Recently, 49 faculty members wrote their own open letter defending Christakis against allegations of racism. Douglas Stone, a colleague who wrote the open letter, told Business Insider that “aggressive tactics” used against Christakis spurred her to decide to stop teaching....Ironically, "useful and important contribution to campus discourse" is also a platitude and also not direct support.
The Christakises received support from Yale’s administration in November, after nearly a month of escalating tension. President Peter Salovey and Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway sent an email to students affirming that they “fully support” the Christakises, YDN reported. But Stone was disappointed with the platitudes, rather than direct support, that Salovey and Holloway used in their email.
“I was disappointed that the President Salovey and Dean Holloway did not defend Erika’s email explicitly, but restricted themselves to general expressions of support for free speech,” he said. “I think Erika’s email was a useful and important contribution to campus discourse.”
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"I will not be teaching at Yale in the future," said the lecturer who told students the university didn't need to protect them from Halloween costumes.
Erika Christakis had emailed: "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?"
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Astute observers will note this continuing spread of Liberal Fascism. The Lib Cong cannot tolerate dissenting views or opinions.
Psychobabble..........
How many days until the husband leaves? I'll say 3.
The Christakises received support from Yale’s administration in November, after nearly a month of escalating tension.
Cowards from top to bottom. It is truly sad on one hand and a pleasure on the other to have the tiger of Leftism turn on its academic tiger tamers.
The 'fight or flight' response mentioned in an earlier post's comments also finds a home here.
The aggrieved students fight; the administration takes flight.
The administrators seem to be following the path outline by Althouse in that previous post:
"Another alternative is to hide or lie low and maximize the chance that the enemy will aim at somebody else. Or hold back and wait for somebody with a stronger fight instinct to step up and fight for you. Or reach out to the enemy and appease and please. Surrender and accept what you can get from your conquerer. Not everyone believes the old motto "Live free or die." Some think: Okay, so I'll have no freedom. At least I'm alive. And I wasn't doing much of anything with that freedom anyway. I'll be fine."
Appease and please.
I wasn't doing much of anything with my job's freedom anyway.
I am Laslo.
49 faculty members wrote
And 4,361 didn't write.
“I think Erika’s email was a useful and important contribution ... "
...is direct support.
"Ironically, 'useful and important contribution to campus discourse ' is also a platitude and also not direct support."
I see your point but I disagree . Stone doesn't need to fully explicate the email in order to praise it for being a "useful and important contribution." To me he seems to be directly supporting her and what she wrote, here.
At the same time though, I disagree with him that the President and the Dean fell short in their statements. I wouldn't call those "platitudes," either .
Weak- kneed faculty created the problem by allowing self-indulgent students to dictate curriculum favoring protests du jour as an excuse to control the learning environment. One can only hope that these anarchist students are graded accordingly for their lack of studying, attending class, completing assignments and doing poorly on examinations. The ringleaders should be expelled from the institution for their actions. Time to clean up the teaching establishment, useless courses, and counselors to those striving for a Phd in a field that will guarantee no job offers if they ever leave the university. Zero tolerance and a focus on the rigors of learning instead of pursuit of victimization. As for the parents of the students, I would not refund a dime of tuition since they are part of the problem.
Possessing Spock-like minds, the liberals who administer Yale will move on to the next epiphenomena that spark their synapses but otherwise will have no effect.
Who's next among the professorial class?
"“I think Erika’s email was a useful and important contribution ... "
...is direct support"
My definition of the term is his definition for the purposes of detecting irony. How is his support more direct than what he criticized as not direct?
Screaming girl won. Unfortunate.
Maybe Erika will teach at a good college like Creighton or Carleton.
Yale gave us the Clintons.
Hillary Clinton must be defeated.
Carthage must be destroyed.
AA,
I am saying I reject his definition and think that in both cases she is getting direct support.
From what I've seen, Yale just lost a good one. Pity I'm retired and not a hiring manager anymore -- I could send an Email to HR and tell them I do not want to see a resume for a Yale graduate ever again. Not that I ever saw that many in the first place; outside of Cornell you hardly ever see an Ivy grad actually doing real work in a technical company.
