For some time the number 2 traffic source for this blog has been a weirdass porntroll site.

of institutional instagram accounts and the spectrality of service work

Yale's instagram account (I blog about that place too much, I know) is mostly full of campus building porn and shots of well-dressed undergraduates doing things well-dressed undergraduates do.  Sometimes it features old photographs - one of a lone and bedraggled woman undergraduate walking across Old Campus on the first day of Yale's first year as a co-ed institution, one of a Yale swimming team in 1913.  These are intended to celebrate the university's history, to situate its past in a teleological narrative of progress, of increasing openness, of constantly embracing modernity and staking a claim on a proprietary futurity which all universities imagine to be their provenance.

Yesterday, though, I noticed this photograph, which someone had reshared on facebook.  If the accompanying text notes the time of the photograph (1937), it also clarifies why it has been included in Yale's promotional archive, which seems to exist primarily to sell prospective students on the university's grandeur, and, more salient here, to produce in alumni the sort of uncritically nostalgic affect which might motivate them to donate large sums of their investment banker salaries to the university's development fund.  Yale wants us to view this photograph through a fetishized relationship to the geography of the campus.  Which residential college is this?  Which entryway?  The alumni/ae are interpolated into a particular relationship to the university and its ideological and fiscal project through the invitation to recognize themselves and their own experiences of the university through old photographs of familiar spaces.

But labor creeps into the nostalgic gaze in this photograph -- I'm interested in this photograph because it's the only one on their page which depicts a Yale worker - the bearded man mowing the lawn by hand as the golfclub-bearing student passes by, completely indifferent.  1937 was a critical year in the history of the university's labor politics, the year when long-boiling discontent among university maintenance and groundskeeping workers - and administrative repression of students and faculty who advocated for better conditions for the workers - erupted in headlines at the end of the year proclaiming the first attempt by the Committee for Industrial Organization to organize Yale.

"I'd be glad to join any union that comes around here," one worker told the YDN, "and I am sure that I speak for my coworkers when I say this.  But the watch us closely, and we are all afraid that if we join we will be put out in the street without a job."  Although the News reported skepticism towards the drive among janitors, whom it dismissed as "old traditionalists," within a few years, they would be at the center of the successful organizing campaign, which won its first contract after a short strike on November 9, 1941.  We have here, wrote the editors of the Yale Daily News "a real test of Yale's potential liberalism... ...will the university recognize the existence of a problem and face it openly, or will students again be sent to the dean for attempting to find out the bare facts?"

There are, then, histories embedded in this photograph of fetishized plantation architecture and practiced neglect which continue to haunt the university's iconography of power, tradition, and privilege, the specter of immigrant construction labor which built the college in which the scene takes place less than a decade earlier, the specter of hyperexploitation of university labor which was notorious even among students while the photograph was taken, and the specter of all of the struggles which have taken place on the Yale campus in the intervening seven and a half decades.  During the March 2003 strike, Mark Wilson, one of the chief stewards of Local 35, the union which was the ultimate result of what began with that 1937 campaign, spoke at a rally supporting workers at Yale-New Haven hospital, about 140 of whom were also on strike.  "If they won't let us in the picture," Wilson said, "we'll take the camera and make our own damn picture."  I recite this line from memory.  It struck me then as an incredibly powerful statement.  But the instagram photograph serves a reminder that even when the camera and the photograph are quite clearly in the bosses' hands, histories of labor, struggle, and exploitation remain visible, even if barely, in the stories the university tells us about itself.  Pulling on these loose strings of imperial institutional memory, exploding the myths of idyll on which this instagram exercise depends, not to mention the forms of racialized and gendered annihilation which sustain it, strikes me as crucial to creating something other than the university in which we work today.




Edited to add: The best single source on this era in Yale's labor history is Deborah Sue Elkin's unpublished 1995 dissertation Labor and the left at Yale.

an excerpt from the chapter I'm working on.

This is an excerpt from the chapter I'm writing about service workers at Yale between 1968 and 1977 and the labor racial politics of university expansion and restructuring.  It's raw and will change, but it seemed like something contained and coherent enough that it might work as a blog post.  Note that the footnote hypertext doesn't work, since i copy-pasted from Microsoft Word into the Blogger interface...

