Dodging 5-year-olds at the Calvin Hill Day Care Center here, Erika Christakis admired how the teachers celebrated free play as a route to intellectual inquiry, listened to children rather than preaching and stood back to let them find their own way. “I think we have a very fear-based way of approaching youth,” she said. “Maybe we need to have a lighter touch.” In the fall, Ms. Christakis, a lecturer at Yale and an associate master at Silliman College, a student residence, became an unwitting target of campus protests here against racial insensitivity. After she sent out an email critical of a university committee’s urging students not to wear racially or culturally insensitive costumes for Halloween, hundreds of students signed a letter accusing her of insensitivity toward “marginalized” people. Some demanded her dismissal. She ended up not teaching the spring semester.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/education/educator-recounts-painful-experience-of-halloween-email-furor-at-yale.html?partner=rss&emc=rss The New York Times