An Interesting Detail about Erika Christakis

Back in October, there was an incident, which I wrote about at the time, in which a professor at Yale was accused of racism for suggesting, in her capacity as an assistant faculty in a residence that the school, that students are capable of making their own decisions regarding Halloween costumes and that it is not helpful towards their development as responsible adults for the young adult students to have older adult school administrators lay down strict costume codes.

Today, there was an article in The New York Times about what has happened to her since. In the article, there was a detail about her past.

A. Douglas Stone, a professor of applied physics who helped rally faculty support, said he was embarrassed that Ms. Christakis — who once worked in the public health field with subsistence farmers in Africa and with drug addicts — would be “a poster child for insensitivity.”

Christakis is not teaching this semester and her husband, Nicholas Christakis, “a physician and sociologist known for his theory of “social contagion,” or how social networks spread behavior, announced that he was taking a sabbatical this term.”

The article concludes that Christakis is considering returning to an early childhood classroom.