In recent weeks, Yale University has been plagued by an ongoing debate over free speech and sensitivity toward different cultures and which should take precedence over the other.

In late October, Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email to students asking them to avoid wearing “culturally unaware and insensitive” Halloween costumes, according to a Nov. 8 New York Times article. Specifically, the article noted, administrators advised students to avoid wearing costumes that include things like blackface, Native American headdresses or turbans.

In response to the email, Erika Christakis, an associate master with Yale’s Branford College, wrote in a letter to students living in Branford — one of Yale’s 12 residential colleges — inviting students to question whether the university had the right to dictate their costumes. She also expressed what she said were concerns from many students that the university’s actions abridged the students’ freedom of expression. “American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition,” she wrote.

Christakis’s letter hit a nerve with some members of Yale’s student body, many of whom criticized her argument that free speech should be valued above sensitivity, according to the article. In an open letter signed by hundreds, students wrote that “to ask marginalized students to throw away their enjoyment of a holiday, in order to expend emotional, mental, and physical energy to explain why something is offensive, is — offensive. … To be a student of color on Yale’s campus is to exist in a space that was not created for you.”

In an email sent to the student body on Thursday, the Dean of Yale College Jonathan Holloway wrote that he supported the original email about not choosing culturally insensitive costumes, according to the New York Times article. “We need always to be dedicated to fashioning a community that is mindful of the many traditions that make us who we are,” he wrote.

—Abby Patkin