Madelyn Kumar

On March 7, less than 24 hours after the Women’s Center announced its annual conference on Instagram, Associate Dean of Student Affairs Hannah Peck reached out to Women’s Center board members, via an an email obtained by the News, in which she said that she had received serious complaints against the Women’s Center and wanted to meet in an hour.  

The conference, “Pinkwashing and Feminism(s) in Palestine,” planned to discuss pinkwashing — the practice of using LGBTQ+ support to downplay negative political action. National media outlets criticized the event in the weeks following its announcement on social media. 

However, two days after meeting with Peck, the Women’s Center board voted to indefinitely postpone the conference. Even after the Center voted to cancel the event, a conference under the same name will still take place this upcoming weekend, unassociated with the Women’s Center.

The News spoke with three students involved with the Women’s Center at the time of the event’s planning, all of whom were granted anonymity due to concerns for personal safety. Of those three, one of them — who requested to go by the initial K — helped plan the event.

“The conference was indefinitely postponed under duress with the hopes of de-escalating rising tensions between administration and the Women’s Center and in the hope of staving off disciplinary action,” K said.  

At the March 7 meeting, Peck and Associate Dean of Residential Life Ferentz Lafargue explained that the complaint of discrimination that the University officially wanted to address was not about the upcoming conference, the sources said. 

Instead, the complaint regarded a Feb. 22 email sent by a student, who identified herself in the email as a leader of Yale Friends of Israel, asking if she could “meet with a representative from the Women’s Center to talk about how Jewish women can feel included and represented in our Yale community.”

The student from Yale Friends of Israel who sent the Feb. 22 email, who was granted anonymity due to concerns of personal safety, said she did not know about the conference when she reached out two weeks before it was announced, but emphasized the importance of the Women’s Center hosting events that include the experiences of Jewish and Israeli women in addition to events about women in Gaza. 

“They’ve had multiple events about women in Gaza,” the student said to the News. “And I think they should. People are suffering and we take that seriously. I just think that you shouldn’t just do one and not the other.”

In addition to the original Feb. 22 email, the student also sent an Instagram direct message to the Women’s Center which received no response and added that multiple other students had reached out to the Women’s Center about representing Jewish voices and were met with no response. 

K was unable to confirm whether or not other students have reached out in the past, but said that the conversations with administrators focused solely on their lack of response to the Feb. 22 email.

The three students involved with the Women’s Center at the time said that the board actively decided not to respond due to a previous interaction with a student they believed to be associated with Yale Friends of Israel. On Oct. 9, one of the three students received extremely graphic videos of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks to her personal Instagram via direct message, without any warning of their graphic content. 

This student who received the videos saw pictures of the sender on the Yale Friends of Israel Instagram account and raised concerns with the other members of the Women’s Center Board over working with Yale Friends of Israel, fearing it could lead to an interaction with the sender. 

The sender of the email told the News he feels concerned that the Women’s Center used him as a “pretext for anti-Semitism” as he is not officially affiliated with the Yale Friends of Israel and would not be involved in the planning of their events. 

The three people involved with the Women’s Center at the time who spoke to the News said that the board was engaged in ongoing internal conversations about whether to respond up until their March 7 meeting with Peck and Lafargue. 

However, two weeks after sending the Feb. 22 email, after the conference was made public, the student who had contacted the Center raised concerns with the Head of Grace Hopper Julia Adams and various department heads over the lack of response to her messages which she said was an act of discrimination. 

Melanie Boyd, the dean of student affairs, and one of Yale College’s Discrimination and Harassment Resource Coordinators reached out to set up a meeting with the student about her concerns around the lack of response, and on March 7, members of the Women’s Board received the email from Peck and Lafargue which requested the same day meeting. 

In the meeting, while Peck and Lafargue said that this discrimination complaint was unrelated to the upcoming conference, they told the board that students, professors and alumni — as well as expected press surrounding the event — would conflate the two.

“Peck and Lafargue let on that they had heard complaints from many faculty, donors and alumni about the contents of the conference and believed people would soon go to the press,” K said. “They failed to separate [these criticisms] from the discrimination complaint.”

