TW: This piece discusses themes of sexual assault.
At 8 o’clock sharp the night after Halloween, a crowd began to gather on Yale’s Cross Campus. Though the crowd covered the space between the north and south courts of Berkeley College, it was surprisingly quiet for such a large group. People greeted friends with hugs and whispers, but there were no cheers or slaps on the back. Everyone could sense that this was a solemn affair.
The rally was Yale’s chapter of Take Back the Night, a nationwide protest against campus rape. The rally was also simultaneously taking place on 102 other college campuses, even despite timezone differences. As we stood on the grass and waited for the rally to commence, I glanced around me, spotting a few familiar faces and many others whom I didn’t recognize. One organizer wove through the crowd, offering some cardboard signs to those who didn’t already have them. “No essays for SA,” one sign read, referring to the 2024 drugging and gang-rape case at Cornell University that student reporters at the Cornell Sun brought to light this September, in which the university invited the Chi Phi fraternity members involved to write reflection papers to mitigate the consequences they faced.
Though the public revelation of the Cornell gang-rape was the catalyst for the rally, Take Back the Night didn’t just focus on the Cornell case but took a broader stance against campus rape culture as a whole. For the Yale chapter, this meant speaking out against recent changes that the university made to programs that support survivors and inform students in learning about consent and sexual health, moves that organizers saw as intending to appease the Trump administration. As Elena Serpas, PC ’27 explained, the CCE program, one of two such programs that host informative workshops for first-years, was cut in half this semester: two of the original four full-time staff were laid off, and the number of student CCEs decreased from 60 last year to 28 this year. Furthermore, the acronym’s meaning had quietly shifted from “Communication and Consent Educators” to “Campus Community Educators” on the program’s official Instagram account. Though an old, empty website still displays the old name on its header, the Instagram account is one of the main ways that current students learn about the program’s events. Thus, the name change on Instagram effectively obscures the program’s originally explicit focus on promoting sexual consent and healthy relationship dynamics for the people who need the information most. When Serpas, herself a CCE, asked if anyone had heard about any of these changes, only one or two hands in the crowd of about 150 people went up.
The first time I noticed the acronym’s change was not at that exact moment, but the night before. I had been in the back of Woolsey Hall, attending the Yale Symphony Orchestra’s annual Halloween show. The show included a student-made silent film, titled “The Performance,” accompanied by a combination of classical and pop music performed by the orchestra. “The Performance” is centered around three Yale prefrosh, Atlas (Grady Flinn, BF ’29), Josh (Yuvin Kang, BK ’29), and Layla (Sasha Tarassenko, MC ’27), who find themselves increasingly disturbed by the unsettling behavior of their Bulldog Days hosts. Early on in the film, the three prefrosh meet up with Layla’s friend from high school, a CCE named Eric (Eric Zhang, BR ’27), who points to the acronym on his shirt and refers to himself as a “Campus Community Educator.” When I read this line of the dialogue on screen, I immediately turned to my friend, a fellow senior, sitting next to me.
“Wait, didn’t one of the Cs in CCE stand for ‘consent?’”
“Oh huh, I don’t know,” he whispered back. “Maybe?”
The truth is, many Yale undergrads, myself included, don’t really stay engaged with the happenings of the CCE program beyond the Myth of Miscommunication workshop and bystander intervention training for first-years. And by senior year, it had been a long time since I had discussed anything with my entire FroCo group, let alone how sexual assault cannot be justified by claims of “unclear” communication or misunderstanding. My most recent recollection of anything related to consent and sexual health programs on campus was from a conversation with a friend who is a current FroCo. Over dinner, he offhandedly mentioned that the Community Health Educators (CHEs), whose workshops supplement those of the CCEs, recently discontinued the condom rolling demonstration. At the time, I hadn’t thought much of it.
Watching “The Performance” unfold into a full-blown horror film in the darkness of Woolsey, my stomach turned. As a whole, “The Performance” is a story deeply intertwined with the violation of consent and bodily autonomy. Over the course of the film, it is revealed that the three Bulldog Days hosts are actually Harvard students working for Halantir (a portmanteau of Harvard and Palantir), an AI company looking to harvest young creatives’ talent to train their model to make music. Noticing Atlas’s interest and proficiency in coding, one of the hosts, Naomi (Elan Jiang, DC ’28), attempts to seduce the high school senior and offers him a board position in her AI club to convince him to help her complete the model, even threatening to revoke her offer when he uncovers the plot and expresses hesitation. Meanwhile, Beck (Jacob Leshnower, GH ’27) and Bella (Amanda Wu, MC ’28) incapacitate Josh and Layla by providing them with alcohol, then prepare to drill holes in their necks to plant chips in their brains. Fortunately, Atlas runs away from Naomi and rescues Josh and Layla just in time. After a long chase sequence, the three escape to safety with the help of a YDN photographer (Juliette Mandelbrot, MY ’28) and a Dramat board member (Eleanor Ohm, TC ’27). Finally, Eric arrives on the scene, channeling Nick Fury to the tune of the main theme of The Avengers. When Layla asks him how he knew where to find them, he replies, “I’m a C-C-motherfuckin’-E.”
Despite the ensuing thunderous applause, something still felt wrong. I thought back to the acronym and shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Had the meaning of the acronym changed, or did both my friend and I just remember incorrectly?
At Take Back the Night, I realized that this was no Mandela Effect after all. The program’s name had been rewritten right under our noses.
Among the opening speakers of Take Back the Night was Rod Ferguson, the faculty advisor for the Yale Women’s Collective and a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies. In his speech, he told the story of the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist lesbian organization that was active in Boston, Massachusetts in the mid- to late-70s. In response to the Roxbury murders—the 1979 murders of twelve Black women and one white woman that went largely ignored by police and the press—the Combahee River Collective created informational pamphlets and organized self-defense classes. Ferguson highlighted the activism of the collective as evidence that when the system in place fails to protect people and ignores their concerns, it is up to us as a community to realize the future we wish to see and keep each other safe.
After the speeches, we made our way from Cross Campus to High Street. There, we crossed the street and took a lap around Old Campus, the organizers leading call-and-response chants. “Show me what community looks like!” Serpas shouted through a megaphone. “This is what community looks like!” we cheered back. We ended our march outside Sterling. By the Women’s Table, we reflected on our visions for a culture of consent and sexual respect, writing our thoughts down on sticky notes and placing them on the sculpture, which architect Maya Lin had designed to bear witness to the exclusion, then gradual inclusion of women in the Yale community.
As the rally gradually dispersed, I found myself thinking back to “The Performance.” In the film, no one from the Yale administration steps in to save the day, and although the figure representing the CCE program is heralded with heroic fanfare, it is unnamed students who stand up for what is right. Speaking with David Stolyarov, BR ’28, the screenwriter of “The Performance” and a CCE himself, I learned that leaving the YDN photographer and Dramat board member unnamed was intentional.
“I kept those characters unnamed so that you could imagine yourself in that situation,” he explained. Later in the conversation, he said, “When someone tries to take away agency over your body and your desires, it’s up to us to support each other in collectively protecting that, in looking out for each other.”
Ultimately, we are the people who make up the Yale community and determine our campus’s culture. No matter what programs continue to be gutted, nothing can take that away from us.