A TRUE DISGRACE – AT 9:17 A.M. ET:   The madness on our college campuses is claiming victims.  The stench of fascism is in the air.  From Fox: 

Anti-free speech demonstrators at one of America’s most vaunted universities have claimed a pair of scalps – a husband-wife duo who say teaching is too much trouble in a campus climate “not conducive to civil dialogue.”

Yale University professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis, who both have always gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews from students, said they have had enough, after an email she sent sparked a campus-wide controversy that soon pulled him in.

“I have great respect and affection for my students, but I worry that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conducive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems,” she said in an email to The Washington Post.

The affair began in October, when Erika Christakis, a psychology professor and associate master at the school’s Silliman College, one of a dozen residential communities, sent out an email defending the right of students to wear costumes which may be “culturally appropriating.” That spurred outrage and led to one student confronting Nicholas Christakis on the campus quad and berating him in a shocking episode that was caught on video that soon went viral.

The video showed Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of social and natural science, calmly trying to reason with a student who was screaming at him for not keeping students “safe,” as others snapped their fingers in a trendy sign of approval.

Erika Christakis said she will quit teaching indefinitely and cited a campus atmosphere not “conducive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems.” Her husband said he would not teach scheduled classes in the spring, and would take a sabbatical.

Neither Yale officials nor the Christakises responded to requests for comment.

COMMENT:  A major loss to Yale students and to the spirit of inquiry that used to be at the heart of a college education.  Watching these stories unfold on television are plenty of superb students who were turned down at Yale and other "prestigious" institutions to make way for the whiners and babies currently demonstrating because their feelings have been hurt. 

There will be backlash and payback.  I wouldn't be shocked if, several years from now, there are serious suggestions that the federal government cut off all federal aid to higher education, outside the sciences, until colleges and universities clean up their collective act.

December 8, 2015