Sudarshan Krishnan, Contributing Illustrator

This story is part of a series, “The Halloween That Changed Yale.”

The “March of Resilience,” which brought some 1,000 Yale community members to Cross Campus in November 2015, marked a moment of mass mobilization across student groups and cultural organizations, collectively demanding better support for students of color at Yale.

Now, as the federal government targets elite universities’ diversity initiatives, students are again joining together to create shared platforms for activism and preserve the moves toward inclusivity that have developed in the past decade.

Following a pair of controversies over Halloween weekend in 2015 — a contentious email sent to Silliman students about costumes and allegations of a “white girls only” fraternity party — both the Black Students Alliance at Yale, or BSAY, and a group called NextYale published concrete demands for the Yale administration. 

The demands, which evolved over time, included increased financial support for Yale’s cultural centers, an expansion of mental health resources for students of color, reform of the Ethnicity, Race and Migration program and increased Black faculty hiring, the News reported at the time.

“The March of Resilience came mostly from those students that already had this multicultural, cross-cultural, really strong foundation with each other, and saw a need for streamlining of messaging from the student body,” Nia Berrian ’19, who was a first year in the fall of 2015 and became BSAY president in her junior year, said in a recent interview.

A central catalyst for campus protests that fall was an email sent by Erika Christakis — then the associate master of Silliman College — criticizing an earlier message from the Intercultural Affairs Committee that discouraged students from wearing culturally insensitive costumes on Halloween. In the aftermath, Berrian said, she participated in a town hall at the Afro-American Cultural Center for an open discussion about the email and recent events at Yale.

While Christakis’ email intensified dialogue about racial inclusion on campus, Berrian underscored that the demands presented by students in that moment were the culmination of ongoing conversations at Yale and nationally. 

“How much of what happened in October 2015 was people using this time to just reignite the fire of fights that they’ve been having for decades, versus what was the exact demand in response to what happened on Halloween — I think those are two separate things,” Berrian said.

Days after that Halloween weekend, BSAY members met to create a set of proposed action items for the administration, according to DOWN Magazine.

Their demands, originally published in DOWN, included increased transparency on the selection process and training for college masters, now called heads of college; a requirement for all students to complete coursework in African-American Studies, Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; the development of a system for students to file discrimination and hate speech complaints; and a University-issued recommendation that members of fraternities involved in similar incidents on campus read and write reports on a series of Black feminist texts.

Birikti Kahsai ’27, the current president of BSAY, said today’s political climate — and specifically the targeting of diversity initiatives at universities by the federal government — has led to enhanced collaboration among various cultural groups on campus, in some ways parallel to the climate of student activism that emerged at Yale in 2015.

According to Kahsai, six different cultural organizations on campus — the Asian American Students Alliance, Mecha de Yale, Indigenous Peoples of Oceania, the Native and Indigenous Student Association, the Middle Eastern North African Student Association and BSAY — formed a coalition this summer to advocate for greater transparency from administrators regarding programs meant to support students of color.

“We also felt that by coming together as sort of broad umbrella organizations that cover the broadest swaths of each of the communities we represent, it would be a more efficient way of collectively organizing,” Kahsai said. “And then also making sure that by representing a significant swath of campus, it’d be perhaps safer for all of us to more aggressively push for different changes.”

One of the primary demands that emerged from the 2015 students was a push to reform the Ethnicity, Race and Migration program, which at the time lacked the power to independently hire faculty given its status as a program instead of a department. In 2019, following the temporary withdrawal of 13 faculty members from the program due to a lack of institutional support, the University added five faculty positions to the ER&M program.

Richie George ’27, the current editor in chief of DOWN Magazine, said that during the 2015 protests, members of DOWN wrote about, and often participated in, the protests that BSAY students were organizing. DOWN was founded at Yale in the spring of 2015 following blackface incidents that had occurred on campus, according to a recent letter from the editor by George. 

“They wanted to foster a space where a kind of counter-institutional thinking could happen, and ER&M at that juncture, at that historical juncture, was a symbol of that,” George said. “Students understood that they had to take full direction of their own education.”

George said he first learned about the 2015 student movement from upperclassmen in DOWN as well as from Timeica Bethel ’11, the Af-Am House’s director and an assistant dean of Yale College. Kahsai said that while she believed current students had some knowledge about the protests calling for Calhoun College to be renamed — which it was, as Grace Hopper College, in 2017 — she wasn’t sure how widespread knowledge of the larger 2015 reckoning was on campus.

Cultural Connections, or CC, a Camp Yale program for incoming freshmen that was founded in the 1970s as the Puerto Rican Orientation Program, takes students on a campus history tour that highlights the legacy of racism at Yale, as well as the contributions of Black and Indigenous people to the University.

Johnathan McGee ’28, one of BSAY’s vice presidents and a CC leader this year, said the tour includes a stop at Hopper to discuss the renaming.

“There was a big emphasis on understanding and knowing the history in Cultural Connections,” McGee said. 

Another focus of the 2015 student movement was increased financial support for Yale’s cultural centers. In response to student demands, the university committed to doubling the budget of each of the four existing cultural centers in November of that year.

According to Berrian, that effectively led to the centers expanding from having one full-time staff member each to two. NextYale’s initial demand was for Yale to establish five full-time staff positions in each of the centers, according to the list of demands published on DOWN’s website.

Also in November 2015, top University administrators announced a $50 million initiative to diversify the Yale faculty. Although the announcement came in the aftermath of the Halloween controversies, the initiative had been in the works for over a year, the News reported at the time. 

Kahsai shared that she believes that the diversification of faculty is an issue that has not been fully addressed in the wake of 2015.

“For me, progress and meaningful diversity would mean that I see as many — or significant numbers — of professors of color in the math department as much as I do in any ethnic studies department,” Kahsai said.

Kahsai said the political climate under which Yale is operating today is fundamentally different from 2015, particularly as it relates to the administration’s ability to address diversity issues on campus. She described the long-term commitment necessary to ensure that change is enacted and maintained.

DOWN’s theme this year, which George called “hope, persisting,” looks toward the successes of past students organizing on campus to inform advocacy in the current moment, under the Trump administration.

“I think a big part of thinking historically about social movements, especially student movements, is that victory is always contingent — success is always contingent. 2015 could be a failure if the things that we have now don’t exist anymore,” George said. “I actually do think that it’s even more important that students remain active, engaged and perceptive.”

BSAY was established in 1967.