Diversity means “no white men”

 

Yale University is trying to explain its intentions when it took down portraits of white men who served as head of a residential college ahead of a Halloween party.

Stephen Davis, the current head of Pierson College, claims that an email he sent to students last week has been “misrepresented” as saying the white men’s portraits would not be put back up in the dining hall.

Davis ignored two separate requests this week to provide the email he sent students before giving The College Fix a copy of the message after this article was published.

The Yale Daily News has also not answered a Fix query on whether its Monday report was incorrect or whether Davis asked “the nation’s oldest college daily newspaper” to subtly change its reporting in an article Wednesday.

The implication of Monday’s report by the News was that the white men’s portraits were being removed permanently from Pierson’s dining hall because they weren’t diverse enough.

They were taken down “in preparation for” Pierson’s annual Halloween party, known as Inferno, but Davis only told students Nov. 1 that unlike previous years, they “will not be remounted,” the News said, paraphrasing the Davis email.

In place of those portraits, students would paint each other’s portraits at a Nov. 6 “study break” hosted by Sam Messer, associate dean of the art school and chair of the Committee on Art in Public Spaces, and hang them “temporarily” in the dining hall, according to the Newsreport. It’s the only mention in the article of a temporary change.

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