What Shocked Me About the Culture at Yale

I grew up in foster care. I wasn’t prepared for what I found on campus.

(Photo by Yana Paskova/Getty Images.)

There were many surreal aspects of my experience at Yale, including the opportunity to learn from high-profile professors. I took a course on Shakespeare taught by the late Harold Bloom, who has been described as “the most renowned, and arguably the most passionate, literary critic and Shakespeare scholar in America.” When I told him about my life, the 87-year-old professor gently replied, “You were forged in a fire.” I also met the psychology professor Albert Bandura—who at the time was 91 years old and died in 2021—to chat about a book he had recently written. I was surprised at how late in life many professors worked—some well into their eighties and even nineties. This was a notable difference from the aging adults I knew in my adoptive hometown of Red Bluff, Northern California, who typically looked forward to retirement and preferred not to work longer than they had to, unless it was out of financial necessity.

Before my first classes were scheduled to begin, I was sitting in the courtyard of my residential college when a young woman asked for help lifting some boxes into her dorm room. She introduced herself and told me she was a senior. I explained that this was my first semester.

“What do you think of Yale so far?” she asked.

I was embarrassed to answer. “I keep waiting for them to tell me it was a mistake that they let me in,” I said, carrying boxes up the stairs as she guided me. “Walking around, it feels like I’m dreaming.”

“That’s such a great feeling,” she replied wistfully. “Enjoy it.”

We entered her room, and I set the boxes down. She opened the larger box and pulled out a large case of pills. 

The medication rattled as she set it on her desk.

“Nice stash. Anything for sale?” I joked.

“Yeah, the Adderall is.” She didn’t appear to be joking.

I thought back to my first day in high school, when my neighbor offered to sell me drugs. Now here I was at this fancy college, and this senior was offering to sell drugs, too. Later, I’d observe rampant drug and alcohol use on campus. This was at odds with the widespread belief, which I held at the time, that poverty was the primary reason for substance abuse.

I came to understand that along with the fact that they were generally bright and hardworking, my peers on campus had experienced a totally different social reality than me and had grown up around people just like them.

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In my first semester, I tried to get into a specific course titled “The Concept of the Problem Child.” I read the course description:

Differing visions of good and bad, typical and atypical, children. Reasons why some children are seen as deviant and others as normal. Implications for public policy, medical practice, family dynamics, schooling, and the criminal justice and protective care systems. Sources include public health data, early childhood curricula, and depictions of problem children in literature and popular culture.

Given my background in the foster care system, I hoped to take this course. But it was capped, meaning only a limited number of students could join. Because around one hundred students had applied, many of them seniors, I was wait-listed. No big deal, I thought. I’ll take it next time. I wrote an email to the instructor, Erika Christakis, thanking her for offering the course, and stated that I looked forward to applying again in the future.

I would soon learn this was the last time she would ever offer this course at Yale.

Walking through Old Campus—the oldest part of Yale—I found a flier indicating that NYU professor Jonathan Haidt was visiting campus to give a talk. I’d recently read his bestselling book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. I figured Professor Haidt would speak about moral psychology, the theme of his book. But instead, on the day of the talk, Haidt discussed the purpose of a university. He urged the audience to consider whether the aim of higher education is to protect students or to equip them with the ability to seek truth, and he was clearly in favor of the latter.

I thought this was a strange presentation. I sat there utterly perplexed. Why was he talking about this?

I simply didn’t have the requisite background knowledge to understand. This new social environment was so unfamiliar to me that I hadn’t realized there was a contentious national debate going on about the very nature of higher education.

Soon, the message of Haidt’s talk would become painfully clear. Just as my feelings of being a total outsider had begun to subside, they would suddenly resurface.

Two weeks later, I was sitting on a bench in front of Sterling Memorial Library, reading an email on my laptop by Erika Christakis, the instructor who taught the Concept of the Problem Child course.

“I’m confused, honestly,” I said to the student next to me. “I have no idea why people are upset about this.”

He sighed. “I knew that email would be controversial as soon as I read it,” he said.

The university administration had recently circulated a campus-wide email to students asking them to be sensitive about what Halloween costumes they wear. The idea was that costumes that implied that other cultures or interests were unserious or played into stereotypes might cause discomfort or harm to other students. In response, Erika Christakis wrote an email to the students within her residential college. In her email, she questioned whether the administration should interfere with students’ lives—she defended freedom of expression and urged students to handle disagreements about costumes on their own. The social climate immediately changed. Hundreds of students marched throughout campus. They called for apologies from the university and insisted Christakis and her husband, who was also a professor and who defended her, be fired, among other demands.

