phantomllama 18 hours, 22 minutes ago
So I'm honestly supposed to take a group called the 'Y Syndicate' seriously? It sounds like a counselling network for those rejected by a cappella.
As River Tam points out, these people have so far shown a commitment to restricting student discourse by disrupting a legitimately organised debate. Forgive me if I don't confer much respect on their further babblings.
(Also, how on earth is Yale meant to help the New Haven
·
theantiyale 8 hours, 3 minutes ago
Yale students to revive Winchester Arms?
·
theantiyale 7 hours, 56
minutes ago
YES.
That's it.
Yale will do the University
of
Colorado
Every Yale student will
pledge to bring a
Winchester
to
every class they
attend.
pledge to bring a
to
every class they
attend.
Let's rename Sterling
Winchester Cathedral.
Winchester Cathedral.
On March 15, 2011, while most of Yale’s
undergraduate students took a respite from campus over the course of spring
break, 16 students and alumni filed a federal Title IX complaint against the
University, launching Yale to the forefront of national discourse and opening
up an ongoing conversation about the University’s modus operandi.
In the weeks and months to come, a handful
of Title IX complainants went public about their involvement in the action.
To some Yalies, these individuals seemed to
have taken a step out of the bounds of acceptable criticism — they had gone too
far, been too vocal.
They needed to tone it down.
“I heard that a lot, even from friends who
were supportive: ‘Couldn’t you have done this in a quieter way?’” said
Alexandra Brodsky ’12, one of the complainants.
Brodsky is skeptical of such calls for a
less public effort more sympathetic to Yale’s reputation. She points out that
the complaint was seen as “a last resort after years and years of student calls
for changes” and that if the University had handled the Title IX issue well, it
could have clearly shown that it cared about the problem and student concerns.
“To be honest, I care more about students
not getting raped than I do about the University’s reputation,” Brodsky told
me, her tone firm over the phone.
To ask whether her peers agreed with that
prioritization might seem ludicrous. But to question how they perceived her
methods is to look at how willing they are, how willing we are, to hear
negative things about an institution we worked hard to get into, elected to
join — and continue to benefit from.
That question is particularly salient now,
as Yale students become increasingly willing to criticize how the University is
run. Over the course of the last few weeks, the newly formed Y Syndicate has
encouraged students to take a more active role in administrative decisions —
and especially to fight for a voice on the search committee that will select
the successor to University President Richard Levin. This Thursday, the
activist group Students Unite Now sent a campus-wide email echoing that
sentiment.
“Only by joining together can we ensure that
the Yale Corporation will listen,” the email read.
The students aligning themselves with these
and other movements are joining a group of activists already well aware that
their public stances put them in a challenging position. Sarah Cox ’14, a SUN
leader, said the chief difficulty lies in publicly faulting a University that
most students love in an a near-unconditional way.
“I think there is very much a sense of
gratitude towards Yale,” she said. “Both gratitude and loyalty to the
institution, which I think in some cases is actually a real block for people in
terms of being able to critique what’s going on.”
Another SUN member, Y Syndicate co-founder
Elias Kleinbock ’14, said that critically examining Yale often feels like
“cruelly biting the hand that feeds.” Speaking softly and rapidly, he adds:
“Hopefully, it’s not cruel. I want Yale to live up to its own values.”
To activists, that generally means the
principle of free speech and thought, one some argue has been sacrificed on the
altar of image-consciousness. Restrictions on freedom of speech at Yale-NUS are
an issue; limited channels for students to communicate with administrators are
cited as problematic.
Kleinbock said he feels inspired by what he
sees as Yale’s original message. For other Yale undergraduates, myriad issues
inspire activism, whether it’s supporting workers in dining halls or reducing
the student income contribution to Yale’s financial aid plans. And even as they
work to change the system that enacts these policies, these students take
classes, catch up on readings and rush to their deans’ offices to turn in their
schedules. They are working to change the world, but not full-time.
“I think that it’s really important for me
to pay my dues to New Haven by providing services to the people whom the
University-hospital economy is screwing over … I say, ‘Yale, you have not
really helped to bring back manufacturing jobs to New Haven or gotten New Haven
people to do your jobs — I’m going to make up for that and do what you should
be doing,” says Amalia Horan Skilton ’13, a veteran of Eli involvement in the
city through her former roles as Ward 1 Democratic Committee co-chair and
co-director of the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project. “But I don’t at
any of those times make the argument that I am not a Yale student — I spend 60
hours a week going to be class, labs and libraries. That is my job in the same
way that other peoples’ jobs are 9-5. You can’t dis-identify with that and be
very honest.”
