In light of recent events at Yale University, Jonathan Holloway, the dean of Yale College, discusses racism, free speech, and student life. Photograph by Craig Warga / Bloomberg via Getty

_Amid the many conversations these past two weeks about racism and free speech at Yale University, one moment stood out. Last Thursday afternoon, hundreds gathered and expressed their grievances about the treatment of students of color to Jonathan Holloway, the first African-American dean of Yale College. Holloway, a historian of civil rights, is at the center of a campus conflict about liberalism and education as well as the meaning of an inclusive community. We spoke to him on Thursday evening about the origins of the protests and their implications for other institutions. _

Can you describe what the climate is on campus now?

I can’t speak to the graduate professional students because I don’t work with them. The undergraduates are, well, exhausted. What I think they are feeling is that they are part of something larger than their own existence, with all these rallies happening across the country—that they are living a very special moment.

There’s a sense of excitement about that. They’ve got their eyes on the administration because they got our attention, absolutely, and now they know that the president said we are going to announce some concrete changes.

They’re watching us, as they should, and they’re trying to get back to class. They haven’t been going to their classes for the better part of a week, as they’ve been trying to navigate all this. It’s getting quieter. It’s getting clarified, and we’ll see. The next frontier, frankly, is the faculty, because there’s a growing divide in the faculty about issues of free speech. The faculty are getting one version of the story, frankly, as is most of the country, about the free-speech-raising issue on campus.

The students, for them it’s not about free speech. They aren’t questioning the rights of free speech. You’re hearing this incredible pain and frustration related to the issue of being constantly marginalized, feeling that their speech and their existence simply doesn’t matter. They get that message from all kinds of different stimuli in their life, whether it’s the pop-culture world, whether it’s the stuff they’re learning in classes, or peers who don’t value them and their contributions, or peers who simply think they don’t deserve to be at this place, or that they, relatedly, don’t have the intellectual ability to handle problems—long papers, etc. It’s a lot of this stuff coming together that the students are very frustrated by, and now that it’s getting conflated into a free-speech issue, it’s galling to them.

Can you elucidate how people came to see a conflict between the free-speech issues and the issues that students are actually concerned with?

It happened in the confrontation in the college courtyard, where the video is telling a louder story than anybody else—the video that captured the student yelling at the residential-college master. She looks like someone being uncivil and shouting over the master, and he’s trying to talk about free speech, and she doesn’t want to hear it at all. The video portrays her as having an anti-intellectual and anti-free-speech kind of mindset. Like I said, for these students, that was not the issue. They said, “If you think that this is about an e-mail or about a party people didn’t get into, you’re not paying attention. This is a much deeper and broader, systemic problem, and that’s what we want to talk about today.” On the free-speech thing, there’s plenty of faculty who themselves are either free-speech purists, or who believe deeply in civil discourse and don’t want to disrupt it, or see a friend of theirs being treated discourteously—it could be any number of these things—and feel that the master and associate master have been thrown under the bus, because no one has come to their defense.

The fissure is between the faculty who are upset at the way that the master was treated and, well, the faculty who feel quite differently. That’s a growing issue, and so there are petitions floating around, not yet delivered, but being talked about, that are to support this person or that person, this issue or that issue. We’re nervous—or concerned, I should say—because there’s rumblings among the faculty, but this could go in many different directions at any moment. We don’t know what to expect. There are many times in the last week when we thought something was going to zig and it zagged, with incredible speed. That’s the world we live in in these days, with social media and the rallies.

You said the students said that this was not about two isolated incidents, but that they were talking about a bigger context. What exactly is the context that they’re talking about here?

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.

It’s no single thing. It’s all of these things. Then you also add the fact that, for so many of them, there are too few courses that resonate with their personal lives. This is not to say that everything we teach has to be personal, but when none of what we teach reflects your experience, that’s a problem. You’re getting that kind of frustration as well. Added to the mix are some noted faculty departures. This happens at universities, but there’s a confluence of faculty departures that are signalling institutional inability to retain faculty, unwillingness to retain faculty, or unwillingness to develop faculty. It’s all being read in the way that people are thinking, Gosh, this place doesn’t care. It just doesn’t care.

Are they talking about this in the bigger context of Black Lives Matter, and other protests and demonstrations we’ve seen on campuses across the country?

Certainly students are talking about it to one another, about what kind of moment this is. The trigger was really mostly the local issues, racial crises at Yale. There’s no doubt that these students are being informed by the world in which they’ve grown up, from when they were in ninth grade roughly to the present. Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, Staten Island, Charleston—how many different times in Charleston?—Cleveland. They’ve grown up seeing people their age being killed, with impunity. That’s a burden. That makes managing life quite difficult. Even if you yourself are not in a position of having your mortality threatened, the fact is, you’re living in a world where people are openly debating that George Zimmerman was probably doing the right thing, that Trayvon Martin probably couldn’t have been trusted. Where the news is saying that Sandra Bland was copping an attitude, so she brought it on herself. That’s a hell of a way to understand the world you live in, especially when you’re in college and trying to figure out who you are. Trying to decode that while navigating what the smartphone media is telling you is very hard.