What Divides Us?: An Interview with Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway - The New Yorker

What Divides Us?: An Interview with Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway - The New Yorker

"It’s in Yale’s culture, specifically, that’s what I’m speaking to. You have a very privileged university, with a lot of students here of great privilege and a lot without. You’re dealing with a coming together of people from radically different perspectives, and you take, in this case, what we’ve been hearing mostly from women of color, that they’re feeling doubly marginalized, in this very pure-air environment, where their views are discounted because they’re female, or their views are discounted because they’re black or Latina, or their views are discounted because they’re both. People are telling stories of professors presuming they wouldn’t know how to answer a question, while the white students in the seminar got a very different set of reactions on the same issue, where people wouldn’t even engage them, that fellow students wouldn’t make eye contact, wouldn’t talk about them. They’re sick and tired of people saying, “Can I touch your hair? It’s so exotic.” They’re frustrated by the notions of beauty in which they aren’t represented at all."