The narrative usually starts like this: A day before Halloween, Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis writes an email to her students, arguing that culturally insensitive costumes are legitimate expressions of youthful exuberance. Protests led by angry, “woke” students spark in reaction to Christakis’ email. The wise administrators respond with appeasement. “Good job, Yale Corporation; you handled the crisis with grace and wisdom.” 

Halloween 2015 was about more than an email. It was an expression of decades of student struggle — visible and invisible — and a demonstration of the university’s uneven and incomplete transformation. 

In the past 60 years, minority students at elite universities have found themselves in a precarious position. The ’60s, with its revolutionary fervor and its student organizing, wrought profound changes to the university that has created America’s political, academic and cultural elite. New departments, namely Black Studies, came into existence; entire demographics, from Blacks to women, were admitted to the university; and cultural centers were created to furnish spaces for minority students.

The ’60s brought with it a new social contract between the nation and the university. The university would insulate the decade’s revolutionary possibility by including historically marginalized groups within its hallowed halls. The university’s mission was reimagined, but only up to a point.

Nevertheless, the racial divide persisted. It reached a tipping point in 2007 when some Yalies took to blackface and defaced Pierson College with the words “n***** school,” presumably with no concern for their Black classmates. Although Blacks joined Yale’s graduating classes at increasing numbers, inclusion was not enough to build care or even respect. 

Whether Black lives mattered — both at Yale and in America — remained the central point of contention in 2015. The Ferguson riots had just elapsed, and the Movement for Black Lives was full steam ahead, demanding that the nation value Black Americans in life and in death. This fight for justice and love prompted Yale students to reconsider the university’s handling of the “race” question and its historic and foundational tie to slavery.

2015 was about more than an offensive costume or two; it was about the university’s legitimacy as a symbol of the nation’s failure to complete the hard-fought project of racial justice. 

The university has always been a site of struggle, over who gets to define what it is and why. It has always been a place where students, faculty and administrators deliberate and stake their position in a fight over the future of the university, as to whether it could be more than just an artifice of slavery and its accumulation over time.

2015 was, like years prior, a crisis of legitimacy, during which a new contract was drawn up. “Master” became “head;” new faculty arrived to join Yale’s ranks and the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program was revitalized. Advocacy group Students Unite Now’s fight to eliminate Yale’s student income contribution — a known barrier for FG/LI students at Yale — began in earnest. 2015 marked another moment when we reimagined the university and defined what it meant for us.

2025 marks another crisis of legitimacy. The Trump administration has pulled billions of dollars in federal funding from public and private universities, using the promise of research as leverage to marshall his racist, sexist and fascist campaign to silence all thought he dislikes. 

It would be a mistake for the university to turn back now, to concede to the worst underbelly of American racism and fascism. If 2025 is the last staging ground for America’s future, let the university be a shining example for an America otherwise, a nation built on a shared commitment to a better world. 

So let us imagine something different now. Let us continue the work of the thousands before us, those who have entrusted us with the promise of a world and a university that are truly emancipatory. 

RICHIE GEORGE is a junior in Grace Hopper College studying history and philosophy. They are the Editor-in-Chief of DOWN Magazine and can be reached at richard.george@yale.edu.