Paul Bass Photo
Chang reads aloud protesters’ demands.
The racial-justice movement exploding at Yale landed at midnight at the Hillhouse Avenue doorstep of University President Peter Salovey — who waited with words of encouragement.
A multiracial group of hundreds of students affiliated with “Next Yale,” a prime organizer of actions that have captured national attention over the past week among a wave of racial protests on American campuses, marched two block north from the residential Silliman College to the presidential mansion on Hillhouse Avenue.
The students drew up a list of demands that includes calls for renaming residential Calhoun College; increasing annual funding to campus cultural centers by $2 million each; and increasing and diversifying the ranks of mental-health professionals.
Before launching on the march, organizers urged the crowd to remain orderly and civil, to stay out of the street, to obey orders from police. That proved unnecessary as the students filed along the Hillhouse Avenue sidewalk, singing and then calmly assembling at the presidential mansion’s front gate.
President Salovey, dressed in a windbreaker, stood by that gate with his wife Marta Moret. He greeted the students, then listened as three organizers — sophomore Yuni Chang and seniors Alicia Ponce Diaz and Autumn Shone — read the demands.
“Next Yale intends to hold Yale accountable to students of color in the public eye,” Chang began. She said the students would like a response from Salovey by Nov. 18, next Wednesday. Click on the play arrow on the above video listen to the demands, which in addition to the above-mentioned items included promoting Native American, Chicano, Latina, Asian-American and African studies to program status; naming two new residential colleges now under construction and renaming Calhoun after people of color; “immediate removal” of Silliman College Master Nicholas Christakis and Associate Master Erika Chirstakis, a target of protests; and “abolish[ing] the title ‘master’” in residential colleges.
The crowd then launched into a song called “We Don’t Mind.” Harmonious voices filled the peaceful autumn darkness, after which point the crowd prepared to leave. It was now Friday morning.
Chang handed Salovey the list of demands. Salovey asked if the students would like him to “say anything at all.” Encouraged, he proceeded to address the three speakers as well as several other nearby students.
“Let me just say I feel incredibly strongly that there is no place for racism at Yale. We’ll work as hard as we can [to] get you an answer to every demand that you made,” Salovey said. “I very much respect what you’re trying to accomplish.”
“Thank you for coming,” students responded. “Thank you.”
“Stay in touch,” said Salovey.
Politics & The Personal
Shone and Ponce Diaz.
The respectful march and encounter offered a striking contrast to the caricature of Yale’s recent protests created by national media outlets using isolated incidents of acting out to portray hysterical, privileged, undemocratic students upset purely by a dispute over Halloween costumes and a racially exclusive frat party.
In conversations along the march, students spoke thoughtfully about why they joined the protests. No one mentioned Halloween. Rather, students spoke of enduring years of disrespect or lack of support and in some cases physical danger during their time at Yale tied to an institutional insensitivity to race. In this telling, the Halloween and frat incidents merely uncorked broader, long-simmering complaints.
Ponce Diaz, a senior who hails from East Palo Alto, California (“East Palo Alto is to Stanford what New Haven is to Yale”), spoke of being sexually assaulted in her sophomore year and being “treated more as an aggressor than a victim” and “not being heard when I expressed myself.” She spoke of males on campus hurling racial slurs at her as she walked home one night this past weekend and telling her she isn’t wanted at Yale. Asked if she reported that incident to anyone at Yale, she responded, “I don’t feel there is an undergraduate system for us to report it to that would take action.” Next Yale’s list of demands include creating a bias reporting system of racial incidents with annual report released to the public.
“As a woman of color I have experienced multiple moments on this campus when I don’t feel safe [or] supported,” Ponce Diaz said.
Shone, also a senior, spoke being “called out for the Native American view” in her classes and being asked by a professor if “the reason I wear all black is because I’m Native American.”
“Coming from Portland, Oregon, and going to an elite public high school, I felt I had to assimilate to a white norm and my voice was not valued and my experiences were not valued,” said marcher Alejandra Padin, a sophomore. “And when I came to Yale I felt the same kind of suppression. It’s been wonderful seeing such a diverse group of people come together run in order to make sure our mental health needs are met, to make sure that there’s enough ethnic studies curriculum, to make sure our peers know who we are, to make sure that students of color are taken care of on this campus.”