The Politics of the Memorial and The Neoliberal University: Yale, David Lee, Maya Lin

(Another paper for the same class at the Firefly piece. Started writing this last night because I dodn't knwo what else to write my last paper on, and got a bit caught up. This is still a work in progress, but it's eight pages too long and due in four hours, so I've sent it in anyway. I welcome criticism and comments from other folks who were involved in all of this first hand. There's stuff I don't think i do very well, and I probably should have engaged memorial theory more and gone into the specifics of the anti-Lee campaign a bit less. That said, here.)

In the fall of 2001, the Reverend W. David Lee, a former Syracuse University football player and the pastor of the Varick AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue, the oldest black church in New Haven, located in a working class African American neighborhood bordering Yale University’s sprawling, fortress-like gothic architecture, announced his candidacy for a seat on the Yale Corporation. The Yale Corporation is “the senior policy-making body for Yale University.” Unlike the massive boards of institutions like New York University, with its 70-some-odd trustees,[1] the Yale Corporation consists of only nineteen members, including the university’s president and Connecticut’s ex oficio governor and Lieutenant Governor. According to Yale’s website, the corporation plays “an unusually active role in university governance” compared to the governing bodies of peer institutions. The small number of board members suggests their institutional power. Ten of the trustees are successor trustees, selected by their predecessors for up to 12 year terms. Currently serving successor trustees include Roland Betts, the developer of Chelsea Piers and a close friend and schoolmate of George W. Bush, and Jeffrey Bewkes, the president and C.O.O of Time Warner. The other six trustees are alumni fellows, who only serve for six years, and are elected by a vote open to all alumni save those who have graduated from the undergraduate college within five years prior to the election.[2]

In order to appear on the alumni fellow election ballot, one must either be nominated by the Association of Yale Alumni, a not-particularly independent body responsible for channeling communication between the university administration and potential donors[3] which also administers the elections, or one must campaign for enough petition signatures to qualify independently. This process “involves the collection of a number of petitions equal to 3% of the prior year's number of qualified electors,” with “qualified electors” numbering over a hundred thousand.[4] While “campaigning” for an alumni fellow seat is unusual, it has been the means by which historically marginalized groups have attained a seat at the table. William Horowitz, who became the first Jewish member of the Yale Corporation in 1965, secured his place on the ballot through such a campaign.[5]

Lee’s roots in New Haven were the centerpiece of his campaign. Raised in the nearby working class black suburb Ansonia, and a graduate of the Yale Divinity School, Lee mobilized firsthand experience of the tangible inequalities between the global university with its $18 billion endowment and one of the poorest cities in Connecticut to call for increased commitment from Yale to an “equal partnership” and “new social contract” with the city. A board member of the union-affiliated non-profit community organization The Connecticut Center for a New Economy, (CCNE,) Lee spoke of pushing Yale to commit more to New Haven’s overwhelmingly poor and working class racialized neighborhoods as the center began a massive organizing program among New Haven clergy and community organizations calling for the desegregation of the university’s work structures, job opportunities for workers from the growing Latino neighborhoods on the fringes of downtown, access to health care, and a fair share contribution by the university to the city’s public school system to reduce class sizes.[6] As the university’s two recognized unions, Locals 34 and 35 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, (HERE)[7] entered into what would prove a two-year long contract struggle involving two strikes and protracted wars of position and manoevre over the university’s investment practices, attempts to crush organizing by workers at its teaching hospital and graduate teachers and researchers, and broader vision for the city’s future, both Lee and the unions spoke of creating a new era of partnership[8] counterpoised to the bitter history of paternalism and turmoil between Yale and its workers and Yale and New Haven.[9] Between the fall of 2001 and the late Spring of 2002, the Federation of Hospital and University Employees (FHUE, the alliance of locals 34 and 35 with the graduate teachers and researchers and hospital employees’ organizing drives,) and Yale engaged in a process known as “Interest Based Bargaining,” facilitated by former Reagan-era Labor Department official John Stepp. Designed to channel the deep and lasting distrust and antagonism between both sides into productive discussion and cooperation, the moment was characterized by exaggerated strategic and performative demonstrations of goodwill, such as Local 35 President Bob Proto’s hugging of Yale president Richard Levin during a joint union-university memorial for the victims of the events of September 11, 2001 in early October of that same year, and Yale negotiator Brian Tunney’s distributing t-shirts to both negotiating teams which emphasized the positive tone of negotiations.[10] Both sides made their claims in relation to a discourse of partnership, with Lee and the unions frequently referencing, in speeches, on banners, and on placards, the idea of an “equal” partnership, or of bringing the existing partnership to a “new level.”[11] The administration’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs (ONHSA,) helmed by Baltimore waterfront developer and Yale alum Bruce Alexander, published numerous full page advertisements in local papers multiple times a week professing to celebrate the university’s already-existing partnership with the city, offering as examples student community service projects and Yale’s redevelopment of the strip of property along York Street and Broadway into a parade of high-end chain retail, such as Urban Outfitters, J. Crew, and Alexia Crawford. This struggle over the semiotics of cooperation eventually collapsed in the wake of Yale’s unilateral decision to fire Stepp in May of 2002, after the end of the spring semester, despite statements from both sides that progress had been made on several but by no means all of the contested aspects of the contract fight.[12]