Even Mayor Lee, the staunch ally of the Yale Administration, conceded that tax-exemption was a problem for the city’s continued operation, announcing in February 1969 a five-man commission to probe the city’s more than $200 million worth of untaxable property.  Part of the problem, Lee explained, lay in the ways in which the city was subsidizing, through municipal services, properties which did not serve the city alone, but rather the state and the nation.  This, explained Lee, was “not equitable.”[1] But if Lee took pains to ensure that his audience knew he was not simply singling out the university, it was the Yale/New Haven relationship in particular which continued to occupy space in the public imagination and in the anxieties of liberal students, university administrators, and public commenters.  In large type, a February, 1969 half-page advertisement in the In large type, a February, 1969 series of half-page advertisements in the Yale Daily News promised “an about face in Yale-New Haven relations” through student voluntarism via the Yale Charities Drive.[2]  The drive’s exclusive focus on New Haven was a novel development, offered as recognition of “the urgency [with] which our aid is needed in our own community.”[3]  Each advertisement addressed the potential benefits of the “Yale community’s” involvement in New Haven – education  and rehabilitating the poor, involving “inner city boys in constructive scouting programs.”[4] The rhetoric of the drive and its leader, Tom McCaughey, both posits New Haven as the “community” which belongs to Yale, and as the object of the university’s charity, which might be improved by the intentions and kindness of students, faculty, administrators, and others to whom the descriptor Yale was easily available.  No facile public relations exercise, the drive and the language with which it was framed demonstrated a very real concern among Yale’s students and faculty with the raced and classed valences of the town-gown dialectic, as well as a desire for easy rapprochement which cast the city beyond the moats as a mute object.  Yale could even “help disadvantaged people assert their rights and express their feelings in this society.”[5]  But if the charities drive sold itself on the promise of constructive proximity, the campus’s paper of record’s report, on the drive’s final day, that two “intruders” and “suspected thieves” had been apprehended by university police following “a brief struggle” in one of the residential colleges the previous morning reasserted the equally familiar relationship of criminalized New Haven youth as a threat to the safety and property of campus.[6]  That this report itself ran adjacent to a banner headline announcing proposals for the Social Science Center which students would denounce scarcely a year later as favoring “administration over politics, control over education,” underscores the ambivalent, vexed, intimate, and highly inegalitarian nature of the university’s relationship with the city.[7] 

Rituals of inclusion and exclusion suggested the centrality of the town gown divide in the campus’s social and spatial imaginary.  Perhaps no incident was more evocative of the contradictory relationship between Yale and New Haven, between Yale students and black popular culture, between the liberal, integrationist rhetoric of university administrators and the racialized logic of its security procedures than that surrounding a campus mixer the weekend after the charity drive.  African American students in Yale’s Calhoun College, named for the notorious secessionist and pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun, had arranged for the popular soul band Au Naturel, comprised entirely of black Yale undergraduates, to play a college party.  The night ended when the college’s social committee called the campus police, worried that the “large number of black New Haveners” outside of the college dining hall waiting to get in to see the band might start a riot.  The campus police not only shut down the mixer, but also “visited several private parties and ordered all persons who were not Yale students to leave.”  Some “New Haveners” may have attempted to enter the college through its windows, “despite the campus police patrolling outside.”[8]  Black students expressed frustration, and one white member of Calhoun College wrote a guest column in the Yale Daily News expressing his “shock” and “dismay” at the “subtle racism” of the actions of his colleagues and the police.  The “type of misunderstanding which apparently led to the mixer shutdown” was “appalling,” because it seemed “rooted in prejudice and perhaps even paranoia rather than an honest mistake.”

