Reply to Has Yale Become a PC Joke?

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[quote=Anonymous]The message has been lost (outside of Yale, at least) because people don't want to talk about race.

There's no free speech issue here - everybody got to say what s/he wanted to say.  The Dean, Chaplain et al. said think about the effect on others before you decide how you want to exercise your right to free expression on Halloween.  The Co-Master said The Dean et al are overreaching, Halloween is for subversion and college is a place where kids should have a safe space to be obnoxious and offensive. The House Master/Yale faculty member said I agree with my wife's statement (which paraphrased him as saying people who are offended by a spectacle should either just "look away" or confront the offender and tell him/her what they think. The aggrieved students -- through various means (open letter, chalking on the quads, blog posts, formal and informal statements in public) -- told Yale what they thought -- the Masters of Silliman don't understand their role in the campus community, Yale's everyday racism (in various forms) makes this a hard and alienating place to be a person (and especially a woman) of color, and the Administration's response to this issue has been slow and inadequate.

No one has been punished for any of these expressions.  Free speech is alive and well at Yale.  And, frankly, if you want to talk about respect for authority and how this might play out in a corporate setting, then the Co-Master might well and deservedly have been fired or demoted.  She exercised poor judgment and undermined an institutional effort to ease racial tensions on campus that was initiated by university officials with higher status and more responsibility for the project than she had.  Imagine a department head who, in response to a corporate-wide missive from HR about how office decor should avoid creating a hostile work environment for women, sent a memo to all her subordinates saying as far as she's concerned your cube is your own space and you should be able to decorate it anyway you want to and anyone who tells you differently is overstepping his or her authority.
Personally, I think universities should have higher/different standards than corporations and that, in reality, there's generally less accountability for the real decision-makers in corporate settings than other domains, but, hey, if that's your standard, the Co-Master would probably have been censured before it came to a point where you had subordinates so angry they were screaming obscenities.  That's a damage control model.

By contrast, Yale's showing what free speech actually looks like when people talk about controversial issues in a context where there are real disparities of power and where those who lack power feel they aren't being heard or taken seriously.  [/quote]

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