The response to Lee’s candidacy was mixed. The bid garnered support from progressive students and alumni, as well as community groups and local and national politicians and political organizations and figures, including Senator Joseph Lieberman and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (both Yale Alumni.) Lee secured far more than the necessary signatures in advance of the deadline, and won a spot on the ballot, promising to become the only member of the corporation besides the university’s president to actually live in New Haven.[13] But the AYA and Yale Office of Public Affairs attempted to frame the campaign as an attempt by obstructionist unions to interfere in the university’s autonomy and decision-making, demonize the university’s expansion, and place a saboteur within the highest echelons of the university’s power structure for the upcoming round of what had become ritualized labor turmoil at the expiration of each contract. Even before announcing the ‘approved’ nominees to run in the election, AYA and Yale spokespeople pointed to the unions’ funding of the $30,000 mailing the Lee campaign had used to solicit petition signatures, as evidence that Lee was under the sway of nefarious outside parties.

In almost every election for alumni fellows of the Yale Corporation, the AYA nominating committee selects multiple candidates to place on the ballot, from which alumni select one new trustee. In late February, 2002, the Association of Yale Alumni announced that this year it would put forward only one nominee – the artist and architect Maya Lin, class of ’81.[14] Lin was a popular figure on the Yale campus. Her Women’s Table sculpture, with its smooth black surfaces visually and thematically evocative of the Vietnam War Memorial, which, Yale students are often reminded, she designed while among their ranks, numerically commemorates and memorializes the presences and absences of women at the university from its founding through coeducation in 1969, only stopping in the early 1990s, when women for the first time outnumbered male classmates. Lin’s liberalism, financial and artistic success, and celebrated creative genius are often represented to undergraduates as elements of a career worthy of emulation, and the university had recently awarded Lin with an honorary degree. Lin enjoys privileged status not only within Yale’s artificially-aged walls, but more pointedly in Asian-American studies generally – Jeannie Barroga’s play Walls, about Lin and the Memorial, is excerpted at length on the very first page of what has arguably been the discipline’s most important and influential intervention over the last decade.[15] Lin’s memorial has been important for Asian American and other cultural studies for its incommensurability, its refusal to be entirely subsumed and enclosed by a nationalist historiography of arma virumque cano, and its openness to appropriations and transformations, including the discourses which circulated widely concerning the ability of artist and memorial alike to embody, understand, and incorporate hermeneutics of experience and belonging from which both are presumed excluded by virtue of their alleged radical otherness.[16]

In New Haven, things got messy. The events surrounding Maya Lin’s landslide victory over David Lee in the mail-in election results, announced in late May, do more than just serve as a stark illustration of the fissures produced by tactical exploitation of the model minority myth.[17] This was, however the thrust of (then) New Haven Advocate editor Paul Bass’s argument when he outlined Yale’s tactics, including Lin’s candidacy and the anti-Lee campaigning of African American Yale Trustee and former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, who, as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, had once led a hunger strike in solidarity with striking members of local 35.[18]

Quoth Bass:

#3: Rules for Attacking Your Opponent

· If possible, have stand-ins do it.

