There’s No College P.C. Crisis: In Defense of Student Protesters
As Halloween approached at Yale this year, a university committee sent around a mass email encouraging students to consider that costumes playing on ethnic, racial or other stereotypes might cause offense. A student life administrator, Erika Christakis, circulated a critical response to that email, which in turn sparked a campus-wide discussion. Faculty, staff and students debated the issue in person, in school publications and online, sometimes heatedly. Many students argued Christakis’ stance was incompatible with her role overseeing a campus residential community. Others disagreed. Some even argued Christakis and her husband, who had been similarly vocal, should be fired — a call that the university quickly rejected.
Many of us, watching from afar, saw all this as a controversy in the best traditions of American college life — spirited debate, heated disagreement, rowdy protest. And if the stakes struck us as small, and some of the reactions overheated, that was hardly unprecedented either.
For others, though, the events at Yale were a major scandal, confirmation that the U.S. higher education system is in a deep and dangerous crisis. The students who protested Christakis were, it was charged, a mob of censors — “snowflake totalitarians” who “made no allowance for legitimate dissent.”
How did we get to this point? Why are such ordinary disagreements suddenly being cast as threats to the American university, even America itself?