Could it be the blacks were simply having a good time, and only a few whites were so unused to seeing blacks in a crowd that they feared a flight?  Blacks cannot be asked nor expected to understand such prejudiced reasoning.  The closure of the mixer looks like a raw act of discrimination against a group who finally attempted attending a Calhoun social function despite the fact that they rate Calhoun as one of the most “racist” of the colleges.  Perhaps white fear of a fight could have induced one, and this may have warranted closing the mixer.  But it is tragic to have to invoke such an explanation for a discriminatory act at so liberal a place as Yale.  It indicates a gap of understanding between white and black people which was widened, not narrowed, by Saturday’s action.[9]

This condemnation elicited an indignant response from a fellow resident of Calhoun college, who intentionally echoed the “shock” and “dismay” of his classmate, but in the opposite direction.  There were indeed “signs of an impending riot inside, that is, if the reader will accept the fact that the committee member pouring beer was slapped in the face by a rather inebriated Yalie, as proof.”  Accusing his rival of not merely dishonesty but “prejudiced reasoning against a group who is trying to provide Calhoun with the best possible social life in her last year of celibacy,” the  defender of the social committee’s actions insisted that any criticism of his group’s actions was gross “misinformation” motivated by “hatred.”  Disappeared from his account are the hundreds of black New Haven residents driven away by the police.  For him, they have no rightful place on campus and their dispersal is necessary, desirable, and uncontroversial.[10]  Although initial coverage of the mixer’s shutdown had reported their displeasure, black students voices were noticeably excluded from the public conversation about the police’s involvement, a striking contrast with student media coverage of the earlier wave of black student activism less than one year earlier.  Indeed, one white student was prompted to write a column for the school’s newspaper on “black silence” and the tight-lipped culture of the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY), framing the “silence formula” as practiced and strategic but also perhaps counterproductive in that it was both “evidently reducing the credible threat” posed by the organization and rendering it and its struggles increasingly “remote” from the lives and concerns of black students.[11]  Behind Bates’ concerns were the whole archive of liberal whites’ antipathy towards black students’ “separatism,” but the mixer incident and the debate which followed occurred in the context of ongoing work by BSAY to increase African American matriculation at Yale college – announcement that applications for the class of 1973 included a record number of black students followed the “black silence” column three days later.  The increase was attributed largely to the work of BSAY members.[12]  The mixer incident also accompanied ongoing conflicts and debate surrounding the university’s relationship and professed desire to more productively integrate itself into New Haven.  As African American community organizations attacked the university’s apparent failure to honor financial commitments it had made, and as students demanded that the university use undeveloped land behind its gigantic gymnasium to construct low-cost housing as a means of combatting the “rigid and somewhat senseless insulation between the university and the community” and thus “plan now fir the urban university of the future,” Yale students were calling the cops on black New Haven youth who had come to the campus to hear a band of African American Yale students play soul music.[13]  The celebration and consumption of black popular music by the overwhelmingly white population of Yale College was not a bellwether of a phantasmal openness but instead an indication of new contours of the university’s increasing centrality in the city’s mutable soft apartheid regime.

---

[1] Frank Kryza, “Lee Appeals for Increase in Taxes,” Yale Daily News 2/4/1968

[2] “An About Face In Yale-New Haven Relations: Education”,  advertisement, Yale Daily News 2/10/1969, 3. “An About Face In Yale-New Haven Relations: Rehabilitation”,  advertisement, Yale Daily News 2/12/1969, 3

[3] “Charity Drive Begins Today,” Yale Daily News, 2/11/1969

[4] About Face In Yale-New Haven Relations: Community Involvement”,  advertisement, Yale Daily News 2/11/1969, 3

[5]About Face In Yale-New Haven Relations: Creative Expression”,  advertisement, Yale Daily News 2/14/1969, 3

[6] “Berkeley Struggle: Intruders Stopped,” Yale Daily News 2/14/1969

[7] Strike Steering Committee, “Yale A Neutral Institution?  Not The Institute of Social Science,” Yale University Manuscripts and Archives, RU 86 YRG 41 accn 1971-A-004 Box 4 Folder 1.  Circa May, 1970

[8] “Crowds, Outsiders End Calhoun Mixer,” Yale Daily News 2/17/1969

[9] Craig A. Salins, “Blacks and Mixers,” Yale Daily News 2/21/1969

[10] John F. De Vleming, “Calhoun Mixer Revisited,” letter to the editor, Yale Daily News, 2/25/1969