· If he's black, find black fronts to do it.

· If he's black and liberal, put up another liberal minority against him.

· Comb through his public statements, remove snippets, then broadcast them out of context to make him look like a raving, dangerous nut.[19]

I now think such a framework is far too simple for thinking about the Yale/AYA anti-Lee offensive. I do not wish to reify the forms of knowledge and research presumed by the masculinist and jingoist logics in Hart’s condemnation of Lin’s refusal to engage and understand a referent (the veterans) in her design for the memorial, but in the context of the Lee-Lin election, Lin’s physical and verbal absence from debates and conversations concerning the university’s relationship to New Haven, its demonizing of Lee, and continued global priorities, was and continues to be deeply troubling. At times allies of the Federation, including me, have critiqued Lin for her silence on matters of concern in ways which bear a problematic relationship to tropes of feminine (and Asian) passivity, difference, and childishness. In part this paper represents an attempt to formulate a more complex and less fraught critique, to think through how me might reach a different understanding of the political implications of the way Lin represented herself, and allowed herself to be represented, throughout the months leading up to the election, and the ways in which she has continued to represent herself in the years since. (Her six-year term on the corporation ends in 2008.)

Even a particularly anti-union, anti-Lee editorial board of the Yale Daily News opined that the AYA nominating committee had “made its nomination process look suspiciously subject to external influence and contradictory to the purpose of alumni fellow elections.”[20] Such skepticism was widespread, but did not prevent the YDN from later endorsing Lin anyway. Lin refused to campaign or speak to New Haven community organizations or media, while in her name the AYA, the Yale administration, and a group of alumni who were mostly current or former trustees and officers of the university (such as former University Secretary Henry “Sam” Chauncey and then-corporation member Frances Beinecke) calling themselves “Yale Graduates for Responsible Trusteeship” waged a “slick, $145,000-plus campaign” to discredit and impugn Lee.[21] The supposedly neutral Association of Yale Alumni website lauded Lin while prominently displaying Lee quotes such as "There is a blind spot at Yale -- no one is responsible for the community interests ... [President] Levin is probably laughing now but he won't laugh after we get there." Paul Bass interviewed Lee and spoke with him at length about the quote:

I ask Lee about the quotes as we sit in his office, below a Yale wall hanging and his Divinity School diploma. Yale's leaving out a crucial part of that Levin quote, Lee claims. He said it in response to a call from a Yale Daily News reporter the night his campaign succeeded in getting a spot on the ballot by collecting 4,000 alumni signatures. The reporter said she'd just asked Levin about it and Levin laughed, according to Lee. (Levin, through his secretary, says he has "nothing to say" about Lee or the campaign. In other papers, he has joined in the criticism of Lee for "campaigning.")

"It hurt," a somber Lee recalls of hearing of Levin's laughter. "My gut reaction was, 'Wow. That stings. Fine. He won't laugh when I come in the room.' It was like calling me a joke. I had to deal with that all my life, growing up in the projects, not having money, people laughing at you.

"I went to Syracuse on a football scholarship. I went to Yale Divinity School. To still be laughed at by the president of the institution I love -- it was disheartening."

Regardless of Lee’s lack of press-handling skills to rival those of Yale spokesperson Helaine Klasky, who attempts to equate Lee’s union support with Enron, it is now and was then clear that the AYA would not neutrally conduct the election it was charged with facilitating. Bass’s response to Klasky’s claim that the media did not see her link between Enron and FHUE as poisonous outside agents with political and economic agendas separate from university leadership is worth quoting at length, for it underscores rather well what is at stake for New Haven in Yale’s anti-Lee campaign.