Maintaining that student identity opens Yale
students engaged in activism up to a host of concerns. They are at once
associated with this institution and yet cynical about its motives and actions,
desperate to mobilize and help their peers but vulnerable to their judgments.
They form communities that they find supportive but run the risk of being
typecast and excluded. They feel they have to work hard to even justify their
views in the first place.
After all, it’s not easy being critical.
Kleinbock was motivated to help start the Y
Syndicate by anger. He was “pissed off,” he said, “seeing stories about
students in Quebec
Activists suggest that Yalies rarely go this
far in part because they feel indebted to Yale. On average, students receive
$37,500 from the University, part of its commitment to meet every student’s demonstrated
financial need.
Alejandro Gutierrez ’13, a current SUN
leader, said he was initially apprehensive about joining a financial aid reform
movement spearheaded by SUN’s predecessor, the Undergraduate Organizing
Committee, for precisely this reason. As a student on full financial aid,
Gutierrez said, he did not want to criticize the system that in many ways
enabled his enrollment. He decided to join only after conversations with SUN
activists convinced him of the adverse effects of Yale’s student income
contribution policy, which asks students on financial aid to earn $3,000 per
year to pay toward their schooling.
“It’s completely valid to say, ‘Why do you
expect me to pay $3,000 in the summer when the things you want me to do to
advance my intellectual development are not going to make me that much money?’”
Skilton said.
In joining the movement, Gutierrez said he
discovered a group of students who could cut through what he sees as a
Yale-promoted narrative that actively discourages student critique.
“A lot of Yale students are kind of
spoon-fed this narrative of Yale that is very specific: that it fosters your
growth and gives you so many opportunities, things that force you to think that
you should be extremely grateful to Yale,” he said. “Which is true. I am very
grateful. Without Yale’s help, I’d be back home at community college.”
Instead, he came here, joining a community
where many feel — as he once did — that they are bound to their institution due
to what a number of activists call a “Mother Yale” complex. But Kenneth Reveiz
’12, a former UOC activist and the co-founder of the People’s Art Collective of
New Haven
Critiquing the institution can fall within
that realm. And, Brodsky said, exposing Yale’s flaws can be a way of displaying
love for the University.
“While the Title IX [complaint] was
obviously asking the administration to change its policies, I never understood
that as being against Yale,” she said. “I saw that as being for Yale.”
This may be an attitude that current
students find difficult to adopt because, according to some activists, Yale’s
approach to education discourages critical thoughts and actions.
“What I quickly realized [after arriving
here] is that Yale as an institution isn’t trying to cultivate serious
intellectual, critical thinkers — it is trying to cultivate leaders,” said Matt
Shafer ’13, a former UOC member and activist with the now-defunct group
Christians for Social Justice. “The ethos of public leadership is at odds with
the kind of social critique.”
Now, Shafer added, he sees that the
philosophy most Yalies subscribe to is a form of what he calls ‘establishment
liberalism.’
With less radical thought present in the
campus conversation, though, those who seek to change social structures and
systems more aggressively can begin to feel alone and out of place.
Seated at the People’s Art Collective blocks
away from Yale’s campus, Reveiz reminisced about his time at Yale.
“People become insanely depressed for
feeling like they don’t belong,” he said.
Feeling different can manifest itself in a
range of decisions for activists at Yale, from finding a community that works,
be it on or off campus, to considering leaving the school entirely.
SUN leader Cox, for instance, took last
semester off to live and work in New
Haven
“I have a hard time being here,” Cox said.
“It was a debate I had with myself, whether to transfer to UNC. I feel a lot of
guilt going to a private school when I believe in public schools.”
After giving the matter thought, Cox came to
sympathize with a different view, one rooted, she said, in a sense that to
leave Yale without tackling the problems she’d identified here would be
“letting [herself] off the hook.” Had she not felt at home in a community of
students committed to questioning the institution, though, Cox said staying
would have been “impossible.”
Reveiz emphasized that students who find
Yale’s policies problematic must make an effort to find these sympathetic
communities as soon as possible, lest they face the kind of political isolation
he said he felt during much of his time here.
That sense is rooted in a feeling that
Yalies are reluctant to think about those whose loss their privilege is based
in, to use their education to tackle social issues, which makes the
conversations some undergraduates would like to have simply impossible on
campus.
For Cox and Nia Holston ’14, the current
Ward 1 co-chair and political action chair for the Black Student Alliance at
Yale, that support came in the form of a guide: LaTisha Campbell ’12.
“She was the political action chair before
me,” Holston said. “I met her at Bulldog Days
and told her what I was interested in. She began almost grooming me to take
over her role.”
