Yale is Imploding over a Halloween Email

http://downatyale.com/post.php?id=528

I have a lot of interest in who is controlling the narrative, and who has actually been silenced.

The best news is that Yale did not implode: It answered. Love. That. School.

I found this video teleconference between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter interesting. Both are African American males who are university professors. I came away thinking how much more freedom they have to express their views publicly on these issues without fear of reprisal.

Loury was educated at MIT and Northwestern. He currently teaches at Brown (this semester he is a visiting professor at Stanford). McWhorter is a PhD out of Stanford and currently teaches at Columbia.

They cover a lot of ground relating to racial tensions on college campuses but at 15:30 on the video they discuss the Halloween costume fracas at Yale:

http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/37708

@alh I was really hoping to get a clearer view by reading your link but by the second paragraph the language used points towards a very biased slant. In particular the analysis of NC’s body language seems totally subjective. If we object to placing undue criticism on the young woman’s actions I’d say this cause is not benefitted by lower itself to the same tactics.

@alh That account is an important telling of the story that needs to stand beside others.

Talking with my son, I think there has been bullying and silencing from individuals on all sides. There have also been people acting bravely and with integrity on all sides. It’s complicated.

I’m mixed on the anti-bullying rhetoric we raised our kids on as well. In theory, I’m all for it; in practice, I saw anti-bullies sometimes turn in to bullies themselves, publicly outing and shaming young people. None of this is easy.

Hi there - the “white girls party” was a lie dreamed up by some columbia students. The bouncer at said party was black and he stopped admitting people when the party got dangerously full.

1505 @momof3inNYC While the members of the fraternity maintaint that position, there were other students, not from Columbia University who backed the story of selective exclusion. One was female and another was male.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/02/students-accuse-yale-sae-fraternity-brothers-of-having-a-white-girls-only-policy-at-their-party/

http://college.usatoday.com/2015/11/03/sae-halloween-party/

New poster joins to post something denouncing the veracity of the party story… ok…

A friend who’s D is a frosh at Y told me that her D and some friends, a group that included black women, were turned away from that party. She was under the impression that the person doing the door when they arrived was not black. I think that her D and friends assumed at the time that it was just because it was full, but they wondered, later.

As I think was explained further back, it is reportedly the case that at frat parties, when they get full, people are turned away–unless they know somebody in the frat, who can come out and escort them in.

I think it will be hard to determine what actually happened at SAE, since there’s not likely going to be any evidence other than what people say they said or heard. There certainly haven’t been a bunch of people coming forward to say that they heard statements that only white girls were being admitted.

Over the past few weeks, from the first facebook status that started this whole uproar, assumptions and innuendos have been thrown around by people who have, at best, second-hand connections to people who were at the door of the SAE party. Nothing so far has come of investigation. I’m not a fan of fraternities at all, but this all strikes me as nothing but gossip–can we let it go? And as @jym626 is suggesting more politely than me, could people who post for the first time skim the thread to avoid rehashing stuff that’s already been debated at length?

" As I think was explained further back, it is reportedly the case that at frat parties, when they get full, people are turned away–unless they know somebody in the frat, who can come out and escort them in."

Yes. SAE was exclusionary of many at my alma mater, equal opportunity offender as one might say. The best way to get into a party, even if you were a decent-looking female, was to know a brother. Parties spilling into the sidewalks or streets were a HUGE issue that the campus police could not ignore, so the most popular parties did have people turned away. The parties with pot and drugs were more likely to turn people away as well, but most of that was upstairs rather than “in the party” on the main floor.

There were 10,000 undergrads at my college, and about the same number of grad students. There were about five very popular good party frats, about five more with parties worth going to, and most had houses near the dorm. Do the numbers - it won’t work out if you let everyone in. Discounting that some frats didn’t want their house completely trashed and that some frats had alumni there on occasion.

An interesting note - I don’t know if it is true nationwide yet, but SAE is supposed to be eliminating pledging. They did last year at my university.

“Yes. SAE was exclusionary of many at my alma mater, equal opportunity offender as one might say. The best way to get into a party, even if you were a decent-looking female, was to know a brother.”

What’s the point of having a fraternity party if just anyone can be let in? Why should the frats be the alcohol-and-food providers to everyone? Of course it’s going to be limited to “friends and family.”