Klasky has a point. That's because Enron is a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise that bribed the federal government and destroyed thousands of workers' livelihoods and pensions. The media doesn't see Yale's unions, or their influence, the same way.

The fact that Yale can see its unions that way helps to explain why more is clearly at stake here than the bid by a pro-labor minister from New Haven's oldest black church to sit in the board meetings of a $10.7 billion university. In fact, one trustee out of 17 clubby members probably won't change the outcomes of any votes.

But Yale's overreaction has endangered two of university President Rick Levin's major initiatives: promoting "partnerships" with New Haven and with Yale's unions. Levin convinced unions to enter a comprehensive form of marriage counseling as part of the latest wave of contract negotiations, to examine the roots of their contentious relationship. And under Levin Yale has helped workers buy homes in New Haven, rebuilt the Broadway shopping district, and spawned local biotechnology companies to help create jobs, part of a bigger campaign that has convinced many townies Yale can help tackle urban problems rather than make them worse.

But faced with the possibility of allowing a labor- or New Haven-backed alum to enter the sanctum of monthly corporation meetings (a "partnership" tool in some American corporate boardrooms), Yale revealed the limits of its definition of "partner."

Bass continues,

In this campaign, Lin has released a public [campaigning] letter in which she trumpeted her credentials and denounced the notion of campaigning. She failed, and continues to fail, to distance herself from the more expensive and nastier campaigning being done on her behalf.

By agreeing to be used by Yale to stop Lee's campaign, Lin has already proved her major qualification for the seat -- reliability. She won't press Yale to take more than baby steps to help rebuild New Haven or to abide by labor law in confronting union drives. (She declined to answer the Advocate's telephone and e-mail inquiries. Yale spokeswoman Klasky calls it a "jump" to suggest that Lin tacitly approves the massive campaigning on her behalf by not openly disavowing it.)[22]

The AYA, the Yale Graduates for Responsible Trusteeship, and the Yale administration together outspent the Lee campaign by nearly a hundred thousand dollars and dwarfed the union’s financial involvement in the race by a factor of five. The AYA letter strongly emphasized to over 115,000 voters that neither Yale nor the AYA supported Lee’s candidacy and openly attacking the Lee campaign

"The AYA's Board of Governors is concerned about the strong and unexplained disparity between Rev. Lee's past public statements about Yale and those now being made in campaign mailings to alumni," the letter said. "We are also concerned about Rev. Lee's expressions of deep commitment to the Yale-New Haven relationship despite his lack of past involvement at any level with Yale's many initiatives and engagements with the city."[23]

The anti-Lee campaign sought to portray the Reverend as a disingenuous and dissimulating intruder, a willing tool of the labor unions not truly dedicated to Yale or New Haven. The New Haven Register, into which Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs sunk millions in advertising dollars, uncritically hopped on board the AYA bandwagon and blasted Lee for treating the board of trustees “like the board of aldermen.”[24] (Of course, they missed the irony that the members of New Haven’s board of aldermen are all democratically elected by all New Haven residents eligible to vote, which excludes large numbers of people incarcerated or formerly incarcerated for committing felonies, unlike most of Yale’s trustees, who often have as much if not greater power over the city’s future than the alderpeople.) Perhaps the Washington Post best summarized the tenor of the anti-Lee campaign, which seemed only tangentially, if at all, a campaign for Lin:

There are those at Yale University who firmly believe that the Rev. W. David Lee is a dangerous man, a stalking-horse and potentially a threat to America's proudly perennial No. 2 institution of higher learning. They use words like "corruption" to describe his efforts to join the 19-member corporation that runs the university, and privately, they belittle him as ambitious yet insignificant, a nobody and a spoiler, a puppet of dark forces bent on soiling their shining city on a hill.[25]