This sort of guidance is common, Holston added, helping current activists pass on their
ideas and values to future ones.
At the same time, reaching out only to
likely supporters can result in what a number of student activists said they
saw as a larger problem within the left, one that has manifested itself on a
smaller scale within Yale organizations: a lack of self-critique and
self-awareness.
“The UOC had this sort of attitude of a
group of people who finally found each other after moments of, ‘Are we the only
people at Yale, am I the only person at Yale [who thinks in a certain way]?’”
Ben Crosby ’14, Holston ’s co-chair on the Ward
1 Democratic Committee, said. “There was a certain circling-the-wagons approach
to a lot of the things we did, which ultimately limited our effectiveness.”
Shafer said the inability of the UOC to
criticize itself from within contributed to the frustration he personally felt
with the organization — though he harked back to a Yalie fix-it mindset by
tacking on that it was “a failing on his part to stay within it and try to fix
it.”
In a New Journal profile of SUN, the UOC’s
new incarnation, UOC member Mac Herring ’12 said that she saw the organization
as more concerned with effecting change than boosting its numbers.
SUN, though, seems more likely to target both
goals. The organization has been surveying undergraduate students across
residential colleges since the spring, sending volunteers to knock on doors and
ask individuals — and even whole suites — to respond to a survey that presented
facts students may not have known about the University’s policies.
Crosby, one of the leaders of the new group,
summed up his philosophy about the direction he’d like to take compared to that
of the UOC: “It is very easy to say that Yale students are apathetic — that’s
the easy thing to say — [but] for me, the response to that cannot be, ‘So, I’m
just going to sit in my little activist corner.’
“It has to be going out knocking on doors
and talking to Yalies who don’t identify as leftists or activists.”
Will the student body be more receptive
today than activists have perceived them to be in the past?
Thinking back to his experience with the
Ward 1 campaign of now-Alderwoman Sarah Eidelson ’12, Crosby
said he believes so. He said the number of students who chose to vote in that
local government election broke all records he’s previously seen — and, in some
way, justified a shift towards the methods the campaign asked its activists to
use, which focused more heavily on interpersonal relationships and
conversations than outright demands to support a cause.
“Having spoken to thousands of students,”
Eidelson said, “I found that students by and large wanted to be more connected
to New Haven
Activists even beyond the SUN platform seem
largely optimistic that reaching out to more Yalies could improve their
efficacy and bring more students into the fold, making critique less of an
outsider move and more central to the way students here think.
For instance, the case the Y Syndicate has been
making for increased student involvement in the presidential search, through
emails and social networks, has piqued Yalie curiosity.
Indeed, this moment might be one of the most
clear opportunities for activists to demand that Elis
“This presidential search is a great way for
[activists] to say, ‘Look, you are not being represented — that is a physically
demonstrable fact. You are not having a voice in perhaps the first important decision
for the University you’re lending your name to and that’s lending its name to
you for the rest of your life,’” said Kleinbock.
If that message doesn’t get through, it
seems difficult to imagine what would.
Meanwhile, one’s ability to be at once a Yalie
and an activist in the real world is growing, with recent progressive
developments in New Haven, such as the increase in labor representation on the
Board of Aldermen in last fall’s elections and the establishment of the
activist umbrella organization New Haven Rising this summer, exciting the
socially conscious on our campus.
Cox said that the fact the “fight is so
right” in the city at present was a major deterrent to her leaving Yale.
“New
Haven
Both Cox and Crosby have taken semesters off
to work with unions in New Haven New Haven
But engagement with the city in that form
reminds Yalies, at the same time, of the privilege they are associated with in
the city, and even the wider world.
“Around New Haven
For Crosby ,
the key to engagement with those aware of his enrollment at the University was
to develop the sort of relationships that enabled city residents with whom he
was working to “call [him] out … if [he] was not being sufficiently aware of
[his] privilege.”
Disassociating oneself from that privilege
is integral, Skilton said.
“What I personally feel compelled to do is,
when in conversation with someone who isn’t a Yale student, … disidentify with
the wealth of Yale,” she added. “I feel the need to tell people explicitly that
not everyone at Yale is rich — I don’t want people to assume that the typical
Yale student is New York
In the city, being a Yale student means
being associated with memories of urban planning gone wrong, grievances from
the past and divisions of which everything from Yale’s freshman orientation to
New Haveners’ responses to Yale police emails remind us.
On campus, being a critic means taking a
look at where one stands, how one benefits and what one would change.
At no point, though, does the Yale student
brand of activism incorporate comfort with the status quo or tradition for
tradition’s sake.
