Yale Protesters Occupy President’s Lawn With New Diversity Demands

Above Photo: From Campusreform.org.

  • The group, now calling themselves ‘Next Yale,’ released a list of 19 demands Thursday night.

  • They have given the school’s president Peter Salovey until Wednesday to announce his intention to implement them.

Student protesters at Yale released a list of 19 demands Thursday night, and have given Yale President Peter Salovey until Wednesday to announce his intention to implement them.

The protest group, numbering about 200 and now calling itself Next Yale, marched to Salovey’s house at close to midnight Thursday and presented the demands to him, according to the Yale Daily News. The document was also published on DOWN Magazine’s website, a publication focused on issues for students of color at Yale.

“Students of color at Yale are acutely aware of the painfully short lives of the Yalies of color that came before us.”   

 

The document begins by demanding Salovey, Dean Jonathan Holloway, and senior members of the Yale administration “implement immediate and lasting policies that will reduce the intolerable racism that students of color experience on campus every day.”

Next Yale, describing itself as an alliance of students of colors and their allies, goes on to identify examples of alleged racist incidents on campus, concluding, “This harm is quantifiable. Students of color at Yale are acutely aware of the painfully short lives of the Yalies of color that came before us.”

Before introducing their list of demands, Next Yale explains that its members have spent hours organizing “at great expense to [their] health and grades, to fight for a university at which we feel safe…”

The document then lists six overall demands with more specific demands listed beneath each one.

These demands include a $2 million increase in the annual budgets of each of Yale’s four cultural centers, more mental health professionals of color, renaming Calhoun College, “racial competence and respect training,” and a bias reporting system.

Another demand is for the university to build a monument designed by a Native American on campus to acknowledge Yale’s founding on formerly indigenous land.

The students explicitly call for immediate removal of Nicholas and Erika Christakis from the positions of Master and Associate Master of Silliman College, whose emails and confrontations with students in support of free speech last week sparked the ongoing protests at Yale.

Next Yale also calls for abolishing the job title of “master.”

The last demand is for “the allocation of resources to support the physical well-being of international, first-generation, low-income, and undocumented students” which specifically calls for food stipends, access to residential college kitchens during breaks, and dental and optometry coverage in the Basic Yale Health plan.

Source Article from https://www.popularresistance.org/yale-protesters-occupy-presidents-lawn-with-new-diversity-demands/

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