Yale President Meets Protesting Students Amid Racial Uproar
Image by Getty Images
Students at Yale University on Wednesday plan a campus forum on race and diversity issues at the elite Ivy League school, amid a wave of demonstrations at U.S. colleges over the treatment of minority students.
The forum, to be held at the school’s African American Cultural Center, comes two days after about 1,000 students briefly shut traffic around the university in a rally to protest an alleged Halloween incident in which a fraternity turned away black guests from a party.
It also follows Monday’s resignation by University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe amid student complaints that the school did not take allegations of racial abuse on campus seriously. Small-scale protests and walkouts in sympathy with the Missouri students have also taken place at universities across the United States this week.
The protests build on the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which was involved in massive and sometimes violent demonstrations in cities including Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore over police killings of black men. This week’s university protests have largely been peaceful affairs, though police in Missouri on Wednesday arrested a white man on suspected of making threats online to shoot black people at the school.
“We want to keep the discussion going tonight and give students a chance to express their feelings,” said Nicole Tinson, a black graduate student at Yale who is helping arrange the Wednesday forum.
Elisia Ceballo-Countryman, a sophomore, board member of the Black Student Alliance and one of the organizers of Monday’s rally, said, “There has been a lot of insensitivity and an ignoring of the diversity that exists on this campus, and that has to change.”
Yale University President Peter Salovey, who met with student leaders during Monday’s rally, said he wants to take action to end racial tensions at the Connecticut school.
“We heard deeply personal accounts from a number of students who are in great distress,” Salovey said in a statement. “This conversation left me deeply troubled, and has caused me to realize that we must act to create at Yale greater inclusion, healing, mutual respect, and understanding.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