“I feel zero need to identify with Yale,”
Skilton said. “I want Yale to look more like me.”
Comments
Sara 1 day, 22 hours
ago
It's questionable how
"progressive" the increase in labor representation on the Board of
Aldermen in last fall’s elections is.
The unions are almost entirely governed by,
and primarily represent, suburban middle-class homeowners. In many ways their
needs are in conflict with the real needs of our lowest-income neighborhoods.
Hopefully Yale students can help mediate
those conflicts, but when a union asks for free parking for its employees, and
more pollution and car trips that result, the low-income neighbors are rarely
on the winning side and rarely have the political power to stop it. Unions are
interested in increasing wages and benefits for their own members (enabling
them to move out to the suburbs, get free parking, or send their kids to
private schools, if they have not already), not necessarily in creating
equitable economic growth within New Haven that can result in healthier
neighborhoods for all people, decreased income inequality, better urban schools
for immigrants, and better opportunities for the majority of workers who are
not part of the union.
·
Reply ↵
yalieForASaneNH 1 day, 21 hours
ago
This is the most powerful, rich, and moving
article I've ever read in the YDN. And so timely. Thank you to the author and
to these courageous, dedicated activists who care so much about making both
Yale and New Haven New Haven
·
Reply ↵
yayasisterhood 1 day, 15 hours
ago
·
Reply ↵
Dancer 1 day, 12 hours
ago
Yale is one of the institutions that hones
replacements for the 1%. The 1% cannot reproduce itself and needs immigrants.
Since the immigrants cannot afford Yale, Yale affords them help.
Another thing Yale does is to recreate the universe in the image of the 1%. It’s a pretty big universe, no doubt, but intentionally limited. The goal is to ensure that students go through Yale fully believing they are in touch with the whole universe, not a circumscribed one. Even as it provides a protective and comfortable womb for its students to inhabit Yale encourages its students to touch in some fashion the lives of the large number of less fortunate members of the New Haven Most importantly, the graduate should avoid asking why in New Haven and its impoverished sister cities throughout the very rich state of Connecticut
·
Reply ↵
River_Tam 1 day, 11 hours
ago
So, what? Is Y Syndicate the new
Undergraduate Organizing Committee? It feels like there's a new one of these
'protest' groups every few years, and they're always guillotines in want of a
neck.
·
Reply ↵
dawz 1 day, 8 hours
ago
You think people are complaining for the
sake of complaining? As another extracurricular?
·
Reply ↵
River_Tam 1 day, 7 hours
ago
Er... sort of. They've decided they hate
"the man", and will complain about pretty much anything "the
man" does or does not do. These are the same clowns who, to stop the
"spectacle" of Rick Santorum speaking his (mainstream in America
·
Reply ↵
theantiyale 19 hours, 58
minutes ago
"Both gratitude and loyalty to the
institution, which I think in some cases is actually a real block for people in
terms of being able to critique what’s going on.”
To be honest, Since I graduated (M.Div. '80)
Yale did unintentionally buy my silence--even as editor of "Holy Smoke
(Opinionation from Holy Hill)" for 28 years because they were so generous
to me---as to all students. One exception: 60 Minutes, 1984.
I didn't want to bite the hand that had fed
me.
Then
in 2008, I had half a kidney removed for cancer. I would be silent no more,
should I survive, said I. Thus in 2009 Holy Smokehttp://holysmoke2011.blogspot.com/ was revived in a new incarnation, The
Anti-Yale http://theantiyale.blogspot.com , and 732 posts and 152,026 views
later it remains unsilenced.
I see now that, far from biting the hand
that fed me, I am grabbing on to it so it won't slip into the fiery furnace of
Mercantilia, below.
PK
·
Reply ↵
theantiyale 19 hours, 50
minutes ago
One exception: 60 Minutes, 1984.
·
Reply ↵
phantomllama 18 hours, 22
minutes ago
So I'm honestly supposed to take a group
called the 'Y Syndicate' seriously? It sounds like a counselling network for
those rejected by a cappella.
As River Tam points out, these people have
so far shown a commitment to restricting student discourse by disrupting a
legitimately organised debate. Forgive me if I don't confer much respect on
their further babblings.
(Also, how on earth is Yale meant to help
the New Haven
·
Reply ↵
theantiyale 8 hours, 3
minutes ago
Yale students to revive Winchester Arms?
·
Reply ↵
theantiyale 7 hours, 56
minutes ago
YES.
That's it.
Yale will do the University of Colorado
Every Yale student will pledge to bring a Winchester
Let's rename Sterling
