The Yale College Council (YCC) Senate has found itself in a political deliberation that fully displayed the disconnect between the student body’s vision of the YCC and the YCC’s vision of itself. Last week, the senate finally passed a proposal to condemn the university’s distribution of a $1 million donation to the Friends of the IDF, a nonprofit “charity” that directly funds the Gaza Genocide; this only came through following an initial rejection by the Senate and strong backlash from the student body afterwards. Despite last year’s referendum indicating that the vast majority of Yale’s students oppose the university colluding with genocidal regimes, the YCC twiddled its thumbs, with some of its members claiming that the condemnation would not reflect the wishes of students and/or would not fall under the YCC’s purview. Such assertions are not only misleading, but also reveal a more systemic identity crisis for the YCC, one centered both on its place among the rest of the student body and as part of Yale’s suppressive bureaucratic machine.
For much of its history, the YCC has positioned itself as an organization predominantly concerned with issues that would fall under a rose-tinted definition of “student life.” It organizes a number of fun events and activities that seek to benefit the student body through community building; the event which inspired the Peanuts-themed cover of this week’s issue of the Herald is certainly one of those. Its greatest responsibility is Spring Fling, allotting a total of $420,000 to the campus-wide event this year after heated debate. Aside from these events, not much else is included in what is typically considered to be the YCC’s purview, or at least what the YCC would consider its purview to be. For an organization which seeks to portray itself as an elected undergraduate student union, it does relatively little of what would be expected from a student union, often staying silent on the actions of the university when they are openly hostile to the student body. Perhaps Senator Benjamin Barkoff, TC ’27 said it best: the YCC is meant to “have fun food truck fests, create stipends and do fun things,” not “waste” its “time” representing and defending the student body as it is directly impacted by Yale’s complicity in genocide.
Nevertheless, the YCC finds itself in a unique position of having the ear of the university administration, a privilege that would not usually be granted to an extracurricular organization predominantly concerned with the operation of food trucks. The YCC president and vice president meet regularly with high-ranking administrators of the university, such as Dean Lewis and Vice President Goff-Crews, to discuss the many issues that the YCC’s leadership feel need to be brought up; this is certainly more respect than Yale ever gave Locals 33, 34 and 35. In addition, the administration grants the YCC the resources and legitimacy necessary to organize campus-wide elections and referendums, a feat that would be much more difficult to pull off otherwise. In theory, the YCC acts as a conduit for student concerns to be voiced directly to the university, a means for the student body to unilaterally demand that the administration makes decisions beneficial rather than antagonistic towards them; yet in practice, it is no such thing. Indeed, to Yale’s administration, the YCC is both powerful and powerless.
This paradox of the YCC’s identity and purpose goes on to impose a paradox of identity and purpose onto the students who are elected to positions within it. Many students run for elected positions within the YCC, from its executive board to its senate, with the hope that they could use the student government’s power to help hold the university accountable to how its actions impact its student population. However, the YCC’s practice of only addressing what it considers to be “student life” limits what these representatives can actually achieve, cursing them to hold a powerful position with no real power. This is where the stereotype of the YCC being a “resume-stuffer” comes from; representatives are able to signal to employers that they were an elected official of their student union without having actually done what would be expected from an elected official. Unfortunately, some see this as a feature instead of a bug, with absenteeism being a chronic issue for the YCC senate, and many members unwilling to push the self-imposed constraints of the organization lest it threaten a future political career.
This internal struggle of identity that the YCC grapples with is not a detriment to the work of the university’s administration; if anything, it is quite the valuable tool. Whenever the university faces widespread criticism from the student body or student activist groups for something that it does, from harming the New Haven community locally to being complicit in war and genocide internationally, Yale can merely point to the YCC and tell students to go through the official channels that they have set up. The administration can then move past the controversy as the YCC refuses to address the issues that its constituents wish it to, and on the rare occasions that the YCC does make meaningful action, the administration can just ignore it as going beyond its self-imposed purview. The administration has the best of both worlds, a student union that siphons away the legitimacy of all other student groups, while refusing to use its monopoly on legitimacy for anything meaningful.
