Editorial

An intellectual home

By Editorial Staff

“It is not about creating an intellectual space… It is about creating a home here.” In a viral video, a Yale student shouts these words in the face of Nicholas Christakis, a Yale professor at the center of controversy over appropriate Halloween costumes at the University. When did those terms become antithetical? We ask, can there be both?

On Monday, trustee Barrett Seaman ’67 gave the last of our SpecSpeak lectures on journalism. Among other topics, he shared his concern about what he sees as a suppression of voices and productive dialogue. He explained, “if no one challenges assertions, if skeptics are not welcome, dogma sets in stone. Even worse, those whose worldviews go unchallenged lose the ability and the willingness even to hear opposing views and reconcile them.” We noticed a few students looked slightly uncomfortable with some of what Seaman was discussing.

The heart of his talk: engage. It seems important, then, to determine some rules for engagement.

1. Discussion depends on respect.
2. A productive conversation is not necessarily one where    consensus is reached.
3. Defer to the choice language of those who feel disempowered.
4. Intellectual space is based on education and good debate    is rooted in information.

The point that we hope to make more broadly is that dialogue is important. It is also maddening. We must realize that for everyone, the stakes of their opinions are high even if the outcomes do not seem to be. Let’s expand our notion of community and recognize that for whatever political stance one might take, our end goals here are, in fact, the same. We hope to understand the world around us better. We want to understand each other better. And we can do that here only if we commit our community to be both an intellectual space and a home.

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