The Yale conference on “Pinkwashing and Feminism in Palestine” was canceled — or so Yale had us believe.
The conference was canceled after its sponsor — the Yale Women’s Center, housed and funded by Yale — received unrelated discrimination complaints. How convenient, given mounting media attention.
After I co-authored a piece in these pages about the conference, Yale officials informed The Hill's editors that the conference had been canceled, to ensure the university would escape the limelight. But the student organizers announced soon thereafter that the conference would proceed anyway, only without the Women’s Center as its sponsor.
The organizers and conference speakers claimed that Palestinian voices had been suppressed, then proceeded to peddle Hamas propaganda to dozens of students for hours. Even though Yale academic departments and faculty sponsored the conference, the university sidestepped responsibility by removing the Women’s Center from the equation.
Retail stores might start asking Yale administrators for advice on window dressing.
On Saturday, I walked into a room of about 50 students, a third of them donning keffiyehs around their necks. A student walked up to the stage and thanked the following Yale organizations and academic departments for cosponsoring the conference: the Department of American Studies; the Department of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Yalies4Palestine; Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; and Faculty for........