[11] Tim Bates, “Black Silence at Yale,” Yale Daily News 2/28/1969

[12] “BSAY effort nets 130,” Yale Daily News 3/3/1969

[13] Robert S. Stein, “Insulate or Integrate,” Yale Daily News 2/26/1969.  Robert A. Schneider, “Freedom Now,” Demands Yale Money,” Yale Daily News 2/27/1969.  Robert A. Schneider, “Freedom Now: Barnes Denies Commitment,” Yale Daily News 3/3/1969

I've been neglecting this blog while trying to write a first draft of what will certainly be the longest and most ambitious (god that sounds pretentious) chapter of my dissertation this month.  This chapter covers roughly the same workers during the same period (plus six more years) at the same university that I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis about, and it's an interesting challenge both to find new archives and new things to say.  I am not really trained as a historian - all of my academic work has been in American Studies departments, and I sometimes feel like I use that as a crutch to not be a better historian than I am, so I am trying to work on that, and I'm trying to find things to say about a moment that strikes me as anticipatory of the present, that seems to echo with later struggles in really interesting ways.  But I know that it's lazy and bad history to use that as the only and/or primary way of talking about the moment I am looking at, and part of the challenge of this chapter and the two others I have written about service workers at the same campus is that I have to figure out more compelling ways to theorize these struggles and what they mean than what my first reaction to them was nine years ago when I first started learning about them, which was holy shit, this conjuncture is a lot like the present in really interesting ways.  So instead I get to talk about the "blue collar blues," about the proletarianization and organization of teaching assistants in the early 1970s, about the struggles of young service workers of color in the age of DRUM and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, about budget austerity during the long death of fordist compromise.  All of which is pretty fun.

So I have no idea if I am doing a good job, I haven't seen a bird in weeks, I feel profoundly cut off from organizing and radical work, and I have barely left the apartment in months, but I do feel like I have been more productive over the last six months than I have been since I started graduate school, and I suppose that's something, though not something I'm entirely thrilled about in the sense that I have never wanted to be the person who shrugs off organizing responsibilities or radical imperatives to sit in a room alone and write.

Anyway, apropos of nothing, here's a list of stuff I want to read but haven't had time to yet.  (In between writing fits I have been working my way through James Geschwender's book about the League, which is really interesting in part for how different it is from Georgakas and Surkin's treatment of more or less the same subject matter.)  Hat tips for these go to various people on various commodified social networks, some of whom I know and some of whom I do not.

Ed Emery, No Politics Without Inquiry!
Weaponize the Corpse!  Anti-Privatization Struggle at Sussex University
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams
Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, "The Avant-garde of white supremacy"
Kathi Weeks, "Imagining Non-Work"
and several books piling up on my desk I am really excited about reading someday.

Instead I get to read through scab urbanist books written by scab management professors for the second time and figure out if seven and a half years of graduate school have improved my polemical skills at all.

No confidence roundup 3/26

This is the week of UCATS' no confidence vote.
Marty Lipton (and Cyrus Patell) didn't really like this Jeff Goodwin NYT op-ed
Some great comments by Andrew Ross in this hilarious NYU Local writeup of the faculty's celebration of their no-confidence vote.
The AAUP responds to the NYU admin's response to the vote
NYU is not transparent, a point Take Back NYU made many years ago
Tisch could be next.
Questions over the relationship between nontenure track faculty and governance have come to light in the wake of the vote

An extraordinary timeline and interview about the Zuccotti Park occupation and its afterlives with some of the Grupo Affect folks has just been published at stress FM and at the affect site.  I find its insights into the composition, politics, and conflicts of the past year and a half to be invaluable ones.  Here's an excerpt, but go read the whole thing.

