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.