Holidays and Seasons, Law Schools

NYU Law's Offensive Halloween Party

It seems some students at NYU Law are mad about the decorations at the annual Fall Ball.

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Have you heard the latest law school controversy? Seems some students at NYU Law are mad about the decorations at the annual Fall Ball.

Now I know that statement in and of itself seems silly, but there is a lot more to the issue than meets the eye. The decorations for the event included images of a man hanging, and the Mental Health Law and Justice Association took umbrage with the depiction of suicide. They reached out to school officials, and according to the Washington Square News, the school took those concerns to heart:

Michael Orey, the NYU School of Law spokesperson, acknowledged the inappropriate nature of certain decorations and confirmed that the law school’s administration would be meet[ing] with law students.

“We agree that some of the imagery at this year’s event was inappropriate and it won’t be used again,” Orey said. “Our dean of students is always accessible for members of our student community to raise concerns and will be meeting with those who did so in this matter.”

But there is still some measure of debate surrounding the issue in the ATL offices. Specifically, were the upset students making a mountain out of a molehill or were their concerns justified?

KATHRYN: I think the students have a point. To be fair, when I first heard that people were upset about images of hanging I immediately thought the school spruced up the event with some lynchings, which would have been super f**ked up. But even the less blatantly offensive version is still problematic AF.

As the Mental Health Law and Justice Association notes in its open letter on the issue, suicide is the second leading cause of death on college campuses. Mental health issues in general are also a giant issue in the legal profession, with lawyers being 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than other employed persons.

To do a little preemption, some may argue that lots of uncomfortable material is covered as part of higher education. That is true enough, but triggering topics or warnings about them in a classroom environment are not the same as law students attending a party being triggered by traumatic imagery. In a classroom setting, assumedly, there is an educational goal associated with investigating traumatic work, and the classroom environment should be set up in such a way as to facilitate difficult conversations about the subject matter. This is a law school event trying to get some cheap spooks out of a projection.

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This is also very different than images of vampires, monsters, ghosts or other Halloween decorations that might be scary. Plenty of people enjoy a good scare, and that’s not the issue here. None of those other things are epidemics on campuses. So don’t tell these students to just get over it; make the event fun for everyone.

JOE: Oh come now. Look, I’m much more sympathetic to the culture of “trigger warnings” than most people. Not that I’d ever brook excising important subject matter — like rape from a criminal law course — but most of the hubbub over “The Coddling of the American Mind” is unwarranted pearl-clutchery from folks who can’t see the benefit in (or are philosophically opposed to) tweaking their approach to life to achieve the modest threshold of not being an a**hole. Some people have been traumatized in life as hard as that may be to comprehend for those of us who successfully avoided it. Methods of education that rely on shock value deserve to be called out and mitigated where they can and students should at least be prepared where there’s no avoiding the lesson.

So it’s with some surprise that I find myself on the other side of this question. Without a doubt, mental health, depression, and suicide are important concerns for the legal profession. Indeed, just this week we lost a lawyer to suicide. That said — with the caveat that I have not seen these specific images — gallows imagery at Halloween does not warrant this response.

First of all, Halloween serves as its own trigger warning. For better or worse, the entire holiday revolves around death, usually violent death, and more usually violent death at the hands of mental illness — either explicitly (a “psychotic” killer) or implicitly (a witch or someone possessed — historical instances of misunderstood mental health issues). Anyone opting into a Halloween experience is opting into a celebration of misconstruing and stigmatizing mental health. Not that notice inoculates from offense, but it should gird people to expecting, contextualizing, and managing potentially unsettling images.

Second, the incidence of suicide in the context of Halloween is largely removed from the issue of depression. It’s not really fair to homogenize suicide. While “demonic possession” is — we know intellectually — a mental health issue, the scourge of suicide on campuses and among attorneys stems from issues like depression, substance abuse, and anxiety, all of which are a far cry from the Antichrist’s nanny declaring “look at me Damien, it’s all for you!” at his mental command.

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So while I’m generally sympathetic to avoiding unnecessary trauma, I’m much more compelled by the position of the other student cited in the article — that the discussion of mental health as a whole is far more valuable than policing any specific Halloween imagery:

“I think it’s far more detrimental when, say for example, political candidates spread misinformation or negative stigma around mental health-related issues,” [Seema] Chaudhari said. “I think most people, including myself, take Halloween fun at face value.”

Chaudhari added that the problem brought up by MHLJA allows for warranted discussion of mental health-related issues and how society handles them.

“I’m glad that this issue is up for discussion, as this can serve as an opportunity for opening a dialogue about the dark history of mental health care,” Chaudhari said.

So who has the right end of this issue?

Offensive images at Fall Ball prompt law student backlash [Washington Square News]

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