AA: How is his support more direct than what he criticized as not direct?
Seems pretty obvious:
"Dean Holloway did not defend Erika’s email explicitly, but restricted themselves to general expressions of support for free speech"
as opposed to
"Erika’s email was a useful and important...".
It will be interesting to see where they go if they leave. In the 1930s, the US and Britain were refuges for those fleeing Nazi intolerance. Where will they go ? It was not only Albert Einstein who fled. Max Peretz who founded the Cambridge Center for Molecular Biology, fled Austria in 1936.
These college students acting out because they were heavily influenced by the liberal elites who have been teaching them their liberal ideals & theories as fact in college and maybe before that in high school. This is a case where the chain reaction has gotten out of control and the "scientists" (college professors) are scratching their heads wondering where it wrong all the while it is getting worse heading towards a meltdown. My liberal friends poo-pooed me in the past when I brought this possible situation up and I say now that they reap what they sowed. Unfotunately, we as a society are SOL as these college students will then try to impose these failed ideals on society once they get into political power. Exihibit A: Professor B.H. Obama of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School.
"Ironically, "useful and important contribution to campus discourse" is also a platitude and also not direct support"
No. The platitude does offer "direct support." Best you're gonna get without hashing out the details anyway. The Yale leadership has tried to undo the "we failed you" embarrassment a tiny bit. But the case will have ramifications. Mr. Christakis looks like a pretty big fish in that pond. If he and his wife can be scared away, that is bound to have a very chilling effect. The deep play of the safe-space fanatics is to make campuses so unsafe for free discourse that no non-Prog will bother to go to work there. Of course, few cons are to be found there now. Jon Shields at heterodoxacademy.org counted two (2!) conservatives at Yale.
It is direct support because it defends the letter itself.
Being reminded of screaming girl this morning, I am struck by the characterization of liberals in the psychology post (a characterization I'm sure they would agree with) "this is a complex phenomenon, and we must contemplate the reasons why this is happening and take care not to do anything rash."
I don't see why she left, unless there are things going on out of sight.
Overtly she has solid support, and every prospect of long term success.
Being a third world sort, I default to conspiratorial thinking. Perhaps warnings or threats regarding her husband's career prospects, him being something of a high flyer. He holds various positions that seem like they may be vulnerable to white-anting.
Poor girl. A relatively small group of students criticize her email. They don't make any "demands" that she quit or go to reeducation camp, etc. And her response is to quit? Did she think there would be no backlash? What a wuss.
David Begley said...
Maybe Erika will teach at a good college like Creighton or Carleton.
She has a husband on the Yale Faculty. Likely she got her appt as part of his hiring package. That's often the case in academia.
I doubt that there are any non-leftist colleges in New Haven. Anyone have a candidate school?
If looking only at actions prior to the professor's decision to leave, the open letter seems more directly supportive than the administration's letter given that according to the Yale Daily News it made its signatories suspect in the eyes of the protesters as being "out of touch" concerning campus conversations and minority plights.
While "useful and important contribution to campus discourse" is a platitude, it's not the only part of his comment, it goes along with disappointment about failure to directly defend the e-mail by administration, which I think can reasonably be described as direct support.
Maybe the Yale community was suspicious of Greeks baring grit
Her name isn't "screaming girl". Her name is Jerelyn Luther.
Make a note of that. Jerelyn Luther.
The Bass family experience with Yale suggests that left wing faculty will never be overturned as the endowment seems adequate to insulate them from consequences.
"There are certain fundamental principles, among which is the fact that Yale...had to take responsibility for selecting its own faculty and not give that over to other parties," Terry Holcombe, SY '64, vice president of Development and Alumni Affairs, said.
However, Christopher G. Long, vice president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), said that Yale is placing too much emphasis on Bass' request for faculty approval to dodge questions about the Administration's own actions.
