A specter is haunting academia, the specter of specters — ghosts, goblins and "cultural appropriation" through insensitive Halloween costumes. Institutions of higher education are engaged in the low comedy of avoiding the agonies of Yale.
Last October, the university was rocked to its 315-year-old foundations by the wife of a residential college master (a title subsequently expunged from Yale's vocabulary lest it trigger traumas by reminding people that slavery once existed). In response to a university memorandum urging students to wear culturally sensitive costumes — e.g., no sombreros — she wrote an email saying it should be permissible for young people to be inappropriate, provocative or even offensive because "the ability to tolerate offense" is a hallmark of "a free and open society."
After the dust settled from this, she and her husband left the residential college. And Yale had trampled in the dust the noble legacy of its 1975 Woodward Report.