Then Levin said, 'Let there be cake'

LINDA CHANG/YH

Sure, Yale has a God complex. It's the guy with 300 years and 10 billion dollars and almost as much prestige as that other university. And last Sat., Oct. 21, the Administration put it all together, somehow even willing the weather to conform to that of a 70-degree heaven. Thirty bulldogs, free t-shirts, and lots of cake were just the most tangible of the bread and circuses that were offered up to the Sons of Eli. Just as the world celebrated 2000 not so long ago with more than adequate pomp and circumstance, Yale went a bit overboard with 300. Our ability to celebrate in such dramatic excess was a bit unsettling—couldn't we apply our time and money to more noble causes?

But that's just the problem—things look pretty good these days. We are in an era of unprecedented prosperity. Technology has provided us with new conveniences and longer lives, and there are no prominent conflicts in the U.S. today. The sad perfection of our era has left us searching for intellectual challenges and emotional battlegrounds. In Fight Club, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) astutely observes, "We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression. The great depression is our lives." Our generation is defined by a lack of defining issues. Guilt for our close-to-perfect world has generated a new anxiety, a sense that we should never leave well enough alone. Yale's campus is now riddled with issues that do not match the righteous protests of earlier generations—we have construction delays, not voting rights; corporate investment policy, not open segregation, and Nicaraguan labor issues, not Vietnam. Sure, these are all unfortunate situations, but does anyone else feel like we're running out of things to protest? Pretty soon we'll see an anti-protest protest out on Beinecke.

These half-hearted, self-righteous pursuits were the only noticeable compromise of Tercentennial grandeur. One banner protesting the Workers' Rights Consortium (WRC) read "72 percent voted yes but still no WRC -> democracy?" referring to last year's YCC referendum on Yale's membership in sweatshop watchdog organizations. The banner was misleading in two ways. First, YCC's published results did not include students who abstained from this question. Only 59 percent of students actually voted "yes" when abstentions are counted. Second, whether it's 59 or 72 or 100 percent doesn't matter, because Yale isn't and shouldn't be a democracy. The YCC cannot pass binding resolutions; it can only make recommendations to Yale Administrators. Until the WRC proves that it can more easily enact third-world labor reform than the FLA, there is no compelling reason for President Levin to change Yale's affiliation.

If you don't like the Branford dining hall delays, go eat in JE and put away that petition, because you already got your 35 Flex Dollars. If you don't like a bank's loan policies, take your money out of that bank and tell your friends. If you don't like sweatshops, go create some high-quality jobs in Nicaragua yourself, because it won't take much more pressure for Nike or Kohl's to mechanize, move, or eliminate their third-world factories. As many recent articles have shown, it's usually a choice between sweatshops and subsistence farming, and no one's forcing anyone to take a sweatshop job. Great democracy that we are at Yale, we still can't be all things to all people and we shouldn't try. The Tercentennial celebrations should not be a forum for student activism. Sometimes, we want to divide up that big Yale cake so the whole world gets a piece, but when we do, we are all still left pretty hungry ourselves.

Jay Augsburger is a senior in Saybrook

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