The attempt to rigidly separate town from gown in this language is extraordinarily simplistic and willfully ignores or obfuscates the constitutive role neoliberalized universities play in shaping ndreshaping deindustrialized urban spaces like New Haven, but often, the logic of the AYA, the YGRT, and the university’s “official” spokespeople was very much complicit in such sweeping generalizations and in the pernicious construction they would redeploy over and over again of Lee’s supposed lack of any capacity for independent thought, “anti-Yale” bravado (here relying on a quote from a 2001 union meeting in which Lee called FHUE Yale’s “waterloo,”) and duplicitous relationship to organizations with whom Yale was still proclaiming a desire to build lasting partnership and cooperation. Granted, the Lee campaign was, in part, an attempt by an activist affiliated with Yale’s workers’ unions and community organizations to push open the limits of what kind of partnership the university was really willing to enter into. Still, with Lee’s campaign recast as a deliberate move to challenge Yale’s power and agenda in the city, Lin’s role is no less problematic.

Yale’s campus is stuffed with memorials. Sterling Memorial Library. Hewitt Memorial Quadrangle and its tomb-like salute to the World War I dead. Woolsey Memorial Rotunda with its armed Athena marbles and names carved in the walls of Yale students and alumni who died in colonial warfare. These spaces are radically unlike Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. They are unapologetically nationalist, realist, and imperialist, not necessarily in that order. Whereas Lin’s memorial is intensely public, these spaces and the histories (and memories) they institutionalize are private, elite, constantly policed to keep the homeless riffraff from sleeping on heated floors during the cold New Haven winters and available only to a select few, or open to the public only occasionally and as part of a grand but transparent gesture of accessibility and pedantic generosity, such as when Benjamin Carson, an African American neurosurgeon t Johns Hopkins and a Yale trustee, gave a free and open lecture to students from New Haven public on self improvement and individual excellence. A painting in the room where the Yale corporation customarily meets depicts Elihu Yale, the university’s first donor standing proudly with a slave wearing an iron collar kneeling at his feet. President Levin has replied to student demands that the painting be removed with assurances that Kurt Schmoke told him to leave it up, so that the university might be reminded of its problematic legacies. Yet, as in the summer of 2001, when a group of graduate students published a report detailing the foundational role the slave trade and racism played in Yale’s early years in the midst of tercentennial self-congratulations,[26] Yale has been often been dismissive of or lukewarm to critical discussion of this legacy, and has been loathe to engage in open dialogue with community organization it does not bankroll or control unless forced to do so by public and political pressure. This represents a key theme of Yale’s long shift from elite finishing school to global university, which obliterates the local in favor of universal discourses of historical and current excellence.[27] While Yale has openly embraced multiculturalism, not only are the possibilities for such a hermeneutic themselves limited, but so has been Yale’s commitment to said possibilities. Thus, these sites of exclusion represent not merely “the memory of the past but the experience of the present moment as explicitly controlled and shaped by the museum.”[28] If the “filth” of the anti-aestheticism and graffiti on Gerz’s disappearing Holocaust monument in Harburg reflects a deep and ugly truth – “the memorial projections and preoccupations”[29] of post-Cold War Germany, in this case, Yale’s memorial culture, antisceptic, neoclassical, and imperial points toward an altogether different project. Lin’s Women’s Table fountain is easily read as an attempt to subvert and disrupt this masculinist built environment glorifying death and war, yet recent events outlined above must lead us to question the limits of this intervention. (Indeed, there is no space on the Women’s Table to commemorate or memorialize the struggles of the uncounted numbers of working-class women employed by the university as maids, and as clerical, food service and custodial workers, the women who were historically the most vulnerable members of the university’s workforce, who built Local 34 and comprise a dedicated activist core within Local 35.) That Lin seemed so quick to embrace this politics of liberal exclusion in the face of a movement which literally promised to “tear down the walls” between Yale and New Haven[30] suggests that the space the memorial inhabits may no longer be simply precarious, but in fact perhaps already collapsed into the very forms of exclusion, violence, and loss which it attempted to disrupt – or ignore.

