A Yale University professor who criticized an email warning students about insensitive Halloween costumes has chosen to stop teaching amid outrage over her response to the email.
Erika Christakis, an early childhood education expert, argued in her email that college should be a place where students should be able to risk being "a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?" Yale announced Christakis' decision to stop teaching on Monday.
"Erika Christakis is a well-regarded instructor, and the university's leadership is disappointed that she has chosen not to continue teaching in the spring semester," read the statement. "Her teaching is highly valued and she is welcome to resume teaching anytime at Yale, where freedom of expression and academic inquiry are the paramount principle and practice."
Yale's Intercultural Affairs Committee released an email in late Oct. warning students against wearing Halloween costumes that could be considered racially or culturally insensitive, according to The New York Times.
"I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious," Christakis wrote in response. "American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition."
Then on Halloween, a student's Facebook post accusing the school's Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter of permitting "white girls only" at a party at their fraternity house. Both the party and Christakis' email resulted in a demonstration over racial insensitivity at the Ivy League institution.
Christakis' husband, Nicholas, is a physician and a professor of sociology at Yale, and will take the next semester off for a sabbatical. Nicholas Christakis is a Silliman College master at Yale and his wife an associate master. Both will remain at Yale in that capacity, though Mrs. Christakis will no longer teach.
