The email heard ’round the world, the one Erika Christakis sent her students in October 2015, is one of the most tame and inoffensive documents I have ever come across.

Sure, it criticizes the oversensitive approach that administrators on Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee had taken — their suggestion that students religiously avoid Halloween costumes “based on ‘making fun’ of real people, human traits or cultures.”

But it’s also got disclaimers about not wanting to “trivialize genuine concerns” that anyone might have had about classmates “wearing feathered headdresses” or turbans. Its closing line is a suggestive question: “Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people?” Not a condemnation, nor a slogan.

Yet the campus backlash was immediate and fiery. The very next day, an open letter appeared calling Christakis’ message “jarring and disheartening.” On Nov. 5, around 100 students surrounded her husband, Nicholas, in the Silliman College courtyard. Some demanded he resign over his wife’s email.

Video of the courtyard mob went viral, receiving breathless coverage in national outlets, and even sparking a brief debate in the pages of The Atlantic. But for all its immediate notoriety, the Christakis affair only became legendary as a harbinger of a new age. A decade where lukewarm appeals to “free speech and the ability to tolerate offence” would be considered literal violence by progressive mobs.

Today, that era — the one ushered in by the Christakis affair — feels like it’s drawing to a close.

And the data agrees. Since 1998, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a campus free-speech watchdog, has documented the deplatforming attempts at American universities.

According to FIRE’s database, every year from 1999 through 2015 featured more right-wing cancellation attempts than left. But, after Yale’s Halloween kerfuffle, between 2016 and 2024, that trend precisely reversed: each year, leftist activists, students, administrators and faculty tried to cancel speakers, professors, performances and art installations nearly twice as often as right-wingers did.

Left-wing censorship was the mundane reality of life in higher education. Prospective faculty were subjected to ideological litmus tests; speakers considered controversial were barred from campus or shouted down. The Christakises’ critics got what they wanted — Erika left her teaching role in December 2015, and in May the next year, both Nicholas and Erika stepped down from their positions in Silliman College.

By 2024, the deplatforming attempts reached a fever pitch. That year, according to FIRE, 104 came from the left, and 65 from the right — the highest total in FIRE’s records. And then the vibe shifted. In 2025, right-wing cancellations are up to a count of 77 — and the left is down all the way to 47.

The change coincides with the Trump administration’s crackdown on left-illiberalism in academia. But Trump isn’t advancing a classically liberal commitment to free expression in its stead. He’s instead eager to enforce right-illiberalism. His administration has proposed ideological litmus tests too — only for conservative values — and they’re leaning on university officials to suppress progressive campus speech.

In 2015, when censorial “antiracist” agitators had the might of all the professional-managerial class behind them, Yale relented and relented. In May 2017, it gave awards to two of the students who told Nicholas Christakis he was “creat[ing] a space for violence to happen,” according to a column in Tablet Magazine. 

Today, the entire apparatus of the federal government stands in the way of free expression on campus. To stand up and fight it head-on would certainly be noble — but also foolish, and most likely doomed.

So what can we do? Just wait until the next Halloween scandal and twiddle our thumbs as the federal shitstorm rains down?

Pretty much! It’s better to be cowed than bankrupted — I’d rather not risk our near–billion dollars’ worth of federally-funded research.

And if the Christakis affair has taught us anything, it’s that the cowing is deeply impermanent. Nicholas and Erika stepped down, sure — in a sense, they surrendered to the mob —  but their retreat was measured, tactical. They kept working: researching and writing. They opined on the controversy, too, but non-confrontationally, and sparingly.

The restraint paid off: in 2018, Nicholas was quietly named a Sterling Professor — the highest honor granted by Yale to its faculty. In 2020, he became a leading soothsayer of the COVID-19 pandemic. FIRE put him on its Advisory Council.

Not every academic who fought the illiberal left made it through so unscathed.

Bret Weinstein was a professor at Evergreen State University, until he resigned in 2017 — a principled stand against antiracist illiberalism had earned him violent threats too. Weinstein refused to be cowed. He made a new career as an outspoken opponent of left-wing identity politics. And then, in 2020, became a leading anti-vaccine crackpot.

This isn’t close to a conclusive proof or anything. But, when Yale finally must meet the Trump administration’s illiberal gaze — well, I think I’d rather we make like a Christakis than a Weinstein.

ARI SHTEIN is a first year in Saybrook College. He can be reached at ari.shtein@yale.edu.