Perverted by Language

College system kills the music

As the Florida debacle drags on, American voices rise and cry out. "Abolish the Electoral College," some yell. Others criticize the peculiarly American mindset that privileges the intermediate—the states—over the big and the small—the nation and individual voters. And with the even bigger in Europe and around the globe, America is both laughing stock and terror, myopic banana republic and xenophobic power that deplores the international awareness and responsibilities its economic globalism demands. E pluribus unum, we claim, but we act as many without a one when we should be a one within many.

Cut to New Haven. Five thousand students, one Yale, one Elm City, 12 residential colleges. The math may be fuzzy, but by any reasonable calculation, 5,000 + 1 + 1 >> 12—people, institution, and location have to be more important than what are essentially administrative and residential entities. Yet Yale, like America, has elevated the intermediate out of proportion to the things that really matter, extrapolating residential colleges from dorms into the centers of Yale's cultural life. Like states' rights, arguments for residential college cultural hegemony are equal parts myopic and xenophobic. In the end, they exclude and punish students who try to exist as part of a larger Yale and New Haven community. Here's one student's sob story, one voice raised.

I've tried, on occasion, to book rock 'n' roll shows somewhere—anywhere—on this expensive, expansive campus of ours. First, I need bands, preferably an out-of-town headliner to draw a crowd. But outside of funds at the discretion of college Masters, there are no readily available Yale funding sources to pay honoraria—not Sudler, not Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee. Compare Yale to nearly every other school in the country, at which general student activity fees pay for bands. Here, however, we have to plead the case that an outside band would somehow enhance the life of a particular college. No. They'd enrich Yale life, and there should be Yale funds that acknowledge this fact. Residential colleges have hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece in discretionary funds—and rock hasn't a drop to drink.

OK—I've found bands willing to play for free. Now I need a space, preferably one with sightlines, maybe a PA and microphones. At the very least, a room where we can make noise into the night. The Women's Center, GPSCY? Maybe, but often no. They have other priorities. The new off-broadway space? It's a step, but weeklong dance and drama performances will snap up dates. And again, it's not a rock space. Residential college spaces? Again, no. Dining halls and butteries are for eating, not performing. Furthermore, because people have to study and sleep, even available, adequate spaces have unworkable noise curfews.

OK—I've gotten a room in some college's basement. Now I need a crowd, the bigger the better—which means townies and Yalies, because the Yale rock scene is inseparable from that of New Haven and its suburbs. But again, the colleges rear their gruesome mugs: Masters don't like townies coming to party and have told me so in no uncertain terms. Even when New Havenites are allowed in (i.e., never), they have to navigate ID-opened gates and musty, twisting basements—not the best way of welcoming our neighbors, eh? No bands, no venues, and no fans equals no rock scene.

Analogous examples could easily be drawn from dance, theater, film et al., and they should be. But I know rock, and here is my plea: Yale administrators, stop the cultural fiction of the residential college system from making the failure of the Yale rock scene a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lousy shows in uncomfortable environments with bad sound don't encourage fans. Scrambling for days just to get an unsatisfactory space and shoddy equipment and then losing money on the deal doesn't encourage budding promoters. Getting paid awfully or not at all and performing to a tiny crowd in a dank room doesn't encourage bands. And telling townies, explicitly or not, to stay away doesn't encourage anybody—it just adds fuel to the imperialist flame.

Can't we have a general student activity fund? Can't we have one space that's outfitted for rock and easily accessible to everybody, not just those who have citizenship in a particular college of our 12-state union? The resources are there. We just need to get them away from the colleges and give them to the people who need them—Yalies and townies, not Saybrugians and Berkeleyites.

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