The blame for the loss of the Bass grant - and the Western civilization program it was to fund - must lie on the shoulders of Yale administrators, according to Long. The delay in implementing Bass' wishes was the result of incompetence, faulty leadership, and rigidity, he said.
Between the time the grant was announced and Levin's inauguration, Yale saw the departure of President Benno Schmidt, TC '63, LAW '66, in 1992, and Acting President Howard Lamar, GRD '51, in 1993. The Bass program, originally scheduled to begin in the fall of 1993, was caught in limbo as the Yale leadership changed. "Nothing went forward until I became president in fall 1993. We basically had two academic years lost," Levin said.
While ISI and Light and Truth have also argued that the delay involved the program's intended content, Levin disagreed. "That's all sniffing in the wrong direction. Yale has a very strong program in Western civilization. We've done an admirable job in avoiding strong ideological politi-cization," he said. "There has been no faculty pressure for us to turn down this grant," he added.
Yale is very certain of its own virtue. This is typical of the left.
Liberal Fascism...ruining the lives of innocent Americans...Obama's America!!!
I'm not able to feel much sympathy here. Having worked real jobs and dealt with real problems all my life, this does not even move the needle. If I didn't already know what the problem was, this might help to explain it but I've raised kids so I understand.
"Did she think there would be no backlash? What a wuss."
If I said something that seemed to me as fuck-obvious as what Christakis said, I wouldn't expect a backlash either.
Then again, academics do tend to be herd-followers and cowards, like most people I suppose.
Good. Those who supposedly see racism in every corner of the university are playing hardball. Those in the university who don't like how the university is treating its employees should go elsewhere.
Parents who see how Yale kowtows to extremists should find schools where they don't.
And yet the liberal grievance professor who threatened a student reporter with physical violence remains employed.
That tells you everything you need to know about the universities.
Fernandinande said..."49 faculty members wrote
And 4,361 didn't write."
...and nearly all of the 49 faculty members who did write were from science, engineering, or medicine. What does that say about the humanities?
Unfortunately, more and more faculty - including female faculty - will find that this is the inevitable result of bloating enrollments generally and specifically with a gender that often prefers rote memorization to abstract thought, emoting to critical thinking, and is glad that the curricula have been revised to match those intellectual traits. Though any "benefit" of those changes is questionable when we find the value of a college degree decreasing every year.
What an incredibly stupid world we live in and have chosen to help create.
Her name isn't "screaming girl". Her name is Jerelyn Luther.
Make a note of that. Jerelyn Luther.
Like a cross between Jor-El and Lex Luther.
On the plus side, a search for this lecturer led me to this article.
Someone once told me that intelligence and good looks are linked. Exhibit A certainly gives me some hope.
I've never sought to elevate the argument/stereotype of feminists being ugly women who are jealous of the attention given to physically more attractive women. But the argument makes sense, biologically. If someone's mate offerings were reduced due to low, er, aptitude in an important criterion, naturally one would seek to make that criterion meaningless. To "level the playing field", so to speak.
And then we remembered Jerelyn Luther.
Do people have to make the arguments against them this demeaning?
Where have you gone, Camille Paglia? A lonely campus turns its eyes to you.
"The Christakises received support from Yale’s administration in November, after nearly a month of escalating tension."
Key point for me is not the mush that the administration offered, but the fact that it took it a month to decide to do it. Clearly the core principles of a true liberal arts institution were consumed long ago by the bureaucracy. And we can hardly blame it. When every word or deed might be construed by the Federal government as conducive of a harassing or oppressive environment under Title IX or otherwise, prompting another investigation and a painful compliance agreement, it is far better to capitulate preemptively.
I'm really surprised that 49 of the faculty had the stones to stand up on this. A list is being kept, no doubt.
The aggrieved students did not care for this display of (token) support for Christakis. Not at all. They complained about the STEM professors' general lack of interest in and empathy for their plight and suggested the professors could use some sensitivity training. Whoever would have guessed that one day our most esteemed universities would become a bad joke.
What it says is that the other professors agree with the activists or that they are probably aware that speaking up would be bad for their careers. I think that behind the scenes there may have been some suggestions to her husband, on the general lines of not rocking the boat.
