This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to Life and Arts with Dominic Green for Spectator USA.

Hello, I'm Dominic Green. I'm Dominic Green.

I'm Culture Editor for Spectator USA, and welcome to our weekly arts and culture podcast.

My guest this week is Jamie Kirchik, is a journalist, author of The End of Europe,

and he's also running for the Board of Trustees of Yale University.

Jamie, hello.

Hi, how are you?

I'm very well. You're in the Czech Republic.

Yeah, I'm on a book tour because a book I wrote called The End of Europe has come out in Czech.

Right. How is Europe ending?

It's still got a couple of years left, I hope.

I hope so. The paperback is on its way. Now, you're also running a campaign to enter the Board of Trustees of Yale University. Now, often this sort of thing, I assume, people do at the end of a glorious career rather than in the middle.

What drives you to do this?

Well, there's been a series of events at my alma mater that have been quite disturbing from a perspective of those of us who care about free speech and intellectual diversity. I think the biggest one

was an incident that gained quite a bit of international infamy in 2015 and regarded an email

that was sent by the administration informing students as to what Halloween costumes they should avoid

wearing. And this was in the absence of any real incidents of, you know, racist Halloween

costumes at Yale was sort of a unnecessary patronizing administrative fiat, basically. And it led

one professor named Erica Christakis to write an email to her students,

in which she basically said, look, I think you're all adults. And if you see one of your peers wearing a

costume that you find particularly troublesome or offensive, I trust you to either speak to them and tell them why you have

a problem with it or perhaps just ignore them. And for writing this email, she was denounced

...