Paul Bass Photos
Students marching to Salovey’s house last Thursday night.
Salovey receives demands.
Five days after marching on Yale President Peter Salovey’s house with a list of demands, student protesters received a response Tuesday that meets them part-way.
In an open letter to the university community, Salovey released his response to the demands issued by a student coalition called Next Yale.
Contrary to national media reports caricaturing the protest movement as focused primarily on Halloween costumes or frats, the demands — and Salovey’s response — dealt most of all with the daily conditions of campus life for students of color, including mental-health services as well as academic, racial, and ethnic diversity.
Next Yale issued a “cautiously optimistic” statement early Wednesday morning about what it depicted as a good start to what will be a long negotiation over improving the racial and ethnic climate at Yale.
Salovey reported that Yale has committed to a combination of specific promises and broader goals, including:
• That Yale will double the budgets next academic year for the university’s four ethnic and racial cultural centers, havens and centers of support for minority students adjusting to life on campus. It was not clear immediately how big those budgets currently are;. Students had demanded $2 million increases for each.
• That counselors from Yale’s health center will schedule specified mental health hours at each center similar to a mental health fellows program in residential colleges; and that Yale will offer multicultural training for the mental health staff, which it will also seek to diversify. Greater availability of mental health care was an important demand for some of the protest participants, one of whom described to the Independent (in this article) being treated as the “aggressor” after being sexually assaulted.
• That Yale will add four ethnic-studies faculty positions next year and, starting this spring, start adding to the ethnic studies teaching staff and courses. (Salovey earlier this month announced a $50 million, five-year initiative to diversity the faculty, which has been losing leading scholars of color to other schools.)
• That he and other top administrators will “receive training on recognizing and combating racism and other forms of discrimination in the academy.”
Click here to read Salovey’s full letter.
His letter also included promises for improved financial-aid policies (with lower work requirements for recipients), and conferences and campus discussions about other ways to address discrimination and make Yale more diverse. It didn’t make any promises about renaming Calhoun College and naming the new residential colleges after people of color, as demanded by Next Yale, or eliminating the residential college title of “master” or firing the master and associate master of Silliman College. Salovey sent a separate email to Sillman’s community stating that the pair will remain in their positions.
In his letter, Salovey rejected the argument that the current drive for more ethnic diversity and support for students of color comes at the expense of free speech, as argued by some conservative commentators (some of whom have pilloried Salovey for allegedly coddling protesters by discussing these issues with them, issues they’ve reduced to being about “hypothetical Halloween costumes”).
“We begin this work by laying to rest the claim that it conflicts with our commitment to free speech, which is unshakeable. The very purpose of our gathering together into a university community is to engage in teaching, learning, and research — to study and think together, sometimes to argue with and challenge one another, even at the risk of discord, but always to take care to preserve our ability to learn from one another,” Salovey wrote.
“Yale’s long history, even in these past two weeks, has shown a steadfast devotion to full freedom of expression. No one has been silenced or punished for speaking their minds, nor will they be. This freedom, which is the bedrock of education, equips us with the fullness of mind to pursue our shared goal of creating a more inclusive community.”
One protest organizer, Sebastian Medina-Tayac, said the letter shows that the Yale administration is taking the students seriously.
“It’s important to acknowledge that this is a good first step,” said Medina-Tayac, president of the Association of Native Americans at Yale. He stressed that he was offering his own personal, initial reaction, pending a more complete group review and discussion.
“It is only the beginning of what we expect to be large changes at the university. We recognize the work that the administration put into making these changes, which are both concrete and vague. It means the administration is not only listening but willing to do the work to take the time to look into these things. This is nowhere close to being over.”
Early Wednesday morning Next Yale organizers issued this statement:
“Next Yale is cautiously optimistic about President Salovey’s announcement of the upcoming institutional changes. We still need time to process the message and communicate as a group to determine a substantial collective response. …
“But this movement is by no means over. The letter only addresses a small fraction of our needs as students of color. For example, despite the budget increase, the cultural centers remain under-resourced for the functions they serve. The proposed academic changes make no mention or room for tenured faculty in ethnic studies, who are of paramount importance as we work to implement these commitments and sustain the progress we have made.”
Click here to watch Next Yale student spokeswomen read the list of demands during the march to Salovey’s Hillhouse Avenue mansion at midnight last Thursday/Friday …
… and here to watch Salovey respond to the protesters outside his home that night.
Athletes Hold Mass Meeting
Meanwhile, the protests that broke out in recent weeks continue to spark collective soul-searching on campus. The most recent session took place Monday night.
Shortly after the Yale men’s basketball team defeated Sacred Heart, student-athletes, coaches, athletic department administrators, and Yale College administrators filed into the John J. Lee Amphitheater for a forum to address how the athletic community plays a part in recent discussions on racial tensions in Yale’s campus climate.
Roughly 200 people attended the event, which Athletic Director Tom Beckett called “Listening to Athletes” in an email to the athletic community. Dean of Student Engagement Burgwell Howard, who played lacrosse as an undergrad at Dartmouth, moderated the discussion. He asked student-athletes questions about inclusivity, privilege, and supporting their peers who have communicated painful experiences.
“Student-athletes understand what it means to be part of a team,” Howard said. “They have an understanding of what it means to be accountable to yourself and to your team. Where there is a fracture is when that accountability to each other isn’t properly communicated.
“Our entire team and coaching staff was in attendance tonight because we are here to listen and learn,” said Meredith Boardman, a senior on the women’s basketball team. “This is something affecting so many people at Yale.”
“Our students needed this conversation and I’m proud of them for their trust and their courage and their willingness to make this right,” Beckett said afterward. “They’re remarkable leaders individually and collectively.”
“It takes efforts on both sides of the spectrum,” said Nyasha Sarju, a senior on the women’s basketball team. “Both to inquire and to be vulnerable.”
Sarju also talked about “reframing privilege to be a standard, something that I have that other people should too. It’s people assuming you have a positive purpose when you step in a room”
“Some people are struggling about how they can engage,” Howard said. “But when you have a team you have an already built-in nucleus, so if you can take that and expand it, that can have a rippling effect on the community.”
Previous coverage of the racial-justice protests at Yale:
• Hundreds March On Yale Prez At Midnight
• It’s About Justice