<a href="http://educationinthestreets.blogspot.com">Education In The Streets</a>

Thursday, April 01, 2004

While I agree with Phoebe's argument about the racialized and commodified logics of reified prescriptive grammars, i also welcome any YDN op-ed which posits the use of defenstration as a solution to email list abuse.

Just kidding. Phoebe's analysis is dead-on, even if the "Splice-splice baby" joke and the Imitation of the Diction of Feuenteenth Centvry English were pretty funny. I agree with Phoebe's analysis of the racialized and class undertones of Adams's rant. One could argue that "Hey man whats up in the hizouse wouldya look at my thesis yo?" is problematic anyway - not because of the diction, but because of the particular implications lent to it by the irony with which scarsdale-bred Yalies infuse such sentences when emailed, if not to professors, then to friends - or hypercasualized teaching assistants. The expropriation of modes of speech inutterable within ivy walls by privileged white kids performs and concretizes the inegalitarian exchanges across Yale's militarized, ever-expanding border with the New Haven community (across which people travel only when clad in blue uniforms with forks and spoons sewed on the breast, or when on strike.) I'm guilty of this too, on some level, and have been since high school. I use mad as an adverb and a superlative, and same with dope. (I blame the former on Mattnick, Austin and Noah, among others, and the latter on V.) But this is beside the point for the moment, as i want to pose to Phoebe and Adams the following question: when James K. Yalie III, of Old Greenwhich, CT, on his way from Payne-Whitney Gymnasium to the Berkeley Dining Hall or "Beta late night," sprinkles his diction with the word crunk, is he tearing down walls between Yale and New Haven, or making them thicker? Isn't this just white privilege fetishizing and commodifying difference?

I don't know if that's at all relevant or makes any sense.

Fuck Mory's.

Finally, Jason Farago takes on Randy Cohen's ethicist column in a rather biting op-ed in today's YDN. Looks like fun, let me try:

I am a CEO of a $600 Million Hospital with a salary of $1 Million, a huge house in Madison, CT, and numerous shady extra compensation packages hiding in the depths of my hospital's financial statements. My hospital put 11,000 people in New Haven in debt for getting sick. We threw people in jail and took their houses, forced workers trying to organize into captive audience meetings, and harassed, arrested, and fired them. Last year, despite the revelation that i had placed liens on the 925 homes in New Haven and one out of every twenty five homes in East Haven, i was awarded the dubious honor of being named the Association of Yale Alumni's "Distinguished Alumnus of the year," a moniker which i wore proudly as i went on to participate in bank hijacking scheme to make millions off taking away New Haven's community bank (which is already guilty of major redlining,) on whose board of trustees i sit. Anyway, my question is, am i practicing good business ethics?

ANONYMOUS,
Madison, Conn.

Was an Ivy League university president who forced his employees out on strike twice in a six month period and then accepted a position of a sham committe to exonerate a business associate, in all probability in exchange for a much desired ruling by a recess-apointee-stacked Labor Board practicing good business ethics? Was a noted american studies scholar and the dean of a major university's school of undergraduate education practicing good business ethics when he sabotaged his graduate students' academic careers and advised students to cross picket lines and work during a strike? How about the CEO of an international soft drink brand who lectured about Adam Smith, globalization and business ethics while his company sent death squads after union leaders and workers went on hunger strikes to fight plant closures and gun-barrel union busting? Of course not!

¶ 8:59 PM

Smash Yale-[ comments.]

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