When Yale Became Nursery School With Beer
Alexandra Wolfe writes in the WSJ of Erika Christakis's view. Does that name sound familiar? She's a lecturer who left Yale after she and her fellow dorm-master husband were screamed at by a bunch of college-age, tantrumming infants (see Lukianoff piece below):

Erika Christakis, an early-education expert who most recently taught at Yale University, thinks that adults and children have reversed roles. Adults, she says, now act like children, reading children's books and dressing like college students, while children have become overscheduled and hyper-pressured, their childhoods cut short. "Adults are paying attention to their own self-care with mindfulness and spa care and yoga, yet children are really suffering," she says.

In her new book, "The Importance of Being Little," Ms. Christakis, 52, argues that giving children less downtime has made them more fragile. She fears that overburdening them with facts, figures and extracurricular activities has led to a decrease in their autonomy and resilience. Giving children free time to play with others, she says, allows them to learn how to solve problems and deal with conflicts.

In this she echoes the work of psychologists Peter Gray and Gabrielle Principe, and anthropologist David Lancy. From one of my syndicated advice columns:

When I was growing up, I'd have to play with toys by myself or go out and poke a worm with a stick. These days, parents go way over the top in how involved they think they should be in playtime, and kids exploit this, extorting constant adult attention. Developmental psychologist Peter Gray explains that play evolved to be the "primary means" for children to learn to solve their own problems, overcome their fears, and take control of their lives, and this parents as playmates thing may stunt kids' self-reliance. Gray, like anthropologist David Lancy, points out that parents being all up in kids' playtime business is a very recent development. Throughout human history, parents have been too busy doing the little things -- you know, like trying to keep the family from starving to death -- to read the hieroglyphic version of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" to their kid 500 times in a row.

More from Wolfe on Christakis and the crybullies:

Ms. Christakis herself was at the center of a conflict last year over Halloween costumes on campus. It started when Yale's Intercultural Affairs Committee advised students that they should not be culturally insensitive by wearing feathered headdresses, turbans or "war paint" or by "modifying skin tone" and linked to a website listing appropriate and inappropriate costumes. In response, Ms. Christakis sent out her own email wondering if such oversight was necessary. "Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people?" she asked, and noted, "Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society."

Students said her email was racially insensitive and staged protests, with some calling for her and her husband to be removed from their positions as heads of an undergraduate residence at Yale. (Her husband, Nicholas Christakis, is a physician and sociology professor.) In December, Ms. Christakis resigned from her teaching job at Yale, and her husband is on sabbatical this semester. They still have their residential positions.

The gist of the email was in keeping with the educational philosophy she outlines in her book. "My intention in writing that email was to validate our students' ability to practice social norming with each other," she says. She agrees with her critics about the need to be sensitive but felt that her words were received the wrong way. "It just was very surreal to me...but I still feel very committed to the idea that kids are powerful."

Turns out the tape of the screaming crybully at Yale was made by free speech defender Greg Lukianoff, of theFIRE.org. He writes in the WaPo:

I was visiting to give a long-planned lecture on campus free speech. When I showed up, students were in an uproar over an email sent by one of the heads of the very dormitory where I was scheduled to speak.

Enter Erika Christakis, lecturer and associate master of Yale's Silliman College (for non-Yalies, a dormitory). Erika is open-minded and a consistent critic of groupthink. When Yale's Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an e-mail urging students to be sensitive in their choice of Halloween costumes, Erika sent out a thoughtful response asking if such e-mails were in tension with students' right to autonomy and expression.

Readers may not realize that Halloween has become a season of campus controversy. For years, college administrators have been issuing stern warnings to students not to wear "offensive" costumes. I'd always assumed students were privately rolling their eyes at these often overbearing instructions from authority figures on how to dress.

Nopies!

I managed to record some of the confrontation, knowing that the easiest way for Nicholas to be fired would be for a student to claim that he flew off the handle. But he didn't. Instead, Nicholas addressed the crowd for more than an hour, even after it became clear that nothing short of begging for forgiveness would satisfy them.

Listen to this hysterical girl who believes that college is supposed to be a place of intellectual comfort. I think it would be a service to employers for her name to come out.

And then Lukianoff spoke:

When I described just how fierce the students' reaction to Erika's e-mail had been, the audience seemed skeptical, so for emphasis I said, "You would think that given the reaction to what she had written that she had actually wiped out an Indian village."

Shortly after, I paused when I heard commotion on the other side of the room: a student appeared to respond to my comments and began putting up posters. I couldn't make out much of what he said as he fought with the security guard who asked him to leave (the student was not registered for the event), but I agreed he could post the posters and attempted to continue my speech.

As the guard struggled to lead him to the exit, the student yelled, "You people speak like you don't know the history of the country you pretend to love! And you talk about burning Indian villages, which gets a lot of laughs!"

Word of my "offensive" comment spread quickly. Over 100 students gathered to protest the event, chanting and holding signs reading "Genocide is not a joke."

Who needs nutcase asylums when we have these nice ivy-covered places called universities?