For some who showed up to these assemblies what was at stake was simply developing a broad and functioning New York City General Assembly, which at the time seemed a little more ambitious and potentially more radical than simply a failed “day of action,” or demonstration, which many of us expected September 17th to be. These early general assemblies were often pretty small, around 30-65 people each week, which in a city of over 8 million, is not much to speak of. Even in the week before, there wasn’t much optimism that people would actually show up. But of course people did. Some of the initial discussions in the assemblies before the occupation spun around tactics—like whether or not violence was proper, what violence was, etc. Some of us of course pushed for tactical diversity and for communications media that would not be centralized. And some of us did not like the “We are the 99%” slogan which would later become so popular.
Here you can already see, before the occupation even began, a number of contradictions and divergent perspectives. There were those treating the weekly assemblies as autonomous actions in their own right, which should be developed and expanded, and thought of as independent from any calls or dates which did not themselves originate from the assembly itself, or even from New York. And there were others who thought the call and projected date should be taken seriously, that they gave us something specific and material to organize around, which made the assemblies often feel more like planning meetings than an assembly, as such. This split, if you will, would continue during the occupation of Zuccotti Park, as the general assembly quickly became a forum to manage the specific details of daily life in the park, rather than a body to work towards an ongoing revolutionary movement in New York.
Another of the contradictions was that, as mentioned, the general assemblies were not very big, and thus could hardly be said to speak for the population of New York City, never mind the United States. In the end, the online organizing initiated by Adbusters perhaps did more to capture popular imagination, and inspire participation, than did these rather modest and often dysfunctional early assemblies ostensibly meant to organize the city. What this led to was that many of those who would come to occupy Zuccotti Park were not New Yorkers, they didn’t live here, didn’t work here, didn’t grow up here, and as such didn’t have many social or political connections outside of the park. They arrived in New York for Occupy Wall Street, the online campaign, without much awareness of past struggles in New York, experience organizing in the city, or the knowledge or capacity to really spread the movement to different areas of the city, or involve more of its population.
So, the different approaches to the function of the general assembly within the Occupy movement, as well as its participants’ relationship to its online and virtual mythology versus the material struggles and spaces of potential intervention in the city: these might be seen as some unresolved contradictions.
Adbusters’ call seemed to be inspired by the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and to a lesser extent the occupation of the kasbah in Tunis earlier that winter. These indefinite occupations in Egypt and Tunisia were the urban communes that came to signal the ongoing commitment to the insurrections which took place in these countries. The call to Occupy Wall Street was not seriously committed to attempting the kinds of insurrections we saw in Tunisia or Egypt, but rather it was like those occupations which took place earlier that spring across the Mediterranean in Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Athens—more symbolic, populist expressions of “direct democracy,” as a response to austerity and crisis.
The occupation that began in New York on September 17th, as well as those that spread throughout the United States that fall, though they weren’t explicitly insurrectionary in intent, or in result, did come to represent a rupture in American politics. The experimentation that took place in the occupied parks and plazas—as well as around them at the actions, marches, protests, and rallies which emanated out of the parks, often spontaneously and uncontrollably—went far beyond what could be accomplished at a demonstration, mass mobilization, or even a riot. The occupations experimented with the participants’ social relationships, social reproduction, subjectivity, the temporality of protest, the distribution of food, clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, and other supplies, decision-making, self-organization, etc. For many this living in public space, collectively, became a kind of prefigurative politics, an enacting of the commune to be created in a revolutionary process.
Zuccotti Park is four blocks from Wall Street, and is across the street from the site of the World Trade Center. It wasn’t the first location chosen to occupy, as those were already gated off by police and private security the night before the occupation was to take place. Zuccotti Park remained open as a technicality, as New York’s public parks have gates and strongly enforced curfews, something which dates back to the late 1980s when the city was preparing for the gentrification to come. Public parks in New York often close at nighttime, 10 o’clock or midnight, but Zuccotti Park was privately owned by the building across the street. New York often makes deals with the developers of large skyscraper buildings where, in exchange for constructing so tall a building, they’re required to create some public space nearby. Zuccotti Park was one of these “privately-owned public spaces,” or POPS, which meant it was required to be open 24 hours a day, and that it was up to the private owner, and not the city or its police department, when it was closed. This was the legal loophole that led to the first few days of arrival for occupiers.

Someone on facebook pointed out that today is the ides of march.  So whatever survives of the ex-classicist in me feels compelled to add a "sic semper tyrannis" to the chorus.