As a member of the Living Wage Campaign here at the University, I have had many conversations in the past several weeks with students expressing a wide range of questions, concerns and reactions to the campaign and to its ongoing hunger strike - now in its twelfth day. On Sunday, I was invited to participate in an informal roundtable organized by several interested fourth years - because participants in the meeting agreed it was to be a private dialogue rather than a public event, I have kept all names private - to bring together student leaders for a dialogue about the living wage. It was an informative and enriching conversation for me because it allowed me to get a better sense of where student opinion on the issue of a living wage currently stands.
One of the meeting's participants told me that among her group of friends and classmates, she often hears the following sentiment: "A living wage seems like a good idea - nobody wants University employees to be paid badly. But if it were really a legal and economic possibility, and if it were really the right thing to do, would not the University have done it already?"
I am not going to address the legal and economic arguments about the feasibility of a living wage here; those have already been covered in The Cavalier Daily, and I invite those interested in learning more about the campaign's arguments on those topics to visit the its website and read its extensive research document, "Keeping Our Promises." The point I wish to address here is the student body's trust in the essential goodness of the University as an institution which makes significant moral choices: "If this were the right thing to do, would not the University have done it already?"
It is completely understandable that we, as students of the University, should feel a personal stake in the basic morality of the institution in which we have invested years of our lives and by which we have been personally shaped. After all, the University explicitly espouses moral standards: The honor system and the project of the caring community are two obvious examples. And yet, the campaign claims the University falls short of those moral standards in its failure to pay fair wages which would allow its workers to live with basic human dignity. To those who love the University, these claims of moral failure on the University's part may seem like a deep affront.
The campaign's motivation, however, is not to tear down the University or to badmouth particular decision-makers within the University. Our motivation is to make the University a better place, not just for the people who are employed here, but for all members of the University community. We truly believe that by pressuring the University to take notice of and to address this issue of basic justice, we can help the University become a more caring and honorable community.
I am reminded that our nation's founding fathers wrote in the Preamble to the Constitution that their goal was "to form a more perfect Union." That document has served as a foundation for our common civic life and a guarantee of basic freedoms for more than two centuries. And yet, as we all know, the Constitution did not create an entirely perfect Union; rather, the document tacitly permitted the deep-seated wrong of slavery to fester in our national life. It took decades of political, social and even military action to right that wrong. To this day, we are still dealing with the effects of our national legacy of slavery and injustice. The project of creating a "more perfect Union" is ongoing; it requires the sustained, committed and caring actions of citizens who believe that a more perfect Union is possible.
Here is another comment from that Sunday meeting of students: "The action of the hunger strike is off-putting for a lot of students. After all, the University is not Berkeley; protests like this are against our traditions." While I recognize the strike is a fairly radical tactic, I would like to point out that we do have a tradition of student protest here at the University. The racial desegregation of the University in the 1950s and the admittance of female undergraduates in 1970 were both changes which resulted from significant student protest and other forms of pressure put on the University. I believe we can all agree that those changes have absolutely made the University a better place. I hope University students will look back decades from now and realize that, in the same way, the adoption of a living wage helped to make the University a more perfect university.
Dannah Dennis is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
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