The Board of Visitors had some unwelcome — though not unexpected — visitors at its meeting last Thursday in the Rotunda. Members of the Living Wage Campaign gathered on the lowest level of the Rotunda’s south side, waving signs and chanting slogans: “One, two, three, four; no one should be working poor.” Upstairs, the Board discussed the University’s budget in dry, even tones. Downstairs, protesters shouted and clapped.
The campaign last year made national headlines with a hunger strike that lasted 13 days. The advocacy group, which seeks to secure a living wage for University employees, has been quieter this year, but it hasn’t gone away. Last week’s rally marked its largest-scale effort of the semester.
At Board meetings, audience members sit silently. Though the Board’s meetings are open to the public, the body does not allow an opportunity for public comment. Authorities at one point allowed several campaign members to enter Thursday’s meeting. The protesters were escorted out after they began chanting.
University students attentive to the living-wage debate fall into a few main camps. First are proponents of a market-driven wage, who oppose the Living Wage campaign’s goals. On the opposite ideological side fall students affiliated with the campaign, who support a living wage and do so vocally.
There is also a third group, which, like the audience at Board meetings, tends to remain silent. Some students who in theory support a living wage for workers bristle at the Living Wage campaign’s tactics. This ambivalence likely arises because traditional protests strike a dissonant chord in the University’s social environment. The foreignness of the protest strategy the Living Wage campaign deploys makes its activities jarring. To jolt and disturb is, of course, the point of any protest that aims to shake the status quo. But the campaign, by applying traditional protest tactics in an inhospitable environment, risks alienating some potential supporters — a cost, however, that is unlikely to outweigh the benefits the campaign draws by attracting public attention through demonstrating.
The Living Wage campaign is a labor campaign, and as such it draws some of its tactics from the organized-labor movement. The campaign also has concrete, quantifiable goals — an important prerequisite for a well-run protest. But why is the mechanism of traditional protest confined only to a small corner of the University? The Living Wage campaign is part of the Progressive Action Network, which has associations with several activist-minded student groups. The Black Student Alliance, the Latino Student Alliance and Queer and Allied Activism are some organizations with well-defined ties to the Progressive Action Network. This cross-section of the school, with significant overlapping membership between groups, does more than rally for a living wage. The LSA, for instance, recently scored a victory by working with the University Bookstore to combat sweatshop apparel.
The University at large is clearly capable of picking up aggressive protest tactics, as last summer showed. But it is only a small corner of the University that consistently applies such tactics when arguing for a set of demands, be it a living wage for workers or, last semester, “transparency.” And the protests to reinstate University President Teresa Sullivan were fundamentally conservative in nature: they aimed at restoring the status quo.
By and large, other student groups appear hesitant to deploy labor-style protest strategies. Problems surrounding sexual violence have animated the University in recent months, but would-be activists turned to writing guest columns or gathering at Take Back the Night events — a more nuanced, subdued form of protest. The Honor Committee’s Restore the Ideal Act drew heated opposition early this semester, but opponents responded not with demonstrations but with op-eds and roundtable discussions.
Any activist-minded group is free, of course, to choose the tactics it deems most appropriate. But demonstration need not be confined to one group or set of groups at the University. Indeed, it should not be. If groups affiliated with the Progressive Action Network are the only ones demonstrating, it makes it easier for other students to dismiss protests as demands sought by people who are not like them. Though the University produces students who love and trust the school — and for good reason — we can benefit from a jolt now and then.
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