Yale students have exercised their right to be treated like children

Shrieking girl. There it is. I’ve been trying to think of a less gendered, less belittling phrase for the subject of a video that went viral this weekend, a black female student at my alma mater, Yale University, letting rip her frustrations at a mobbed college master. But shrieking she is, and not like an adult. ‘It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here!’ (that’s one of the less expletive-laden sections). The trigger for this was Halloween, the subject at hand the question of who gets to judge potentially offensive costumes, and how. But how did we get to the point where students are brought to tears at the suggestion a leading university ‘should be an intellectual space’?

You can’t understand Yale today without understanding the Black Lives Matter movement. New Haven, one of the north’s poorest, densely African-American cities, spreads around a single island of privilege, Yale University.