I don't post about New Haven-related stuff too much these days. I'm not there, and when alderpeople get cell phones or get indicted or what have you, it doesn't really affect me in the way it once did. Accept that as a disclaimer prefacing the rant below.
Recently Yale's Sprague Hall hosted a concert by the folk singer Judy Collins. This concert was open to the public because of the "generosity" of Yale University Secretary Linda Lorimer, whose corporate-tycoon husband Charles Ellis, of Greenwich Associates, in Greenwich, Connecticut (take note on that, Yale Administration circa fall 2001,) had intended the concert to be a private one for his wife alone. Paul Bass, the guy who wrote the "heartless hospital" and all manner of insightful stuff on the 2003 strikes, gushes.
Now, in part Bass is gushing because the sponsorship money for the concert was directed towards a reproductive health organization, which is great. If you're going to be as wealthy and powerful as Ellis and throw yourself a concert, you might as well make it open to the public and donate the money to a reproductive health charity. But I don't see how this makes up for all the ways in which the Yale Corporation, on which both Ellis and Lorimer sit, has continuosly sought to silence the voices of folks who live outside of - and/or work within Yale's iron gates. Sprague Hall itself was, after all, one of the buildings Yale threatened to subcontract in an attempt to demoralize Local 35 members. Recall, if you will, that during the reverend W. David Lee's campaign for a seat on the Yale Corporation in 2001-2002, the Conroy-Klasky axis of spin pointed to Ellis to deflect charges from the Lee campaign that no Yale trustees actually lived in New Haven, Ellis's mansion in Greenwich and business in Greenwich named Greenwich Associates notwithstanding. Now, i'm glad that Ellis and Lorimer are so philanthropic, and I have to desire here to engage in ploemics against them, Paul Bass, or Judy Collins. Nevertheless, I have to ask whether a few hours of Judy Collins and a couple thousand bucks for reproductive health is a palatable substitute for the voice of organized New Haven communities in the way Yale does business.
It's not--but I ask, again, must everything always be completely contextualized? (And, strategically, is more accomplished by using every available occasion to call Yale [or NYU, or Bill Gates, or whatever] out on its sins, or by praising people/institutions when they do do good stuff? Maybe the role of someone like Paul Bass--with generally good politics but no direct involvement in Yale-NH stuff--is to cry out against the bad sometimes and complement the good sometimes. Keeps up the image of journalistic neutrality and all that jazz.)
ReplyDeleteI don't want to wade too deep into this discourse you and Katie are developing, but I would like to add the obvious point that when it's relevant, some things require contextualization. In this case we HAVE to remember Sprague Hall, because hundreds of terrific, Yale-centered events will continue to happen there with no institutional memory of those subcontracting threats.
ReplyDeleteSo what you're saying is that we should modify "always historicize" to "sometimes historicize?" If Dorfman and Mattelart can "put the duck on the carpet," is it not germane to question the political commitments of Yale's elite and of Paul Bass's new organ - and there isn't much criticism of Yale - that I've seen, anyway. I would be hgappy if i were to be disabused of this sense. So I'm again not sure if i ever think it makes sense to celebrate the "good stuff" people like Ellis do, since sometimes that "good stuff" is, brazenly or not, a smokescreen, and when not, I'm still not sure it's ever extricable from one context or another. The question fo strategy is obviously a more nuanced one, and i'll admit that this wasn't a very strategic blog post - more of a bored rant - this is in fact a (firmand)toned-down version of a somewhat more angry post that i'm glad i reworked. Certainly there are some things more worthwhile of critical opprobium than others from the perspective of strategy, and I'm not going to start picketing outside Linda Lorimer's office over this, but I also don't see what's wrong about blogging about it. Please excuse my lack of coherence. I just got out of class.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I meant about not wanting to wade too deep. There are different ways to historicize, different tones to take (as you say), and different elements to highlight.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry my initial post came across so harshly. I was conceiving of it (I think--it's been a long week) as an attempt to continue some thinking that I've been doing recently about 'philanthropy,' and whether/when/how it should be encouraged/appropriated/condemned by people who are interested in social change. And I haven't really reached any conclusions except that sometimes money from terrible people seems to accomplish good things, and that it's all very complicated.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I've now also actually read the article (confession--I was responding before to your comments without looking at the source text--again, more of an excuse to continue my internal monologue than to thoughtfully react to you--forgive me), and I'm getting more of where you're coming from in your original critique. The piece is unquestionably silly puffery and over-the-top praising of Lorimer, and I understand your gut wtf?! reaction.
(And I haven't read anything else from the Independent, so I can't evaluate this piece in the context of the publication as a whole.)
Still, I want to lay out a few options: Paul Bass could have used the concert as an opportunity to write a deeper, more-interesting, better-historicized account of Lorimer and the Yale Corp and Sprague Hall and subcontracting (which is a lot to ask, as much as I agree with the need for those involved in 'the movement' to historicize everything). He could have not covered the event at all. He could have written about it in less hyperbolic, but still generally positive, terms while still not giving a full history of the politics of Sprague. He could have written the actual story or the less-gushing story and mentioned in one line at the end that Lorimer and the Yale admin had wanted to subcontract maintenance of Sprague and had abandoned this idea after union and community protest. Which of these options would be "ok"...?
No need to apologize. I'm basically a one trick pony and I do find it valuable when folks I respect and admire push me on stuff. I find your interventions onm this site almost uniformly valuable and I'm glad you post here.
ReplyDeleteI'm not in New Haven, so i'm not really clear on what's up with Paul Bass's political commitments, but the last time i saw anything in the NHI about work and labor at Yale it was an oped by some suburbanite peace activist i'd never heard of castigating bob proto for endorsing Lieberman.
I guess any of those options would have been ok. This is a cop out, but i don't really feel like I have any right to be perscriptive with respect to how Paul Bass chooses to cover stuff. I would love to see more stuff in the NHI, the advocate, the register, the nyt, whatever, that addressed questions of institutional history, expansion, and pageantry from a more critical/historicist position, but it seems more important to me at least, for folks to do thew organizing work necessary to ensure that Sprague Hall never gets subcontracted and that Lorimer, Ellis, and the rest of the Yale Administration are continuously forced to confront and negotiate with Yale Workers and the New Haven Community.