streets because the name of a dormitory was offensive to them. The reason? It was named after Vice President John C. Calhoun, who, even for his era, was vocally pro-slavery. After months of student protest, it was changed to Grace Hopper.
Then there were the Yelp reviews. The student newspaper parsed hundreds of Dean June Chu’s Yelp reviews, found all of the worst ones, collated them into a PDF, and published it in the student newspaper. What would a university president with vision have done? What should he have done when national newspapers reprinted the piece? Maybe the student newspaper would be placed on suspension, or receive a guidance order. Maybe he would add a faculty advisor. The point is that collating the ‘worst’ of a dean’s activity online and publishing it as a single document—unless there is something criminal or truly heinous—has less in common with journalism than with a revenge plot.
How did leadership respond in real life? Chu was supported at first, but then, when it was found out that there were seven offensive reviews and not just two as she initially claimed, she was let go, and no student was punished. This case made national headlines, but the actual administrative proceedings that determined her leave are still a black box. Perhaps she was already in hot water, and this was the last straw. Perhaps she was paid off to leave and keep quiet. Nobody knows. The public story is that her leaving was solely because of the Yelp reviews.
Some conflicts were public explosions, and some were completely private. The change from “Freshman” to “First-year” happened when an administrator requested that all instances of “Freshman” be changed to “First-year” in all of the materials and pamphlets for the 2018–2019 school year. But women were not asked if they were actually offended by the word. Students were not asked what they thought. This was a change that came completely from the top.
What do all of these events have in common? Some had student support. Some did not. Some started as public outrage taken to the street. Some were completely internal. What they had in common was an administration and student body coordinated around an ideology that continually mutated to ensure moral entrepreneurship and a continued supply of purges, as new forms of human behavior or commonplace descriptors became off-limits. Some of this energy was genuine, some cynical.
These were not kids protesting the Vietnam war, or graduate students mobilizing for better pay and medical care. Nobody would have had a gun shoved into their arms and sent across the world if Yale had not fired the professors. Nobody would have lost money if they did not change “Master.” In fact—Yale lost money on these changes in the form of alumni donations and administrative time. Meetings, committees, redone paperwork, and brand new “head of college” plaques. These changes were neither meant to save lives, nor to save money.
But what was the point of it all?
What’s Really Behind The Campus Wars
The news stories portrayed the Halloween Costumes debacle as either an obvious issue of professors’ rights, or an obvious issue of minority rights. But they missed all the messy emotions on the ground.
You must understand—a woman—one professor—wrote an email, and the entire campus went insane. For an entire year, nobody knew what was going to happen. Will the professors really be fired? Can you be fired over an email like that? A cloud of tension drenched the campus. Those opposed to the “politically correct” view whispered among themselves about if, and how, they should mobilize. Those who wanted the firings waited anxiously for the administrative response. On the national scale, this was a minor news story updated every few months, but on the campus these were not minor debates. They changed the entire dynamic. These issues were debated in dining halls. They split apart friends. They formed a mist over everything else—for an entire year. The people who wanted the professors to stay? Either because they disagreed with the scandal, or they liked their classes? They were not just wrong—they must also be cruel.
Thousands of hours of human effort and labor. And for what? What was it for?
If you ask supporters, they will tell you the cost does not matter so much, because this is about creating an ideal world. Of course the professor should be fired—how dare she stand against the minority student organizations? Of course it’s okay that the Yelp reviews were published—she should never have written them. Of course names should be changed if they hint at or honor the wrong ideology. What does preserving history matter if history is racist? The university is handling things according to its proper ideals of empathy and inclusion.
In short, their point was that this was all to help poor people. Immigrants. People whose parents are from distant, impoverished lands. People of color. Changing “Master,” firing the dean, and firing professors was all for this.
Except this did so little to actually help any of these people that this could not possibly have been the main motivation.
None of this was actually to their benefit, except for the few activists willing to invest time and energy into the game. It is not easy to stay up-to-date with the new, ever-more-complex rules about what you are allowed to say to qualify as the bare minimum of sociable and sane. It is cognitively and socially demanding. I had to not just study psychology and computer science, but I had to stay up-to-date with the latest PhD-level critical theory just to have conversations.
I had to debate with people why it is not racist that my Russian parents actually liked the word “Master.” That they liked that Yale was drawing from a rich, centuries-long tradition. “Master” connotes mastery of a subject. It connotes responsibilities and a cultural aesthetic far beyond what “head of college” connotes.
If words like “Master” are deemed offensive based on questionable linguistic or historical standards, then this means other words and phrases can become offensive at a moment’s notice. Under these rules, only people in the upper ranks who receive constant updates can learn what is acceptable. Everybody else will be left behind.
The people best positioned for this are professors at elite universities. They are ingrained in the culture that makes up these social rules. They get weekly or even daily updates, but even they cannot keep up.
Erika and Nicholas Christakis were on-the-record liberals who had fought for minority issues at Harvard. That didn’t matter; they didn’t get with the program, so they had to go. June Chu had penned an article saying that deans need to be mindful of their students’ backgrounds and diverse challenges. If even competent, qualified, liberal, well-meaning, tenured professors at Ivy League universities are in danger of losing their livelihood for arbitrary reasons just because they said something subtly wrong to the wrong student organization, then what hope do the rest of us have?
Nicholas Christakis was ousted as if he were a bad guy. His on-campus family was bullied. His entire life was cast aside over one email, as if the email were the one standard by which he should be judged. Jonathan Holloway, the African-American then-Dean of Yale College, was shouted at by students for not doing enough for black students. Whether June Chu was a good dean or not—and maybe she wasn’t—does not matter. What mattered was what she wrote on Yelp.
A cynical observer might conclude that this is all just revolution as usual—a small clique of agitators seizing more and more power, and purging their enemies by virtue of their superior internal solidarity, a bold and demanding ideology, lukewarm popular moral support, and no real organized opposition. In some ways, that is what’s going on. They have the bold ideology, the ambient support, and no real opposition.
But importantly, they don’t have internal coordination by any means other than adherence to the ideology itself. Even members of the clique are never really safe. Anyone who contradicts the latest consensus version of the constantly mutating ideology, even if they have worked to its benefit or are otherwise obviously on side, gets purged. If you don’t keep up, you get purged.
It doesn’t matter that the ideology is abusive to its own constituents and allies, or that it doesn’t really even serve its formal beneficiaries. All that matters is this: for everyone who gets purged for a slight infraction, there are dozens who learn from this example never to stand up to the ideology, dozens who learn that they can attack with impunity if they use the ideology to do it, and dozens who are vaguely convinced by its rhetoric to be supportive of the next purge. So, on it goes.
This is the nature of coordination via ideology. If you’re organizing out of some common interest, you can have lively debates about what to do, how things work, who’s right and wrong, and even core aspects of your intellectual paradigm. But if your only standard for membership in your power coalition is detailed adherence to your ideology, as is increasingly true for membership in elite circles, then it becomes very hard to correct mistakes, or switch to a different paradigm.
And this helps explain much of the quagmire American elites are stuck in: being unable to speak outside of the current ideology, the only choice is to double down on a failing paradigm. These failures lead to lower elite morale, resulting in the class identity crisis which afflicts so many at Yale. Ironically, the result is an expression of that ideology which is increasingly rigid on ever more minute points of belief and conduct.
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