Yale’s distinctive “residential college” system is meant to foster warm, inclusive environments. And that's what makes the university‘s current fight over free speech on campus different. Photograph by Kike Calvo / Redux

When I arrived at Yale University, in the nineteen-nineties, I and all the other “frosh people” (the P.C. term of the day) were assigned to residential colleges. The colleges were ersatz versions of Oxford and Cambridge’s famed colleges—to the point, one historian explained to me, that, in my Gothic-style college, the leaded glass windows had been elaborately manipulated, perhaps even broken and repaired, to create a more authentic look. (I was assigned to Branford, the oldest, a fact I’m still illogically proud of.) We spent the bulk of our undergraduate years living in our college, eating dinner together in a wood-panelled room whose would-be elegance didn’t jibe with the menu (rubbery pasta, over-steamed broccoli, unlimited cereal). We slept and studied in minuscule, antiqued dorm rooms (rumors had it that there’d once been maid service), explored the unstaffed library at whim, and played impromptu (possibly drunken) games of late-night squash in the courts in the college’s basement. It was in the residential college that our senior advisers counselled us about binge drinking, sexual violence, and other collegial dangers; it was to the college, not just to Yale, that you were supposed to be loyal. One day, as I sat on a bench on the quad, an older man stopped and asked if I liked sitting there. I told him I did—and he explained that he’d donated it on behalf of his dead son, so that other Branford students could enjoy the quad his son had loved.

Yale sells itself to prospective students partly on the merits of this distinctive “residential college” system. The residential colleges aren’t simply dormitories. They are—as the university’s Web site currently stresses—students’ "homes away from home.” They provide an “intimate” (Yale’s word) base, where students get to know small groups of their peers, math majors befriending the photographers. Students are randomly assigned, creating a calculatedly diverse group. This sundry sorting is intended to foster the liberal-arts values of acceptance, tolerance, and community, which are in turn supported by the college’s ceremonial figures—its faculty fellows and its dean and particularly its master (again an ersatz version of Oxbridge). These people are your advocates in the larger system, the in loco parentis face of the university, with the “master”—usually a professor—responsible for creating a warm, “positive,” and rich residential life, hosting “study breaks” and “master’s teas,” at which you meet visiting public figures in a small setting. And so it’s not entirely surprising that minority students in Yale’s Silliman College were upset that their master, Nicholas Christakis, and his wife, Erika, the associate master, defended the rights of students to wear offensive costumes at a Halloween party, while counselling those bothered by such behavior to “look away.” When one of those students insisted to Nicholas (in an exchange caught on video) that “in [his] position as master” it was his “job” to create not just an intellectual space but “a place of comfort and home,” she was simply insisting on the story that Yale itself spun her.

In the days since what happened at Yale reached the national news, many media pundits have spun a different kind of story. These students, it’s said, embody the neuralgic sense of entitlement typical of a generation raised by helicopter parents, so cocooned that they mistakenly believe life should be free of challenge and conflict and the hurt feelings that they bring. A piece in the Yale Herald by a young black student laid out his grievances about racial issues on campus, saying, “I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain”—a sentiment that was widely mocked by pundits in print and on Twitter.

The debate has been framed as a conflict between two rights: the freedom of speech and the right not to be discriminated against—or, as the students at many universities put it, the right to “safe spaces” on campus. But that abstract argument leaves out the many contextual factors worth noting—including the broader context of racial tension at Yale and the complex dual role of the liberal arts university today. While there are problems with the rhetoric of safe spaces and student vulnerability—as a professor at N.Y.U. and Princeton, I worry about what can happen when that rhetoric reaches the classroom—the Yale case, given the specific environment of the residential-college system, differs from many of the recent skirmishes between faculty and students (such as the one at Northwestern). And it reveals some of the tensions of the liberal-arts college’s role: namely, that they are not just heady intellectual spaces but also domestic spaces, where young people live in close contact and negotiate emotionally intricate issues, including racial hostility, sexual violence, and more. The whole point of the residential system—as distinct from Yale’s classrooms—is to be a safe space, or at least this is what Yale itself implies.

The email in which Erika Christakis, also a Yale lecturer, suggested that “inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive” behavior was part of what students were meant to experiment with in college, was itself sent in response to a letter from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee asking students to reflect on whether their Halloween costumes might offend their fellow students. The original letter made a point of invoking free speech and did not ban any kind of costume; it simply encouraged students to give due consideration to others, in the hopes of fostering a nondiscriminatory, tolerant community—“one Yale.”

Even on its own terms, Christakis’s intervention doesn’t seem all that well judged or intellectually useful. Certainly, we need to have an ongoing discussion about the university’s role as an arbiter of identity politics. But launching such a conversation in response to one of Yale’s attempts to get residential life right seems strangely tone-deaf. Christakis was not responding to an actual event in which a student had been penalized for wearing such a costume, or to a prohibition against such costumes. She was musing about what might be lost if we stop being “transgressive,” without engaging in any meaningful way with what it might feel like to be a student who regularly experiences racial slights at a supposedly liberal place like Yale. You might say that the university was e-mailing its students to say, “Don’t be a Halloween troll,” and Christakis chose that moment to advocate for the free-speech rights of trolls.

Trolls do have free-speech rights. But there are two different issues tangled up here: whether students have a right to say offensive things, and whether it is right for them to do so. Intellectually, Yale should allow students to say offensive things. Residentially, though, it’s reasonable for the university to encourage students to believe that it’s not right for them to do so. Such urging is part and parcel with trying to foster an “intimate” environment of good citizens. In speaking out about the university’s possible paternalism, Christakis and her husband were privileging abstract free-speech rights over the immediate emotional experiences of those who are likely to experience discrimination at the university. And what must be underscored is the position from which they spoke. Masters host teas, throw parties, and are your advocates on campus—your social support and your surrogate parents, in a sense. To have these figures suggest that the way to deal with racism is to “look away” must feel like a massive disappointment—even a betrayal.

It’s hard not to see the Yale case as emblematic of a vicious cycle—and, in this way, different from some of the other recent conflicts on college campuses: élite institutions allow inequities to continue without successfully addressing them, in turn making resentment build. And then, when emotions flare up, we chastise the firebrands for speaking with emotional heat, for not being “reasonable.” That’s a cool—and rather cruel—logic for you.