Kirchick for Yale

Yale University last week gave sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis a Sterling professorship, the school’s most prestigious academic honor. It was richly deserved — and a slap at the school’s PC mob.

Christakis is a world-class scholar whose research connects the fields of public health, network science and biosociology. But he was also driven off campus back in 2015 after standing up for his wife, Erika, then another Yale prof, when she dared publicly question the need for school administrators to police Halloween costumes.

Her e-mail to the students of the dorm her husband was presiding over prompted a mob of radicals to confront Nicolas with a loud and rude lecture on Correct Thought. Video of the students’ shocking behavior went viral; protests rocked the campus for weeks — and the school’s president and much of the faculty sided with the PC goons, even giving two of the ringleaders special honors when they graduated this past spring.

Both Christakises quit their positions at the dorm at year’s end, and Erica left Yale altogether. By the way: They’d also stood up for free expression years earlier at Harvard, defending minority students when the administration tried to penalize them for using satire to attack that school’s elite “finals clubs.”

The Yale administration’s disgusting behavior in this and other cases has prompted journalist Jamie Kirchick (a sometime contributor to these pages) to mount an insurgent campaign for an alumni seat on the school’s board. He’s running expressly to defend free speech on the campus.

Kirchick, who’s now on a petition drive to make it onto the ballot, deserves the support of all Yale alums. He’s a proud liberal, a contributor to the Daily Beast and Tablet as well as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and 2007 winner of the Journalist of the Year Award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

It’s an uphill battle: Yale, like other Ivies, has designed the election system to favor yes-men and -women who won’t rock the boat. Indeed, while we happily cheer this honor for Nicholas Christakis, we can’t help but suspect that it’s intended to take some air out of Kirchick’s campaign.

After all, one of his minor planks is to reduce the administrative bloat that’s driven tuition into the stratosphere.