The nadir of academia was supposedly the McCarthy era with all the firings, black listings, self-censorship, denunciations, etc. I think Obama's Amerikkka is exceeding McCarthy in all categories.
Rhythm and Balls: "Unfortunately, more and more faculty - including female faculty - will find that this is the inevitable result of bloating enrollments generally and specifically with a gender that often prefers rote memorization to abstract thought, emoting to critical thinking, and is glad that the curricula have been revised to match those intellectual traits. Though any "benefit" of those changes is questionable when we find the value of a college degree decreasing every year."
Now that is a provocative thought.
I'm genuinely curious what you are basing this on and I'm perfectly willing to consider simple anecdotal evidence/experience as a starting point.
Dogma is dogma and violators will be eliminated. That is one thing on which Chairman Mao and ElBaghdadi are in total agreement. Education is now a political act. Bow or die!
I see the other brave professors ( like so many these days ) are willing to pen a sternly worded letter but not willing to inconvenience themselves and walk out as well. No wonder the students will continue to push these virtuos teachers around.
uwaya puti said...
What it says is that the other professors agree with the activists or that they are probably aware that speaking up would be bad for their careers.
Then what is the point of tenure? Get rid of it and clean out the pig-sty.
I'd say the Administration should stand and fight, back their professors and hand out suspension notices like parking tickets...
...but that assumes that the University Leadership believes in their Institution and its Mission, rather than in simply clinging to their phony-baloney jobs like Obama's former OPM director.
Where will they go ?
I would have said the Land Grant schools, but it looks like Mizzou has been overrun, as well.
I'm not able to feel much sympathy here. Having worked real jobs and dealt with real problems all my life, this does not even move the needle.
Actually, it does. Have you seen the video of the little harridan berating Dr. Christakis' husband? The future at Yale is Jerelyn Luthers shrieking and cursing in Professors' faces, with no disciplinary consequences, forever. Who needs that shit?
This kind of crap preserves the phenomenon of the 1%. 70 percent never get a degree and their likelihood of making to the top are quite low. Then some large percentage of students have lousy majors and more concerned with being safely coddled. They basically opt out of the game before it really starts. That probably leaves less than 10% that are really "in the game". Then some of those choose lifestyle (family, etc.) over high achievement. So not really a surprise that a small number of people end up with most of the rewards.
Althouse said,
"Ironically, "useful and important contribution to campus discourse" is also a platitude and also not direct support."
Douglas Stone;
“I was disappointed that the President Salovey and Dean Holloway did not defend Erika’s email explicitly, but restricted themselves to general expressions of support for free speech,” he said.
“I think Erika’s email was a useful and important contribution to campus discourse.”
It seems fairly clear that he is saying the lily-livered vermin who run Yale were too cowardly to actually defend the e-mail or its author. Instead, they mudged about "free speech", but they were not actually willing to suggest that people who get upset about non-existent Halloween costumes might be overly sensitive.
Let alone expel the fucking little shit-heads, as they should have.
When I was in basic training, our drill instructor told us that he expected us to act like alpha dogs at all times, and that anyone who was caught being a bitch was going to have to pay a penalty. This follows me throughout my life.
Just the other day this guy stepped in front of me in the check-out line. He was about 50 pounds heavier than me. I gathered-up my alpha dog voice and said "you can go to the rear now, or I will fuck you up" and then pushed him aside.
He looked like he was going to fight me, but I kept looking at him, and got ready to fuck him up. He backed down and went to another cashier.
The sad thing was, the cashier he went to was about 10 times faster than the fucking bitch who was scanning our fucking shit. You just can't win.
Anyway, the professor is right to leave. She's the alpha dog, the University is the bitch. Taking it in the ass from a bunch of 19 year old kids.
Things are quickly getting to the point where all the classic discourses will have to be amended to describe how offensive Socrates was to Plato, how they both weren't sufficiently respectful to Aristotle's feelings, and how the whole thing had to be patched over by identifying "trigger warnings" before engaging their best arguments.