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[1] http://2110uaw.org/gsoc/nyu_trustees.htm

[2] http://yale.edu/about/leadership.html

[3] Aya.yale.edu/about

[4] http://www.aya.yale.edu/corpelection/process.htm

[5] “Light and Verity,” Yale Alumni Magazine, November, 2001

[6] As CCNE’s organizing grew, Immigrant Rights and responsible development became increasingly foregrounded. See http://www.ctneweconomy.org/socialcontract.html

[7] HERE merged with the textile and garment workers union UNITE! In July 2004 to create UNITE-HERE

[8] “Unions Rally With Call For Partnership,” Yale Daily News, April 25, 2002 http://yaledailynews.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=19186

[9] Yale workers have struck perhaps 14 times since the first union (what is now Local 35) won recognition in 1941. This history has been extensively documented. See Deborah Sue Elkin, Labor and The Left: The Limits of Acceptable Dissent at Yale University, 1920s to 1950s, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1995, Toni Gilpin, Gary Isaac, Dan Letwin, and Jack McKivigan, On Strike For Respect: The Clerical and Technical Workers’ Strike at Yale University, 1984-1985, updated edition, University of Illinois Press, 1995. Also Herbert Janick, “Yale Blue: Unionization at Yale University,” Labor History, 1987 28(3): 361-362, and Gordon Lafer, “Land and labor in the post-industrial university town: remaking social geography, Political Geography 22, 2003. Information on the fights surrounding medical debt at Yale New Haven Hospital, university investments, and the other issues discussed above may be found at union-created websites such as http://unfarallon.info and ctneweconomy.org, as well as in a series of articles by The Wall Street Journal (“Twenty Years and Still Paying,” WSJ 3/13/03)and continuous coverage over a multi-year period by local media such as the New Haven Advocate and the Yale Daily News. My own intervention into this scholarship, “The 1971 Yale Strike: Imperial Power, Workers’ Struggle, and Urban Renewal in the Globalization of the University,” is deeply indebted to this and other work which has been formed and informed by the city’s history of dynamic social movements.

[10] “T-shirts DominateLabor Talks,” Yale Daily News, 3/1/02

[11]Paul Bass, “The Bulldog Bites Back,” New Haven Advocate, 5/6/2002

[12] “Yale Unions Poised to Call Strike,” New Haven Register, 9/4/2002

[13] The University at the time claimed that Charles Ellis of Greenwich Associates, Greenwich, Connecticut also lived in New Haven (he is married to Linda Lorimer, the secretary of the University,) but to my knowledge Ellis in fact lived in a mansion in Greenwich and not, in fact, in New Haven. If this is incorrect I will gladly edit this sentence.

[14] “Maya Lin Nominated for Corporation Seat,” YDN 3/1/02

[15] Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, Durham; Duke University Press, 1996

[16] Sturken, Tangled Memories, 51-58

[17] “Maya Lin vying with minister for seat on Yale board,” New Haven Register, 3/2/02

[18] “BSAY Position Paper,” Yale Daily News, 5/3/71 “Hunger Strike,” Yale Daily News, 5/4/1971. “Students Continue Support Activities,” Yale Daily News 5/7/1971

[19] Bass, “The Bulldog Bites Back,” op cit

[20] “A conspicuously singular nomination”, Yale Daily News, 3/6/2002

[21] Bass, “The Bulldog Bites Back,” op cit

[22] Ibid.

[23] “AYA criticizes Lee in letter to alumni,” Yale Daily News, 4/16/2002

[24] “Elect Maya Lin to Yale Board,” New Haven Register, 4/7/2002

[25] “At Yale University, Ivy vs. Grass Roots,” The Washington Post, 5/10/02

[26] See http://www.yaleslavery.org/

[27] Bill Readings offers an interesting deconstruction of this sort of discursive formation in The University in Ruins. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1996.

[28] James Young, At Memory’s Edge:After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven; Yale University Press, 2000. 123.

[29] Young, 139

[30] “Hispanics to Wield Clout at Union Rally,” New Haven Register, 3/3/03