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.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news. All donations are still being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000 until April 24.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
