A New Semester, a New Approach to Campus Turmoil The work of the Yale professor who was berated by students helps explain the ‘emotional stampede’ and how to address it. By Paul McHugh
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-semester-a-new-approach-to-campus-turmoil-1452460962
College students are returning to school after the winter break, and administrators must be bracing for another semester like the tumultuous one just passed. That trivial circumstances like those at Yale University in November could provoke such unrest indicates how fraught race relations remain at schools striving to promote diversity.
Ironically, an incident caught on video at Yale—one that for many Americans seemed to epitomize how badly American higher education has gone off the rails—also offers an explanation for this spasm of protests and points toward a more productive way of addressing students’ concerns.
ENLARGE The incident involved a Yale professor named Nicholas Christakis, who was waylaid on campus by angry students. They were livid about a letter written by his wife, Erika, also a Yale teacher, who had suggested that the university’s recent admonishments about Halloween costumes, cultural appropriation and racial insensitivity perhaps were unnecessary, since young adults are capable of deciding for themselves what to wear for Halloween and might even learn from being “a little bit obnoxious.” Mr. Christakis was caught in an ugly scene, with one student in particular roundly cursing him.
Eventually the campus settled when Yale’s president reassured the students that he understood their feelings and would take measures to protect them from insult. Some distance will be put between the students and the Christakises. The school reports that Ms. Christakis, a lecturer in early-childhood education, has chosen not to teach this spring, and her husband is on what Yale called a “scheduled leave.”
Overlooked was the fact that the target of the campus confrontation, Mr. Christakis, is one of America’s outstanding physician-scientists—and a person ideally suited to making sense of the events that gripped campuses in recent months. One can presume that eventually, when his feelings about this sorry episode become less intense, Mr. Christakis will dissect it. But until that time, let me—someone who has never met the man but admires and teaches his work—identify what seem the salient matters and how what we’ve learned from Mr. Christakis’s work might help address the current destructive, distressful climate on many campuses.
In his research and in his 2009 book, written with James H. Fowler, “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives,” Mr. Christakis has demonstrated how thoughts and behaviors that we think are determined by our reasoning and sense of situation are actually shaped—not always to our benefit—by people with whom we’re socially engaged, even those at some remove from our immediate circle.
Mr. Christakis, working with longitudinal research such as the renowned Framingham Heart Study that followed more than 5,000 adults in a Massachusetts town for decades beginning in 1948, showed that obesity, smoking, alcohol consumption, drug use and even personal happiness and altruism spread essentially as a kind of contagion within the social cluster of relationships in which people are embedded.
He revealed that what one accepts as a “norm” in behaviors and physical appearance depends on those of others—up to and including the friends of friends of one’s friends. Interestingly, Mr. Christakis has also shown that these aspects of our behavior will change in a coordinated fashion when those of our friends—and, again, those friends of friends we’ve not met—change in the same way.
I use these discoveries in teaching psychiatrists how to manage patients with depression and addiction. For example: We can encourage alcoholics to attend 90 meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in the 90 days after discharge so as to embed them in a community of people committed to abstinence and help them take on sobriety as a norm in the future.
How do these insights apply to the disturbances that have convulsed U.S. colleges? First, let’s be clear: The racial protest and social disruption like that at Yale was not another Selma March or Birmingham battle against Bull Connor and his dogs. Rather it was what psychiatrists call an “emotional stampede,” by a group of sensitive young people living in a culture of suspicion who were provoked into believing that they had been gravely injured—a belief that they no doubt still hold. Yet these individuals remain students in good standing at Yale, with all the privileges that entails, having suffered no setbacks other than their shared sense of injury.
Now, college students in general worry about their academic performance and its effect on their future, but these young people bore the added concern that the Yale community harbored subtle forms of social injustice reflective of a racist American culture. Like any group that thinks itself beleaguered, these students were sensitive to the feelings of their fellows, saw loyalty to one another as a principle and were responsive to any evidence of distress.
With today’s technology, they were able to stay in close contact through social media, reinforcing the norms within their group. In essence they constituted a tightly knit, volatile social cluster drawing away from the other students at Yale, poorly equipped to judge coolly events impinging on their fears.
This culture of suspicion at Yale and other universities must be remedied for the academic pursuit of social diversity to succeed. What is needed: A person respected by the group, preferably from within the group, who recognizes the unhealthy direction events have taken and intervenes to help the students—even if only a few—see the advances in racial matters achieved, both at Yale and in America. Such a person would know from experience that injustices can occur, but could also shed light on the good intentions and racial progress at the university. Putting the “long view” in front of the students is essential, emphasizing the achievements America has made in racial relations in the past decades and from which the Yale students have profited.
Changing the viewpoint of a few individuals in the cluster could have—just as did the triggering event—a ripple effect on their friends and friends of friends. If that viewpoint became more their norm, the students would have a better opportunity to get what they came to Yale for: a first-rate education, a reputation for accomplishment, and entrée into a place of responsibility in America.
It would require a certain amount of courage to take up this task, given how emotionally charged American campuses are today. But advances in race relations always seem to be marked by the actions of a brave few leading the way.
Dr. McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is the author of “The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
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