Para leer a la universidad neoliberal

“This place is magic,” Michael Morand ’87 DIV ‘93, Yale Associate Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs, said in an interview with the News. “Yale is a magic kingdom, and this has extended the magic.” (Yale Daily News, 10/19/07)

This quote is interesting not simply for its excess, its absurdity, but because in terming a 20 billion dollar corporation sitting in the middle of one of the U.S.'s poorest cities "magic kingdom," (the geek in me wonders which one - Mordor?) Morand is revealing some profound truths about the optics and ideologies of the neoliberal university. Magic kingdoms, as Dorfman and Mattlelart would remind us, erase the realities of labor, of exploitation in favor of self-sweeping brooms, axes chopping firewood without arms to swing them. Yale as magic kindgom, perhaps the most exaggerated and thus paradigmatic example of the university's elitist, exceptionalist, self-representation. Amidst the glitz of new libraries the people who will clean them, make them run, and teach overflowing FORMAC sections in their basement classrooms fade from view. But without them the edifice collapses, the university does not run. And New Haven's interactions with and role in the immiseration of New Haven's racialized geography of labor and difference can't be ignored either. Yale is the medical debt burdens hanging over the heads of its med school library clerical staff. It is sixty six years of picket lines and a dozen homeless people sleeping on park benches in the New Haven green. There is no difference between the university and the "real world;" universities like Yale, like NYU, like Columbia are high stakes, large scale, often violent participants in urban and global economies through endowment investments, through real estate, through the patenting and privatization of knowledge. Morand suggests that Yale's new library "extends" the magic of the university's privilege and power, but it can not and has never been able to fully obfuscate the conditions of its existence - which is its imperial presence, and the movements which are contantly seeking to trouble and transform it.