Two people involved with the Women’s Center at the time told the News that the meeting with Peck and Lafargue was extremely intimidating. 

They said that Peck and Lafargue told the Women’s Center board that Boyd would be looking into the discrimination complaint to see if they needed to take disciplinary action against the board members. The Women’s Center board was told to not delete any documents and communication surrounding the incident, including group chats that they were told could be requested by administrators. 

They were also asked to respond to the student’s email and set up a time to talk with her. They were advised to institute a policy at the Women’s Center going forward of responding to all requests from students and Yale community members.

The student in question confirmed to the News that the Board had since responded to her and set up a time to speak about her concerns.

Following this meeting, Boyd reached out to the Women’s Center board in an email obtained by the News, saying that she was “gathering information” about the allegation that the board “may have acted in a discriminatory fashion” by “actively decid[ing] not to respond to requests from students representing pro-Israel groups.” She requested that each board member be “in touch with [her] individually to share [their] recollection of any such requests.”

After Boyd’s email, on March 9, the Women’s Center board voted unanimously to indefinitely postpone the event.

“As soon as the Center advertised the Pinkwashing Conference, the administration used tactics of intimidation to scare us into backing down, and it worked. The Women’s Center canceled the conference out of fear of retaliation and to protect our well-being and academic standing,” wrote a person who formerly worked with the Women’s Center — one of the three anonymous students involved with the Women’s Center at the time of the event’s planning. “The administration’s aggressive response and the pressures against the Center ultimately suppressed the center’s political programming.”

The three students from the Women’s Center also told the News that after the board voted to indefinitely postpone the conference, Tom Adams, the assistant dean of student affairs who oversees the Women’s Center, repeatedly instructed the students to announce their decision on the Center’s social media, remove advertising for the conference and take down the website containing information about it.

The chief University spokesperson wrote to the News that the decision to not go forward with the conference “was made solely by the student organizers.”

The spokesperson added that since March 9, when the Women’s Center notified the Yale College Dean’s Office of the decision, Faculty for Justice in Palestine — a group of Yale faculty who “support the cause of Palestinian liberation” per their website — sent the University “a letter of concern about the guidance provided by staff to students in the organization” and that a Yale administrator is planning to meet the group in early April.

“The free exchange of ideas and opinions is fundamental to Yale’s mission, and the university permits students, faculty, and others to invite speakers to campus and engage in a wide variety of academic and scholarly pursuits,” the spokesperson wrote. “Recognizing that this free exchange of ideas may be challenging, and with the goal of fostering students’ sense of belonging to the community, it is Yale’s practice to provide students with support through its robust infrastructure of resources.”

The spokesperson also referred the News to University President Peter Salovey’s Nov. 3 “remarks on compassion and civility,” in which Salovey wrote that there are “waves of hatred” toward Jewish, Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian people and emphasized that antisemitism and Islamophobia are “empathetically against” the University’s values.

Lafargue, Peck, Boyd and Adams did not offer comments for this story, and the University spokesperson noted that the given response was on behalf of all of them. 

Despite initial turbulence, the “Pinkwashing and Feminism(s) in Gaza Event” is now moving forward and is planned for April 6. The Women’s Center is no longer a sponsor; the event will be co-sponsored by the American Studies Department; the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration; the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies department; Yalies4Palestine; the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration; and Faculty for Justice in Palestine, per the conference registration form.

The event, which will now take place in Linsly-Chittenden Hall and William L. Harkness Hall, will feature the same speakers, including Ghadir Shafie, the co-director of Aswat, an organization of queer Palestinian women; Sa’ed Astshan, an associate professor of peace and conflict studies and anthropology and chair of the department of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College; Sarah Ihmoud, assistant professor of anthropology, sociology and peace and conflict studies at the College of the Holy Cross; and Isis Nusair, associate professor of women’s studies and international studies at Denison University.

The Women’s Center was founded in 1971, two years after Yale College first admitted female students.