Yale's Co-op policy: waging war

Right Reason
    By Matthew G. Alexander

Late this summer, amid the flow of correspondence from Yale that her alds the onset of a new school year, all students found in their mailboxes an announcement from Student Financial Services: students will now be able to charge $1000 per semester at the Barnes & Noble-operated Yale Bookstore.

While on the surface this service appears to be a wonderful new convenience for students, it is actually but the latest salvo in the University's two-year-old war against the Yale Co-op—a war potentially detrimental to students, alumni, and to Yale itself.

Should the term "war" seem an exaggeration, remember that Yale, desirous of higher rent and a national name, refused to renew the Co-op's lease on its original Broadway property. Of course, unlike the Daily Caffe, the Co-op was a model tenant. The Co-op was then exiled to what may charitably be called the outskirts of campus, and its former building was leased to Barnes & Noble. Subsequently, the university administration made the Barnes & Noble-operated Yale Bookstore its "official" bookstore, and publicly encouraged faculty members to place their course book orders there. Since then, Yale has refused to allow the Co-op to include membership information in university mailings to incoming freshmen.

The practical aim of these moves is the creation of a Barnes & Noble monopoly in the vital course book and school supplies market. Any Yale denials of an explicit intention to kill the Co-op and other competitors are irrelevant since this effect is clearly a foreseeable consequence of Yale's actions. It doesn't take an economics major to figure out that such a monopoly will in no way benefit the students. The flip side of the new bursar billing convenience, for example, is that it only makes Barnes & Noble more assured of its customers' business, thus diminishing the market incentive to be responsive to consumer preferences and to provide goods at low prices.

Before the advent of the Bookstore, the Co-op had a similar monopoly. But the University did not invite Barnes & Noble to compete with the Co-op evenly and fairly; it has simply substituted one monopoly for another, and, in doing so, it has attacked a venerable institution that has always been steeped in Yale tradition.

In this self-inflicted wound lies the real tragedy of the whole affair. When one enters the new Yale Bookstore, one finds walls covered in depictions of old Yale football programs, stacks of a reissue of Owen Johnson's Stover at Yale, and portraits of famous alumni. Yet it all feels artificial and overdone, like a Yale pavilion at Walt Disney World. After all, it is just a recently established branch of a national chain. The Co-op, by contrast, is the genuine article; it has developed from within the Yale community and possesses more charm and tradition than the Bookstore can muster, even with all its expensive renovations.

In an attempt to associate itself with Yale tradition, the Bookstore commissioned the reissue of Stover for its grand opening, but unwittingly subverted its own efforts in the process. One finds the following passage in the second chapter of the book: "They passed by Osborne Hall, and the Brick Row with the choked display of the Co-op below, and, crossing to the dark mass of the Old Library, sat down on the steps." One won't find a similar mention of the Yale Bookstore, because, in Dink Stover's day, its foundation was still a century off.

One of the fundamental premises upon which universities have been founded since the middle ages is that they are to be seats of learning for its own sake, apart from concerns of the "real world"—particularly apart from commercial concerns. As many universities have largely abandoned this mission in favor of training the "sophisters, economists, and calculators" of Edmund's famous locution, it should not be surprising that Yale's real estate dealings focus on revenue and commercial glitz at the expense of tradition and civil conduct. One should think that an institution with a $6 billion endowment would not need to expel one of its own for the sake of a higher rent check. If followed to its logical conclusion, such a policy will result in a university with the Yale name—but without any connection to the people and traditions that made that name meaningful in the first place.

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