Protecting Free Speech at Yale

My life as a writer has been animated by two fundamental values: freedom of expression and the pursuit of knowledge. They were values nurtured at Yale, where I developed a love for debate and rich, life-changing conversations. At the Yale Political Union, I joined the Independent Party, whose motto is “Hear All Sides.” Sometimes the sides were stupid or offensive, but we heard and refuted them. In a biweekly column for the Yale Daily News, I engaged respectfully in campus debates. It never occurred to me that the words I wrote, or the vicious hate mail I occasionally received, constituted “violence.”  Since leaving Yale and pursuing a career in journalism, I have traveled around the world to countries where people are physically attacked or imprisoned merely for speaking their minds. Covering the first gay pride parade in Belgrade, Serbia, I was punched in the face by a fascist protestor. These experiences have taught me never to take the freedoms we are so lucky to have for granted.

Recent events leave me worried that the Yale I know and loved is changing, and for the worse. To be sure, all of us alumni are vulnerable to waxing nostalgic about how things were better in the old days, and I acknowledge that the University has made important strides in ensuring that the experience it affords students from all sorts of backgrounds is as rich and rewarding as it was for me. But a sign that something had gone terribly wrong occurred in the fall of 2015, when video of a mob of Yale students shouting at then-Silliman Master Nicholas Christakis went viral. That these students were treating a professor in such disrespectful fashion was troubling enough; that the impetus for their outrage was a completely innocuous email written by his wife, fellow professor Erika Christakis, about Halloween costumes left me utterly bewildered. Yale’s effective endorsement of the mob and subsequent failure to stand up for the Christakises — which led to Nicholas stepping down from his position as Master and Erika leaving Yale entirely — left me feeling deeply ashamed as an alum. When I later discovered that the university had rewarded two of the ringleaders of this mob with a prestigious school prize, I realized that something was deeply amiss.  

A decade before the publication of the report bearing his name, historian C. Vann Woodward warned that “the University is in danger of sacrificing principle to expediency.” If elected trustee, I promise never to sacrifice free speech, academic excellence or the pursuit of knowledge on the altar of fashionable opinion.