Though it’s easy to understand the current protests at Yale as a debate over free speech, this simplification belies a more complex discussion that standard free speech positions fail to address.

If you read coverage of the events that have recently taken place at Yale, they predominantly focus on a pair of emails, one sent by the Intercultural Affairs Committee and another sent by Erika Christakis, associate master of Silliman College, as the flashpoint that triggered the recent unrest on campus. Whereas the IAC email suggests to students to be thoughtful about the costumes they wear for Halloween, Christakis' email raises the question of whether the Yale administration should be in the business of suggesting and censuring student costumes, which she argues is an exercise of free speech. The student backlash to Christakis' email and the public’s backlash¹ to the student backlash have been equally swift. The swiftness of these responses, and indeed my own initial response as well, gave me pause: were the patterns being recognized here the right ones?

Christakis articulates a fairly basic narrative around sensitivity and free speech:

1. There are “genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation”
2. But sensitivity does not justify guidance on free speech (e.g. institutional guidance on what costumes are ok)

This free speech narrative reminds me of the rioting narrative I described in my blog post about Baltimore six months ago, where public officials would

1. Express their sympathy for the death of Freddie Gray
2. Condemn the riots

As I discussed then, it was confusing to me why a public official would spend any time explicitly condemning the riots; doing so isn’t intellectually consistent, it doesn’t really stop rioting, and if anything, it just saps the strength of the nonviolent reform movement.

Arguably the free speech narrative suffers from similar flaws. In both cases, a protest movement forms around calls for institutional reform, whether a city police department or the administration of a private university. Some individuals choose to react with specific means, like destroying property or endorsing a framework of speech (e.g. suggest inoffensive costumes).² In response, the institution in question deploys the standard narrative, which highlights the trivial point that rights (e.g. property or speech) are inviolable, and in so doing, divert attention from the core of the issue. In the Baltimore situation, government officials would use the standard narrative; here, Christakis, an associate college master and therefore representative of the administration, does the same. Just as public officials have a responsibility to guarantee equal protection under the law, Christakis has a responsibility, as college master, to “the physical well being and safety of students in the residential college, as well as for fostering and shaping the social, cultural, and educational life and character of the college.”³ It’s through this lens that Christakis' choice to send the email that she did is similarly confusing.

Independent of the tactical blunders in Christakis' email⁴, she seems to ignore the fact that Yale is an institution which does not observe from the sidelines, it regularly endorses and censures speech, in ways far more pernicious than a suggestion to be thoughtful about Halloween costumes. Ta-Nehisi Coates' critique of the Baltimore narrative cleanly applies here as well: it is inconsistent to require those who lack power to forego institutional endorsement while simultaneously glossing over Yale’s sustained endorsement of speech against minorities.⁵

This is where the similarities end. With Baltimore, I argued that denouncing riots doesn’t really stop rioting, and furthermore, it delegitimized the reform movement by drawing attention to an extreme subset of actors. With Yale, though it’s unlikely that Christakis' position on free speech will placate anyone who is truly calling for speech codes, it’s plausible that it would be effective on a set of students who don’t hold strong opinions on this matter. Or to simplify, everyone understands that rioting is bad, but not everyone agrees on how Yale should handle free speech, so talking about rioting being bad doesn’t change anything whereas talking about free speech might. Thus, broaching the subject may have some value, but it also incurs some cost. By bringing in the rights-based discussion that she does, Christakis draws discourse away from the original topic of Yale’s treatment of minority groups, instead plunging it deep into the quagmire of free speech, which arouses strong emotional responses and severely complicates any discussion.⁶

Christakis' decision to deploy her narrative may seem dependent on a balancing of sorts: whether it’s worth promoting her view of free speech and starting a discussion at the cost of undercutting a protest movement seeking to address the marginalization of minority groups on campus, both by calling out the IAC email as well as by drawing out the subset of actors who hold more extreme views on the value of free speech (i.e. those who wish to have Christakis removed) and generating a backlash. However, this is a false dichotomy. It’s possible to initiate a robust discussion on free speech, while simultaneously acknowledging the context of the protest movement, and Christakis failed to do this.

Importing personal context

Despite the protest movement moving past the initial anger expressed by student op-eds or confrontations with Nicholas Christakis, the media continues to fixate on this. Some observers have commented that the extreme responses of certain student protesters are indicative of a larger phenomenon within higher education, that students have been “coddled” into weakness and oversensitivity.⁷ Though there may be some truth to this, I think these student responses are more indicative of something different. The stereotypical student who matriculates to an institution like Yale isn’t someone used to incivility. One way to approach this is to infer that Yale has made these students weak, but the other is to infer that these students are experiencing genuine pain. As one student describes it:

The protests are not really about Halloween costumes or a frat party. They’re about a mismatch between the Yale we find in admissions brochures and the Yale we experience every day. They’re about real experiences with racism on this campus that have gone unacknowledged for far too long. The university sells itself as a welcoming and inclusive place for people of all backgrounds. Unfortunately, it often isn’t.

This distinction is critical to understanding why the second inference, that this pain is real and not manufactured or imagined, may be closer to the truth. Those who make the weakness inference are implicitly comparing the stated sources of pain (e.g. an associate college master’s email, swastikas, exclusionary frat parties) against sources of pain that they’ve heard of in society (e.g. the right to vote, the right to marry) and drawing the conclusion that because these grievances seem so wildly different in scale, perhaps the sensitivity of these students are way off. The error here is importing societal context as a heuristic to judge the validity of the students' pain about things happening on campus.⁸ Evident from Aaron’s point above, the magnitude of pain in reality depends both on the source as well as the expectation, and in this case, the expectation is set by Yale, which touts certain ideals that it supposedly upholds. The notion that some of these sources of pain are illegitimate because everyone expects that “shit happens” in the real world is also precisely why it’s conceivable that a Yale student would be so upset. If Yale promised an environment where shit doesn’t happen, where overt and covert racism are both minimized, and this is in fact not the case, feeling disappointed and betrayed seems perfectly reasonable.

A second, related point is the observation that student protests typically are at the vanguard of larger protest movements, and it’s exactly because of the unique context established by institutions of higher education. Unlike many parts of society, universities are particularly adept at creating spaces for rational discourse, so students are able to more freely question why things are the way they are. What outsiders perceive as useless and overly-sensitive student protest movements is less a commentary on the quality of those movements and the sensitivity of the students and more on their own limited understanding of context and perhaps even their indifference.⁹

More broadly, the issue of missing context, of arguing without understanding, is something that is clearly becoming emblematic of discourse around these protest movements. In a world where discrimination is now generally covert, context matters that much more. Leveraging personal experience to understand the harms that another experiences is no longer as useful of a heuristic as it may have once been, and if understanding is a prerequisite to productive debate, the only way out is to start from an epistemic position that isn’t so presumptive.