Iqra’i

I don’t want to post on Aliza Shvarts qua Aliza Shvarts. But it’s obviously impossible to be on campus and ignore the controversy, especially because our admitted-students recruiting event (called Bulldog Days) is coming up at the beginning of next week — right as the exhibit is slated to open, in fact. In wondering how the heck Yale’s going to avoid total trainwreck, I’ve started thinking about the failures of narrative when appropriated by an institution to obscure or explain multivocality and diversity in the community it represents. (While I use Yale as an example for convenience, the relationship between the University and the students is largely analogous to that between state and nation.)

I used to wonder why Yale always decided to reseed the grass on the quads right before Bulldog Days. Didn’t it create undue hassle to have the quads blocked off and force the already-confused kids to take the long way? This year I’ve finally figured it out: it’s less about taking care of something that had to be done in the spring, and doing it at a particularly inconvenient time, than a way to protect the fragile April lushness of New England grass from hundreds of overenthusiastic high-school feet. It’s more important to Yale that prefrosh have a good image of the campus, aesthetically speaking, than that they have a good experience of being able to use its spaces; they’d rather have a bunch of awed spectators eager to enter the mystery than give them a taste of Yale life that will get them hooked. It’s a preview, quite literally speaking.

That’s certainly one way to do public relations: super-choreograph the experience so that it’s closer to watching a performance of a community than engaging with the community itself. After all, participating in reality on the ground level has a way of giving the lie to any officially-imposed narrative and instead exposing the much more polyphonic truth. (I say this coming from a discipline that has fairly notorious trouble keeping its theory under control — the anthropologists themselves know that everything’s subordinate to the facts on the ground, but the public/laity want easy and broadly applicable answers.) It’s not just a matter of avoiding the risk that a high-schooler left to his own devices will stumble onto something unsavory, but avoiding the risk that a high-schooler will leave campus overwhelmed and confused, unable to assimilate the thousands of experiences to which he’s been subjected into an understandable whole. That’s what narrative is for, anyway.

The problem is that this year, Yale doesn’t have control of its own narrative to begin with, to say the least. (In fact, if you want to get cute about it, it doesn’t even have control of the narrative that’s disrupting its narrative.) So the official, University-endorsed, Bulldog Days-performed image has to go mano a mano with the image glimpsed through the dust surrounding the media fracas — an image of a school without moral mooring, academic oversight, or the epistemological authority to tell its own students what is or is not real. It’s a risky proposition, especially if it turns out that Aliza Shvarts wasn’t lying and Helaine Klasky was. Like any totalizing force, narratives are brittle things, and they should never be opposed to facts — that’s the definition of “bad spin.”

Ironically, at the moment the community of Yale’s student body isn’t as multivocal as usual — Aliza Shvarts is the single topic of conversation to an extent that I’ve never seen (no, not even when we found out about the Taliban dude). But, given that Yalies have the attention span of gnats and Bulldog Days has a more luminous pull than any porchlight, that won’t necessarily be the case in a few days’ time. While the admissions officer has to respond to the “But don’t you kill babies?” question with “Not really…” and hope that his explanation is sufficient, the student has the luxury of conceding that someone does but continuing “But also, people do x, or y.”

I understand that equating Shvarts with the captain of the varsity crew team trivializes the controversy, but it’s obviously true that neither is more representative of Yale. Narrative, with its eye-chart prioritization, has to promote one or the other, and it’s not clear which will prevail. So the general rule holds: it’s better to rely on community, polyphony and ground-level involvement — lived experience — than institutions, official narratives and a performance that prohibits its audience from being any more than spectators.