Thread by @aaronsibarium

Administrators at Yale Law School spent weeks pressuring a student to apologize for a "triggering" email he sent out. Part of what made the email "triggering," the administrators told the student, was his membership in a conservative organization. 🧵freebeacon.com/campus/a-yale-…

The second-year law student, a member of both the Native American Law Students Association and the conservative Federalist Society, had invited classmates to an event cohosted by the two groups. Here is what the student wrote in an email to the Native American listserv:

The student is part Cherokee, the Indian tribe that was forcibly displaced during the infamous Trail of Tears.

Within minutes, the email elicited furious accusations of racism from his classmates, several of whom alleged that the term "trap house" indicated a blackface party.

"I guess celebrating whiteness wasn’t enough," the president of the Black Law Students Association wrote. "Y’all had to upgrade to cosplay/black face." She also objected to the mixer’s affiliation with the Federalist Society, which she said "supported anti-Black rhetoric."

"Trap house" has been part of progressive pop culture since 2016, when "Chapo Trap House" burst onto the scene. Hosted by three white men, the socialist podcast has received sympathetic profiles in the NYT, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, none of which take issue with the name.

Just 12 hours after the email went out, the student was summoned to the law school’s Office of Student Affairs, which administrators said had received nine discrimination and harassment complaints about his message.

At the Sept. 16 meeting—which you can listen to below—associate dean Ellen Cosgrove and diversity director Yaseen Eldik told the student that the word "trap" connotes crack use, hip hop, and blackface.

freebeacon.com/campus/listen-…

Those "triggering associations," Eldik said, were "compounded by the fried chicken reference," which "is often used to undermine arguments that structural and systemic racism has contributed to racial health disparities in the U.S." See the 3:40 mark: freebeacon.com/campus/listen-…

Eldik, a former Obama White House official, went on to say that the email's association with the Federalist Society was "very triggering for students who already feel like Fedsoc" is "oppressive to certain communities."

That's at the 5:32 mark.

freebeacon.com/campus/listen-…

Eldik added: "That of course obviously includes the LGBTQIA community and black communities and immigrant communities."

The statement signals that administrators at the country’s top-ranked law school now regard membership in mainstream conservative circles as a legitimate object of offense—and as potential grounds for discipline. Ironically, Fedsoc grew out of a conference hosted at Yale Law.

A wider embrace of the stance conveyed by the Yale Law officials would effectively suppress—with the threat of disciplinary action—views and associations that have until now been commonplace in elite legal circles. Note that all 6 conservative SCOTUS justices have ties to Fedsoc.

Behind closed doors, the leaked audio suggests, campus diversity bureaucracies are less ecumenical than their public messaging lets on: Their goal isn’t to make universities more inclusive, but rather to wield the threat of exclusion against disfavored groups.

Throughout the Sept. 16 meeting and a subsequent conversation the next day, Eldik and Cosgrove hinted repeatedly that the student might face consequences if he didn’t apologize—including trouble with the bar exam’s "character and fitness" investigations.

Those investigations review aspiring lawyers' disciplinary records in considerable detail: The NY State Bar, for example, asks law schools to describe any "discreditable information" that might bear upon an "applicant’s character," even if it did not result in formal discipline.

That may have been what Eldik had in mind when he told the student: "I worry about this leaning over your reputation as a person—not just here but when you leave. You know the legal community is a small one."

That's at 15:10 of the audio.

freebeacon.com/campus/listen-…

The best way to "make this go away," he continued, would be to formally apologize to Yale’s Black Law Students Association.

"You’re a law student, and there’s a bar you have to take," Eldik said in a follow-up meeting on Sept. 17. "So we think it’s really important to give you a 360 view." See the second recording here: freebeacon.com/campus/listen-…

When the student resisted, saying he’d prefer to have a face-to-face discussion with anybody offended by his email, Eldik nonetheless drafted an apology for the student to send in the service of "character-driven rehabilitation."

That's at 14:32: freebeacon.com/campus/listen-…

Addressed to black student leaders, the note included an apology for "any harm, trauma, or upset" the initial email may have caused. "I know I must learn more and grow," the draft apology concluded, "[a]nd I will actively educate myself so I can do better."

The student ultimately declined to send the note, instead telling his classmates that he welcomed conversations with anybody offended by his email.

When the student hadn’t apologized by the evening of Sept. 16, Eldik and Cosgrove emailed his entire class about the incident.

"[A]n invitation was recently circulated containing pejorative and racist language," the email read. "We condemn this in the strongest possible terms" and "are working on addressing this."

Eldik, Cosgrove, and YLS dean Heather Gerken did not respond to requests for comment.

Dubious discrimination complaints are nothing new at the Ivy League law school. In February, for example, a raft of affinity groups accused the Yale Law Journal of systematically excluding black students from the masthead. freebeacon.com/campus/yale-la…

When the prestigious publication released its admissions data, it turned out that black students had been admitted at a rate of 61 percent—far higher than the rate for any other race or ethnicity.

But as "discrimination" and "harassment" have taken on ever wider meanings, anti-discrimination offices have taken on a larger mandate, enforcing not just equal opportunity but progressive ideology.

At least one complaint alleged that the email "was a form of discrimination," Eldik told the student, while the "harassment" claims centered on how "psychically harmful" it had been.

That's at the 7:15 mark. freebeacon.com/campus/listen-…

This concept creep has been enforced by bureaucratic self-interest. Anti-discrimination officers have an incentive to address grievances in heavy-handed, public ways, a fact the audio drives home.

When the student suggested letting his peers reach out to him individually to discuss their feelings about the email, Eldik responded: "I don’t want to make our office look like an ineffective source of resolution." See 13:35 of the audio: freebeacon.com/campus/listen-…

That resolution may not involve any formal punishment. In a third meeting on Oct. 12, nearly a month after the initial incident, Eldik and Cosgrove assured the student they would not put anything in his file that might pose a problem for the bar.

"We would never get on our letterhead and write anything to the bar about you," Eldik said. "You may have been confused."

(Gee, I wonder why.)

At their first meeting, Eldik had hinted that the student's race might result in some leniency.

"As a man of color, there probably isn’t as much scrutiny of you as there might be of a white person in the same position," Eldik informed the Native American student. "I just want to acknowledge that there’s a complexity to that too." See the 5:15 mark.

freebeacon.com/campus/listen-…