Report: White Yale student called cops on black student sleeping in common room

Yale Police were allegedly called by a white student to report a black student sleeping in a common room on Tuesday, May 9, 2018. Yale Police were allegedly called by a white student to report a black student sleeping in a common room on Tuesday, May 9, 2018. Photo: Screenshot From Lolade Siyonbola's Facebook Page Photo: Screenshot From Lolade Siyonbola's Facebook Page Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close Report: White Yale student called cops on black student sleeping in common room 1 / 20 Back to Gallery

NEW HAVEN ─ On Tuesday, the Yale Daily News reported an incident on campus where a white graduate student called police to report a black graduate student who was sleeping in The Common Room at the McDougal Graduate Center.

According to the Yale publication, university police officers interrogated Lolade Siyonbola for more than 15 minutes in order to verify her student information.

Siyonbola posted two videos of the incident on Facebook Tuesday night and has since gone viral with more than 7,500 shares and more than 500,000 views.

In an email to students, Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, secretary and vice president for student life at Yale, acknowledged the incident and said: "Over the last 48 hours, I have been in discussion with Dean Lynn Cooley, Chief Ronnell Higgins, and other university staff, including Yale police, to better understand what exactly happened at HGS on Monday night, and how we can work together to avoid such incidents in the future."

"We still have so much more to do.

"As a step in the process, Chief Higgins, Dean Cooley and I will hold listening sessions with students in the coming days and months. In addition, the university will continue to implement the initiatives we announced a year ago, including the appointment and training of dean's designees in each school to address student concerns about equal opportunity, diversity and inclusion, and discrimination and harassment.

"This past year, we also launched a comprehensive website and adopted a discrimination and harassment reporting protocol using the Bulldog Mobile (LiveSafe) app and have been looking at ways to make this more accessible. As already planned, we will share this tool more broadly with students and clarify the reporting process. Over the summer, I will work with administrators and student leaders to review and strategize around suggestions that we have received from faculty, staff, and students, especially with regard to improving the university's response to incidents of discrimination and harassment. We remain committed to quickly and appropriately addressing issues of racism and bias on campus. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback on how we can improve our community together."

In 2015, a Yale officer drew his firearm as he stopped a student fitting the description of a burglary suspect. The officer was found in compliance with Yale Police Department policies.

The Yale Police Benevolent Association, in a statement at the time, said the university did the right thing in exonerating the officer, who was not named.

"Police Officers must exercise the utmost caution when conducting felony stops. Indeed, hesitating when confronting a potential felony suspect could cost an officer his/her life," the association wrote in a 2015 statement.

University officials had requested the internal police investigation after Tajh Blow, son of New York Times columnist Charles Blow, was stopped on Jan. 24 as officers looked for an intruder at Trumbull College who students had reported to police.

In a tweet at that time, the elder Blow said: "He was let go when they realized he was a college student and not a criminal (he was leaving the library!) He's shaken, but I'm fuming!"

According to the YDN, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Lynn Cooley emailed PhD and masters students in the Graduate School Tuesday e"emphasizing the importance of inclusivity and inviting students to share their comments and concerns in light of the incident."

Student concerns about inclusivity have been expressed widely in recent years.

In 2015, 1,000 or more Yale University students marched downtown to a massive rally on Cross Campus demanding that Yale become the inclusive university they said they were promised when they enrolled.

Yale last year renamed its Calhoun College to honor Grace Murray Hopper, a distinguished Yale alumna. This followed strong objections to keeping intact the name of the former vice president of the United States and as a U.S. senator, but left a legacy of virulent white supremacy, calling slavery "a positive good" for African Americans.

In 2016, an African-American dining hall employee at Calhoun College took a broom handle and broke a windowpane that depicted enslaved people in a cotton field. The window was one of a set that illustrated Calhoun's life and the antebellum era in which he lived. All have since been removed from the college, as have three portraits of Calhoun.

The man was charged by Yale police with second-degree reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor, and first-degree criminal mischief, a felony, but Yale asked that the charges be dismissed and rehired the employee.

A rally in support of the man outside the Elm Street courthouse organized by community activists, including Unidad Latina en Accion was one of many held in the following months calling on Yale to "change the name."

In his announcement on the renaming, Yale President Peter Salovey wrote: "This decision overrides my announcement in April of last year that the name of Calhoun College would remain. At that time, as now, I was committed to confronting, not erasing, our history. I was concerned about inviting a series of name changes that would obscure Yale's past. These concerns remain paramount, but we have since established an enduring set of principles that address them. The principles establish a strong presumption against renaming buildings, ensure respect for our past, and enable thoughtful review of any future requests for change."

He said a prime reason for deciding to rename Calhoun was because his strong stand in promoting slavery are "at odds with the values of this university." His views "hardened over his life," Salovey said Saturday, and at the end of his life Calhoun went so far as to repudiate the Declaration of Independence's promise of liberty for all.

The debate over Calhoun, which has cropped up over decades, flared again after a white man, claiming he wanted to start a race war, killed nine black church-goers in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. The massacre led to a successful effort to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds.