by Rob Shimshock
A candidate for Yale University’s board of trustees is intent on smashing political correctness, particularly after the 2015 cultural appropriation scandal on campus.
Yale graduate James Kirchick suggested that he saw the beginnings of leftist intolerance on campus when he noticed an underrepresentation of liberals in the school debate club, according to The College Fix. Kirchick announced his candidacy for Yale’s board of trustees in a Wall Street Journal column entitled “I’m Running to Restore Yale Values”.
Kirchick cited Yale students’ viral surrounding and lecturing of former headmaster Nicholas Christakis after his wife, professor Erika Christakis, sent a campus-wide email in which she expressed skepticism that students had to be warned about “appropriate Halloween wear.”
“When the university rewarded two of the mob’s leaders with a prestigious prize, something was deeply amiss,” Kirchick stated. “Further developments have only confirmed my worries. Yale ditched the title “master” on the ludicrous grounds that it is racist; a survey finds half the faculty approves of “trigger warnings” for readings and classroom discussions, and the number of campus administrators continues to swell while the cost of attending has increased to $70,000 a year.”
The candidate also cited the yellow-light rating assigned to Yale by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a free speech nonprofit, for policies that could be applied arbitrarily to limit student speech. FIRE lists Yale’s prop weapon and stage combat policy, sexual misconduct, and harassment policies among others deemed too broad to be consistently implemented.
Alumni “over the years told me that they felt betrayed by Yale, that they didn’t understand what happened, that they stopped giving money to Yale,” Kirchick told The College Fix. “I think it’s a real shame that we don’t understand how valuable [free speech] is and how rare it is actually in the world today.”
The school made headlines in 2017 for changing the name of its Calhoun College residency on the basis of advice from a three-person panel, two of whose members were professors who had engaged in activism to rename the building previously. Yale also boasted 14 times as many emotional support animals on campus in 2018 than in 2017.
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Rob Shimshock is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation. Follow Rob on Twitter and Facebook.
