Educator recounts ‘painful experience’ of Halloween email commotion at Yale
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Dodging 5-year-olds at the Calvin Hill Day Care Center here, Erika Christakis admired how the teachers celebrated free play as a route to intellectual inquiry, listened to children rather than preaching and stood back to let them find their own way.
“I think we have a very fear- based way of approaching youth,” she said. “Maybe we need to have a lighter touch.”
In the fall, Christakis, a former lecturer at Yale and an associate master at Silliman College, a student residence, became an unwitting target of campus protests here against racial insensitivity. After she sent out an email critical of a university committee’s urging students not to wear racially or culturally insensitive costumes for Halloween, hundreds of students signed a letter accusing her of insensitivity toward “marginalized” people. Some demanded her dismissal.
She ended up not teaching the spring semester.
“It was a painful experience,” Christakis said, swallowing hard before she spoke last month, in her first interview since those events.
Yet the mood on campuses may be shifting in her direction.
Increasingly, college administrators are pushing back against student demands perceived as doctrinaire on matters involving cultural sensitivity, and are asking for a spirit of negotiation rather than ultimatums, as Christakis urged in her email.
In late January, Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College, wrote an open letter to students there, saying that while he sympathized with their concerns about racism and injustice, and agreed there was much to be done, “I will not respond directly to any document that explicitly rejects the notion of collaborative engagement.”
A few days after the Oberlin letter, Oriel College of Oxford University refused student demands to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, an imperialist benefactor seen by many as an architect of apartheid.
Christakis, a former preschool teacher and expert in early childhood education, can be warm and chatty. But when talking about the Halloween debacle, she froze and chose every word carefully.
Walking back to the college, she avoided eye contact with people who passed her on the campus. Yet perhaps one out of five shot her a sidelong glance of recognition, and sometimes a halfsmile.
She did not notice, she said, adding that she was fairly unobservant: “I couldn’t tell you the color of my neighbor’s house.”
At Silliman,s he offered tea, pulling piles of boxes of different kinds from a drawer in the kitchen. Her dachshund, Rudy, was excited to see her, but no students were in sight. The drawing room exuded a sort of Victorian upperclass taste — Persian rugs, carved chairs, a gilt- framed portrait of a fair- skinned woman in a flouncy dress, holding a chubby baby. None of it, of course, had anything to do with whatever Christakis’ personal taste might or might not be.
In her role as associate master — an administrator and social and academic adviser — she became an almost generic target of student anger. Friends wondered why she had been rash enough to stick her neck out and take on a hot-button issue.
“I see myself as very anti- establishment, in a sort of old- school, lefty way,” she said. Besides, some of her students had asked her what she thought, and “I can’t accept the idea that we can only restrict ourselves to discussions of the weather.”
The thing that shocked her most about the Halloween furor, she said, was that students would cede control over matters like how they should dress to the Yale administration.
“Should we be talking more transparently about when it’s appropriate for administrations to insert themselves into issues that arise in students’ lives?” Christakis asked. “I think students are more capable than we give them credit for being to manage social norming.”
She said in her email: “Is there really no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious?”