This phenomenon puts on full display the purpose of the YCC. Inadvertently, through its identity crisis between being a mere party planning committee and a full-fledged student union, the YCC has found itself to be a critical part of the Yale machine. Willingly or not, it acts as a black hole of legitimacy for the entire university, sucking away the ability to challenge the administration’s actions from both other student groups and from elected officers of the YCC themselves. Any affiliate of the Sumud Coalition can tell you about the difficulty of going through the “official channels” on campus, as those channels are more like walls which block any hopes to challenge the university’s actions. In this way, the YCC acts as a caporegime for the university: a middleman of this mafia-like organization, regulating the campus’ political sphere and shielding Yale from criticism as it profiteers off the unaffordability of college education, off the resources of the New Haven community, and off global genocide.
It would be inaccurate to assert that the YCC is entirely at fault for this. Not only is it constrained by the precedent of its own activity, but it is also constrained by the culture of career progression at affluent universities and in American politics. Being a voting member of the YCC has great power, not in that its members can enjoy power at the moment, but that it invests into later power in the form of a future budding political career; if the exclusive label itself promises influence, then why hijack yourself by actually acting upon the label? We are taught from a young age that reform can only come about through those who are granted exclusive power; can we blame our YCC senators and officers for merely following this through, at least the ones who sought to actually improve our campus? The YCC has the potential to become a legitimate force for the university to reckon with, and to do so, it must overcome its identity crisis and inferiority complex, embracing itself as a bonafide student union.
However, it would not be enough to simply demand that the YCC does this without addressing a root cause behind why it doesn’t. To become a bonafide student union, it must actually reflect the student body, the power of having a place within the YCC no longer being an exclusive thing to be won through rhetorical combat every April. Its symbolic power derives from its exclusivity, which fuels efforts to protect the legacy of that earned exclusivity through political inaction. If you have read my column, then you already know what I am going to suggest: sortition. Many of the ailments of the YCC are paired with the ailments of the real-life governments that its members seek to join in their professional lives, and like how the state’s efforts at representation is theft, so too is the myth that the YCC reflects us as it currently stands.
Student unions at high-ranking universities like Yale could be the perfect sandbox for experimenting with selecting officials through random lottery, with the YCC senate being comprised, not of just 30 victors of low-turnout elections with a wasted vote share of ~65%, but of possibly hundreds of randomly selected students. With this process, not only would the YCC accurately reflect the makeup of campus, but both the social pressure and workload of participating in it would be vastly reduced for the average senator. Having the executive of the YCC be appointed directly by the legislature like in a parliamentary system could also be considered. In this way, being part of the YCC would no longer be something one could brag about; it would be something every student would be part of at some point. The divide between senator and constituent would be no more, and the YCC and the student body would be one and the same.
The YCC’s identity crisis and conflict of purpose is reflective of a wider identity crisis among our very student body. As Yale has found itself directly implicated in some of the world’s most heinous man-made atrocities, we are told, by ourselves and by others, that we as students can do very little to change the behavior of the administration. We are told that the best thing we can do now is simply sit back and enjoy college, shamelessly feasting on the fruits of conquest while only concerning ourselves with the “fun things” of being a Yale student. Yet these fruits are moldy and rotten, poisoning our campus as our right to learn and grow together as global citizens is viciously violated, and our marginalized students are forced to live in fear while the rest are morally compromised. We are required, as both Yale students and as global citizens, to do everything we can to combat the injustices aided by our university; as the YCC and its constituents must be one and the same, it too must rise to the occasion. With sortition, it will finally become the true student union it was meant to be, not just as a perfect mirror of our student body, but as the student body, a means for the student body to organize itself for the purpose of advocating for itself. This is the answer to the YCC’s identity crisis. And when the curious first-year asks, “What is the student body?”, it will merely respond: “I Am That I Am.”