Only 49 faculty members showed public support. How many Melissa Clicks are on the Yale payroll that thought, like the students, that an unforgivable offense had occurred?
"AA: How is his support more direct than what he criticized as not direct?" Seems pretty obvious:
"Dean Holloway did not defend Erika’s email explicitly, but restricted themselves to general expressions of support for free speech"
as opposed to "Erika’s email was a useful and important..."."
Thanks for responding to my question. I can see that's why Stone thinks he was different, but in my view, his support is noncommittal and generic. "Useful & important" is sort of like: it was good of you to contribute. And Stone also said: “I do not want to stir up angry debate, but felt that the debate up to this point has been one-sided and needed to be balanced." That's very similar to a generic defense of free speech. We need to hear more that one side, we need balance, etc.
Jerelyn Luthers has no idea of what a sorry mess her life is going to be. Her behavior is pure thug culture and should have been squared away in childhood. It wasn't and now, having bullied her betters, she thinks she's the boss. Well, no, she's just briefly notorious. Nobody with a clue will want her near. She has created a permanent ghetto for herself. Because most of the shunning will be tacit and unexplained --just an absence of offers-- she will probably become even more paranoid and angry at the "conspiracy to disempower" her deserving self.
Meanwhile there must be about 100,000 Yale grads wondering what just happened to their school and their brand. Yale administration chose the path of least resistance, but it is going to end up being very costly.
Other schools are in the same boat. IMHO we are in the end stage of the industry's collapse. Not much we can do now but watch it happen.
Agree that it was ironic that Stone used mushy generalities to critique Holloway's use of mushy generalities. I can only speculate that Stone thought his rhetorical move was positive. If he had defended Christakis' email directly, he would have drawn fire away from the target he intended. He would have become the story, which would be painful (of course) but more importantly it would have allowed Holloway to escape into the underbrush.
Maybe --since Professor Althouse is acutely aware of the "meta"-- Stone intended us to notice the irony, and to draw from it the real message, which is that academia is so choked with intellectual cowardice that even the boldest can no longer call things by their true names.
Ann is right
Direct support would be...
Doing a joint press conf. with them and calling out the students. Stating explicitly that they are the antihesis to free speech and there position in calling for her resignation is childish.
This crazy lady thinks that Halloween costumes are an existential threat to Ivy League college students. Someone must protect these poor children from her.
So we see that university professors are moral cowards and hypocrites who don't believe in free speech, although sometimes, like Prof. Althouse, they invoke the ideal of free speech to defend speech with which they agree. People, this is not news. University life mostly attracts conformists who can't handle the rough and tumble of the real world and just want to conform without having to think.
In plain English, the Yale administration was delighted to see Mrs. Christakis go, and if they could figure out a way to ease her husband out, that would be even better. A better college president, someone who wasn't already soused in the leftist weltanschauung, would have stiff-armed and/or disciplined the protestors, and invited Mrs. Christakis to tea.
Owen, I think it more likely Jerelyn Luther will have a successful career as a community organizer and politician. At the very least she will land a sinecure, probably at a university, as an advisor.
" ... also a platitude and also not direct support."
Yes, indeed. What has been sorely missing in the fracas has been a little adult supervision. The email of Ms. Christakes was offensive in direct proportion to her attempt to provide that perspective. The comments by Yale officialdom since then have been pathetic, to put it as charitably as possible, because they refuse to criticize the childish excesses of the would-be student victims of hypothetical Halloween costume insensitivity. More fundamentally, the Yale administration refuses to embrace diversity in anything but racial and ethnic terms, and instead accepts a monoculture where dissenting expressions from the "current line" are ruthlessly suppressed. It's odd and a bit sad that an ever useful Stalinist cliché describes the way public discussion of such things is regulated on campus today. Even sadder that the precious snowflakes wouldn't have a clue what I am referring to.
At least, that seems to be the situation viewed at a distance from the outside.
Screaming girl won. Unfortunate.
For some values of "won". Yale degree or no, who would hire someone like that?
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