I have it on word that I trust, but by definition second-hand, that the 3 kids working the door that night were black, Latino, and white. The same source says that he knows the 3 kids and that a “white girls only” comment out of any of the 3 would have been completely out of character and is not believable. Frat parties are loud, and the words might have been uttered somewhere nearby by someone else, and that’s as charitable as my source is willing to be about the veracity of the story.

Here’s a theory of what might have happened, in which nobody is exactly lying:
People are standing in line to get in, including a black woman.
Somebody comes out of the frat, and brings in a white woman from further back in the line.
“Hey, how come she gets in and we don’t?”
“The party’s full, and you can only get in if a member knows you.”
“It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”
“Sure, whatever, the party’s full.”

I’m not saying this happened, but it could have, and it could have given rise to the dispute we are now seeing. I simply find it hard to believe that any member at the door would have said it was a white-girls-only party, especially if it actually was a white-girls-only party.

I’ll hazard a guess too…The party was full. From time to time some people left and some of those waiting on line were admitted. In choosing among the people on line who would be admitted, it wasn’t “first come, first served.” Instead, the friends of frat members and/or prettiest girls were admitted.

So, at one point someone left and one person waiting on line was admitted. In descibing the one person who was going to get in, directions were issued to let in “the white girl only” or “only the white girl.” This was not because she was white. It was because EITHER she knew someone inside OR she happened to be the most attractive female in line by whatever the standards of the person in charge of admissions espouses.

Once in a blue moon–or less often–I’ve walked past one of the NYC clubs on a weekend night. There’s usually a “velvet” rope outside and a bouncer wearing an ear piece. If someone famous is about to arrive, the bouncer will receive orders and as soon as the limo stops outside, he and sometimes a couple of helpers will clear the path for some celebrity with entourage to enter. However, at other times, he seems to get general instructions to let in X number of people. He then exercises his discretion. The helpers may then approach a pretty, often scantily dressed female and ask who is in her party. If she’s there with a guy friend, the inquiry will probably end.If she’s there with attractive female friends, he’ll say something that’s conveyed to the guy at the head of the line. He’ll then make the announcement and it can include a description like “just the three white girls” or “the black girl in a miniskirt.” In other words, the color of her skin is just part of the description.

However, if you were standing there and heard “just the three white girls” you might think it was “whites only.” If you waited a few minutes and saw the next “batch” admitted, you’d know it wasn’t.

Now, I do NOT know what happened at SAE, but my hunch is that at some point, something like that occurred. If it happened that there were two white girls on the line who were friends of frat members, the doorman might have been told “only the white girls” should be admitted. if the friends of frat members were black, the message would have been “only the black girls.”

^ A friend’s D enjoys clubbing and since she is pretty and always well put together, she frequently gets ushered to the front of the line. They call her “the cute blonde.”

“One example of Black groups being regarded as “too uppity” or “demanding special treatment” by the dominant White majority historically was the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-'50s when Black individuals like Rosa Parks and Black groups launched around a year-long protest to demand the same rights to sit whereever they want
Some of those very long-standing attitudes are present to this very day as exhibited by some posters on this very thread.”

Oh, drop it. My parents and grandparents in the North cheered on Rosa Parks and the integration of schools in Little Rock and so forth. So stop with this pretension that every white person must be from or sympathize with the antebellum south.

Prominent Harvard Law prof. Alan Dershowitz denounces the student protests:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/famous-harvard-professor-denounces-college-204722688.html

Excerpt:

But as students receive support from some academics in higher education, Alan Dershowitz, a prominent Harvard Law School professor, has denounced these protests for eroding the very basis of what he believes colleges should be.

“That’s what universities have to be about: dangerous ideas; ideas that are iconoclastic; ideas that aren’t part of the conventional wisdom,” Dershowitz told Business Insider.

There’s no idea that’s so despicable that it should be banned from campus, according to Dershowitz. “Everything should be allowed,” he said. “Ideas are permissible.”

This is a bit ironic considering Alan Dershowitz didn’t exactly respect the “free speech” rights of another Prof who criticized his scholarship as shown here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/8/320986/-

In their quote from a 2005 The Nation article:

And then the article goes on to state: