Activist hysteria doesn’t always work
Several years ago Nicholas and Erika Christakis, professors at Yale University, were subject to the shrieking rage of student mob politics, with Nicholas resigning his post at one of Yale’s colleges and Erika resigning her teaching position…all because Erika sent an email suggesting that students shouldn’t be so easily offended by Halloween costumes. For that, the husband and wife were nearly run off of campus altogether.
Now Nicholas Christakis has been honored with a prestigious professorship at Yale. Congratulations to him. Surely such an award constitutes a high point in a professor’s life. It very likely feels like that whole miserable fiasco from a few years ago is behind him, as it is.
And yet we should not readily forget what happened at Yale just a few short years ago. It was something of a flashpoint for the campus activist movement: A small yet extremely angry group of students managed to browbeat a couple of professors almost into submission, all over an utterly harmless and uncontroversial email. It was certainly an illustrative experience, showing how a relatively tiny number of students can leverage astonishing power on campus, all by simply ginning up shrieking group hysteria.
It is a blueprint for effective, if shameful, activist engagement: It is likely that a great many other wannabe revolutionaries have looked to the Christakis fiasco as an example of how to bend a campus to one’s will. In fairness, it didn’t work out as well as they wanted it to: Nicholas Christakis has remained on campus and indeed has been elevated to a higher position. And yet the power of that mob, for a few bizarre days a few years ago, was something to behold. Universities should be aware that this sort of low-grade mob rule can occur pretty much at will on campus; administrative officials should be prepared for it, and should be resolved to not surrender their school to a horde of irrationally angry zealots.
MORE: Yale disgraces itself by honoring participants in student mob
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