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Controversial Yale Professor Receives School's Highest Honor

Paul Schnaittacher
/
Wikimedia Commons

A Yale professor who was at the center of a debate about free speech on campus has been awarded the school’s highest honor.

Yale’s President and Trustees have awarded Nicholas Christakis the Sterling Professorship.

Christakis is a sociology scholar at Yale. He and his wife, Erika, resigned from their posts as leaders of Silliman Residential College a few years ago. Nicholas kept his role as professor.

The Christakises made headlines after multicultural groups on campus protested them for fostering a racist environment in 2015. It was in response to a campus-wide email Erika sent. She said students should be allowed to wear culturally insensitive Halloween costumes.

Yale announced Nicholas Christakis’s Sterling Professorship in a press release during summer break last month.

Cassandra Basler, a former senior editor at WSHU, came to the station by way of Columbia Journalism School in New York City. When she's not reporting on wealth and poverty, she's writing about food and family.