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Originally Posted by DeltaBetaBaby
I thought she was married to the faculty adviser, so lived there incidentally, not as a result of her role with the university, but I don't know exactly how residential colleges at Yale work.
Regardless, I don't think that anyone needs to come out and disagree with an email that says "don't wear a racist Halloween costume." If she thought that costumes were a topic worthy of discussion, she could have raised the issue at any time.
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She began her email with "Nicholas and I have heard from a number of students who were frustrated by the mass email sent to the student body about appropriate Halloween-wear." I take that to mean that her email was prompted by conversations she and her husband had already had with students—conversations that were in turn prompted by the first email.
She then very quickly tied the perspective she was offering, and the questions she was raising, to her own academic field. Then she said:
I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.
It seems to me that we can have this discussion of costumes on many levels: we can talk about complex issues of identify, free speech, cultural appropriation, and virtue “signalling.” But I wanted to share my thoughts with you from a totally different angle, as an educator concerned with the developmental stages of childhood and young adulthood.
She acknowledged the valid concerns of others and then offered a different perspective on the conversation, based on her own academic expertise. Seems to me like exactly what it is to be hoped will happen in a university community.