Some Yale students are hopping mad at 2 faculty members who didn't see the exquisite importance of repressing Halloween costumery.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education explains the multilayered outrage.

This email from Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis is the main source of irritation. She had the nerve to address Yale students as intellectuals, drawing on her expertise — she teaches a class on "The Concept of the Problem Child" — and saying things like:

At the first link there's video of Yale students yelling at Erika Christakis's husband Nicholas:

“As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman,” one student says. “You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?”

When Christakis disagreed, the student proceeded to yell at him. “Who the fuck hired you?” she asked, arguing that Christakis should “step down” because being master is “not about creating an intellectual space,” but rather “creating a home.”

To be fair, I'd like to know more about what representations Yale made to the students it lured into matriculating. Was a "safe space" promised? Part of the "marketplace of ideas" that the Christakises champion is the marketplace of colleges where students get their choice. What did the Yale packaging say? I can't really judge the anger and the urgency of these students without knowing what other offers they had and what they were led to think they were buying when they picked Yale. A vibrant "intellectual space" sounds exciting to me, but is that what they were told they'd get if they came to Yale? Maybe some other schools offered a challenging intellectual environment and they passed on it, preferring a caring, nurturing setting. Were they deceived?

There's a lot that could be said here, but I'll just say one more thing. Halloween is childish fun. If you're grimly serious about it, you've aged out. Maybe some of your classmates are still playing around, vacationing from their daily worries, indulging in this annual childishness. If you're too adult to join them, then do the adult thing and stay home and read. Complaining to the authorities is another form of indulgence in childishness — not childish fun but childish whining and tattling.

"A child sex offender working as a volunteer monster at a charity haunted house was uncovered..."

"... when he removed his mask to calm frightened children and an alert dad recognized him, according to a criminal complaint."

"The FBI has issued an alert to law enforcement about a possible 'Halloween Revolt' by a dangerous anarchist group..."

"[A] group known as the National Liberation Militia may be planning to dress in costume, cause a disturbance, and then ambush police who come to help."

The official Hillary Clinton website does viral media with a collection of how-to tips on how to make DIY Hillary costumes for Halloween.

The page is titled "Texts from Hillary and 4 other DIY Hillary Clinton costumes for Halloween/What’s in Hillary’s closet? A lifetime of looks," and there are 5 photos of Hillary from various stages of her life, each with a photo of a woman emulating her. We're given a list of items, for example, to be "Hipster Hillary," from 1969, you need a white blouse, glasses, striped pants, "leather shoes" (why stress "leather" rather than sandals?), and long, loose hair. The campaign promo is there: Hillary was "Wellesley College’s first-ever student commencement speaker."



I got there via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, that is, I caught the virus through someone who loathes Hillary and prompts readers to laugh contemptuously ("Not The Onion"). I was initially surprised that the campaign would portray Hillary as a subject for Halloween (traditionally the realm of monsters and the dead), but reading the page, I saw the value. The bio is there, the young women modeling the costumes all look like they're having fun with it. And the Hillary haters who propagate the link, layering on their contempt and astonishment, give it spin that is useful for those who'd love to scream with horror at that old reflexive misogyny, risen from the grave once again.

By the way, back in 1969, college kids didn't refer to each other as "hipsters." A "hipster" would have been a man from the past, more of a 1950s beatnik in some smoky urban jazz club. The word the Hillary campaign has apparently forgotten is: "hippie."

Hippie, oddly enough, has become a go-to Halloween costume in recent years, perhaps because it's easy to put together from crap you might have around the house, like the old-standbys of the 1950s and 60s: bum and gypsy.