Because I was older, sometimes students would crack jokes to me about the movie 21 Jump Street, about two 25-year-old cops who go undercover to pose as students at a high school. Throughout the movie, the protagonists make subtle errors indicating a miniature generation gap. At no point did these jokes feel more apt than when I saw those students marching around campus, demanding the two professors be fired. I felt like they were speaking a language I didn’t know.

Even the students who didn’t agree that Erika’s email was wrong knew why others thought it was wrong, but I was mystified. I would ask outraged classmates to explain what had been done wrong, hoping to understand.

A student from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had attended Phillips Exeter Academy (an expensive private boarding school), explained that I was too privileged to understand the pain these professors had caused. At first, I was stunned. But later, I came to understand the intellectual acrobatics necessary to say something like this. The student who called me “privileged” likely meant that due to my background as a biracial Asian Latino heterosexual cisgender (that is, I “present” as the sex I was “assigned” at birth) male, this means that I have led a privileged life. However, I also learned that many inhabitants of elite universities assign a great deal of importance to “lived experience.” This means that your unique personal hardships serve as important credentials to expound on social ills and suggest remedies.

These two ideas appeared to be contradictory.

Which is more relevant to identity, one’s discernible characteristics (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on) or what they actually went through in their lives? I asked two students this question. One replied that this question was dangerous to ask. The other said that one’s discernible characteristics determine what experiences they have in their lives. This means that if you belong to a “privileged” group, then you must have had a privileged life. I dropped the conversation there.

I was fascinated by this new social reality and avoided discussing my life when contentious discussions erupted. I really wanted to understand what these students thought without risking them being weirded out by someone in their midst who they might have acknowledged as having had a tougher life than them, and who disagreed that words in an email could actually inflict “pain.”

That was the language many students used. Danger and harm and pain. Words like trauma meant something different for them.

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The student protests became a national story. Erika Christakis and her husband, Nicholas, were ridiculed and reviled, with little public support from students, faculty, or the administration.

Privately, many people—perhaps most—were supportive, but they were fearful of openly expressing this. Erika was asked by some of the protesters to announce when she was going into the dining hall so that students wouldn’t be triggered. She stepped down from her teaching position at the university, although her husband remained. After those incomprehensible events, I would gaze at the beautiful architecture throughout the university and think about a line I’d read from F. Scott Fitzgerald, describing Gatsby’s forever altered relationship with the green light across the bay: “His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”

I watched students claim that investment banks were emblematic of capitalist oppression, and then discovered that they’d attended recruitment sessions for Goldman Sachs. Gradually, I came to believe that many of these students were broadcasting the belief that such firms were evil in order to undercut their rivals. If they managed to convince you that a certain occupation is corrupt and thus to be avoided, then that was one less competitor they had in their quest to be hired.

But they didn’t see themselves this way. They viewed themselves as morally righteous and were surprisingly myopic about the virtuous image they held of themselves.

In December, shortly after the Yale-Harvard football game, one of my peers explained to the rest of the class that she’d seen a group of Harvard students at a New Haven restaurant leave a huge mess at their table.

“I hope the restaurant staff knew those people were from Harvard, not Yale!” said another student.

“I doubt they care,” I replied, thinking of my days as a busboy. “They just saw a bunch of spoiled students. Harvard, Yale, it doesn’t matter. The mess is the same.”

Another time, I was on a social media page where Ivy League students and graduates shared stories about their schools. Someone had posted a story about Yeonmi Park, a North Korean refugee who had graduated from Columbia University. Park described her alarm about how the monolithic culture at her Ivy League school reminded her of her home country. The top-rated comment, the one with the most “like” and “love” reactions: “She should have stayed in North Korea.” They couldn’t bear the criticism and posted endless mean-spirited comments mocking Park, with some saying she should “go back to Pyongyang.”

Ordinarily, the people who visited this webpage would have considered the statement that a refugee should have stayed where she came from to be reprehensible (and it is). But in this instance it was lauded because Park’s comments undermined these people’s view of themselves as morally righteous. Many students and graduates of top universities are terrified of being seen as what they really are. We don’t leave messes for other people to clean up, it’s those other elite students from that other school. We’re not xenophobic, it’s those unenlightened people who didn’t go to a fancy college. We haven’t cultivated an ideologically rigid environment—go back to where you came from.  

Rob Henderson is a writer and author of Rob Henderson’s Newsletter. His book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, was released this week.

From TROUBLED: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson. Copyright © 2024 by Rob Henderson. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

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