Below please find my Why I Was a Social Pariah at Yale and Why the Yale Administration Was Trying to Expel Me for the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax YouTube Channel Video and Transcript. Many persons have requested transcripts of my videos, and I will provide them here, especially the videos of my full, detailed account of what really happened during the now notorious Living or Napping While Black incident at Yale, which was actually a hate crime hoax, and the Yale Administration and the Yale Campus Police were complicit.
Here is the my Why I Was a Social Pariah at Yale and Why the Yale Administration Was Trying to Expel Me for the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax YouTube Channel Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7v-1h2C6Ls
Here is the transcript thereof:
Hi. This is Sarah Braasch. Welcome or welcome back to my channel.
Today, I am going to talk about why I was a social pariah on campus at Yale, and why the Yale Administration was looking for any reason to expel me, and to destroy my life and discredit my work.
I was widely despised on campus, including by the Yale Administration. You’d think I’d be used to being socially ostracized, after having grown up in the misogynistic religious cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a cult from which I walked away at 17 with nothing and no one, but it was a very difficult time for me. I ended up having to seek help at the Mental Health Clinic at the Student Health Center on Yale’s campus. I was on psychotropic medication for the next couple of years, including anti-psychotic medication, a point of which much was made by my attackers and the Yale Administration, who illegally fed my personal information to my attackers.
In the Spring of 2015, during my first year in the PhD Program in Philosophy at Yale, our department was undergoing a search for a tenure track Assistant Professor position. I actually hadn’t been much involved.
I found out that some of the graduate students had been trolling online for dirt on the job candidates. Someone found some years old comments that one of the job candidates had made regarding homosexuality. I believe that these comments were made on explicitly Christian community forums. More or less, the comments expressed his adherence to Christian doctrine on all matters, which he understood to include Biblical scripture. He then said that he understood Biblical scripture to include a prohibition on sodomy, which he understood as including a prohibition on homosexual sex. That’s it.
These years old online comments were interpreted as anti-LGBTQ hate speech by many of the graduate students. They decided that they were going to wage a campaign to make sure that this particular job candidate (our only POC job candidate) would not, under any conditions, get the Assistant Professor job. I tried to speak reason and common sense to them. I told them that, arguably, they were part of the hiring process, and that they were wading into legally dangerous waters. I told them that it is a violation of federal civil rights law to discriminate on the basis of religion, and that, arguably, this job candidate had done little more than express his adherence to Biblical scripture as Christian doctrine. I told them that the university has a commitment to free speech and academic freedom, which they were arguably violating. I told them that we’re talking about someone who had already spent years in academia teaching at an elite institution. He has an established history of professional behavior. I told them to speak with a trusted faculty member about their concerns, if they felt like they needed to do so, but to leave it to the faculty to handle it.
I was immediately denounced as anti-LGBTQ. My legal competence was disparaged. My philosophical competence was disparaged. My character was disparaged and maligned.
Then, they stated that they were planning to disrupt the job candidate’s job talk with a protest with rainbow colored wigs and rainbow t-shirts and flags, etc.
I put my foot down. I said, in no uncertain terms, that I would not allow them to do this.
I went to a trusted faculty member. The other graduate students spoke to faculty. Emails were sent. At some point someone leaked the controversy to a popular philosophy blog.
I was accused of having been the one to leak the information to the philosophy blog. It wasn’t me. I was trying to protect the reputation of the Philosophy Department and Yale. I never would have done so.
Department meetings were held. People denied having done things and said things that they had done and said. They tried to make this about me having done something wrong, me being anti-LGBTQ when I’m nothing of the sort, me having violated their privacy by leaking information to the philosophy blog when I had done nothing of the kind. Then, we had a meeting with just the philosophy graduate students that ended with people crying (myself included) and people running out of the room, because I was allegedly making anti-LGBTQ statements (I wasn’t.).
There was another get together planned with just the graduate students to clear the air and to try to repair our community and move forward. I had absolutely no intention of going. I figured it would devolve into a Sarah bashing session. A couple of the faculty members talked me into going. They assured me that the other graduate students were sincere in wanting to mend fences. It was even worse than I had feared. It was me sitting in the center of a circle while 20 or so graduate students took turns berating me and telling me how stupid and evil I am. I stood firm to the end. I tried, repeatedly, to explain my profound commitment to civil libertarianism and freedom of expression, including religious expression, despite my strident anti-religion views. I was in tears and shaking by the end. The graduate students stormed out of the room, leaving me there alone, devastated. That was the last time most of them ever spoke to me.
I immediately became persona non grata amongst the graduate students in the Philosophy Department and beyond. For the next three years, most of the graduate students wouldn’t speak to me. They wouldn’t look at me except to glare at me. They would literally get up and leave a room if I entered it.
It was an incredibly difficult and painful time for me. I struggled with the social ostracization.
It wasn’t so much the social ostracization itself, because, as we all know, I’m quite used to being a social pariah, it was the prodigious disappointment.
When I found out on the very last possible day, April 15th, 2014, that I had been accepted to Yale, I lied down on the floor in the fetal position and cried tears of joy and relief. I was beyond thrilled. I had the highest expectations for my life and academic career after that point.
And, to have all of those hopes and expectations dashed, to be a social outcast once more, to know that my Yale experience was going to be painful and difficult, when I had hoped for camaraderie and collegiality, was more than I could bear. I was devastated. I fell apart from the shock and the disappointment.
I needed support, and I had no choice but to seek help at the Mental Health Clinic at the Student Health Center. I was treated there for the next two years or so, including with the use of psychotropic and anti-psychotic medication. I don’t think I would have been able to get thru the next couple of years without this assistance.
I was also supported by the faculty. They stood by me through the entire nightmare. In the character letters that the faculty wrote on my behalf recently, after the latest debacle, they wrote that they hoped that they would have the same courage and integrity that I showed when similarly tested. Nothing has made me prouder.
I was later made aware that the graduate students had not been satisfied with merely socially ousting me from the department and making my life a living hell. They wanted me expelled. They went to the Administration. This is what I was told.
I was also made to believe that the only reason why I wasn’t disciplined is because, yet again, the faculty stood up for me.
I am under no illusions about the fact that many of the graduate students were thrilled to see my life and career destroyed and to see me have to flee campus while being taunted by a mob. I’m sure that nothing could have made them happier.
I’m sure that many of the graduate students, those still at Yale and those who have moved on, encouraged the moral outrage mob, online or otherwise, fanning the outrage flames that burned my life to the ground.
I am also under no illusions that the Administration was positively thrilled when I was accused of a racist hate crime this past Spring. I believe that they jumped at the chance to publicly brand me a racist, thereby destroying my life and discrediting my work.
After the nightmare that I have endured, if I had to do it all over again, would I stand up for the federal civil rights of our only POC job candidate? Knowing how my life would be destroyed as a result?
In a heartbeat. I am a profoundly committed civil libertarian. I can only live a life of integrity. My commitment to free speech is principled. Unless you stand up for everyone’s right to express themselves, even to express ideas with which you could not disagree more, then you don’t believe in free speech.
This is why my more religious friends were the first ones to stand up for me. This is why they stood by my side throughout this nightmare, despite my egregious anti religion rhetoric of the past.
They knew I would do it for them, in a heartbeat, without hesitation, no matter the personal cost.
Because they had seen me do it. They had seen me risk my career, risk everything, to stand up for a stranger’s federal civil rights, including his freedom of religious expression rights.
If you wish to support me, as I seek justice, it would mean the world to me. Here are my PayPalMe and GoFundMe links.
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