Talk The Talk, Walk The Walk

Though many on college campuses—students, faculty, administrators—cannot stop talking about the need for social justice, when a movement for worker’s rights actually materializes on campus, it is shocking. Provosts, deans and vice-presidents pontificate about the need for diversity all the time, but, rarely, do you see these powerful individuals fight for something that can actually change the lives of people. When these individuals give speeches on minority rights on campus, yet fight against for the USC health workers going on strike for higher wages and better benefits, they betray their superficiality. Indeed, it easy to talk a big game when it comes to sexual assault, diversity and living wages for service workers at the university —all extremely important and pressing issues—but when you have nothing to show for it, one is forced to think that you are simply feigning concern. Looking at the recent Harvard University Dining Service (HUDS) strike, it is evident that, despite all the posturing, the academic powers that be do not actually care about anyone but themselves. In an op-ed for The New York Times, Rosa Ines Rivera, one of the HUDS workers on strike, points out the “hypocrisy” of the institution she works for.

On my way to work each morning, I pass a building with the inscription: “The highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.” If Harvard believes this, why is the administration asking dining hall workers to pay even more for our health care even though some of us pay as much as $4,000 a year in premiums alone? I serve the people who created Obamacare, people who treat epidemics and devise ways to make the world healthier and more humane. But I can’t afford the health care plan Harvard wants us to accept.

In her piece, Rivera brilliantly, and perceptively, calls Harvard out on their bullshit. If Harvard, a university with one of the largest endowments in the United States, is not paying their workers a living wage, it is because they are greedy, not frugal. Indeed, at Harvard, and other universities, there are many fellows, tenure-track professors and administrators who cannot bother to address the long-held grievances held by the university staff. Corey Robin puts it best when he states,

While the union and its supporters did a heroic job of mobilizing support on the Harvard campus and its surroundings, the fact remains that only 130 to 150 of Harvard’s instructional staff even signed a petition in support of the strike. And of those, many seem to be instructors, lecturers, visiting faculty, and the like. According to one count, Harvard has nearly one thousand tenure-track or tenured faculty, of whom only sixty-five signed. Less than 10 percent, in other words. I can think, off the top of my head, of a lot of big names on the Harvard faculty who are prominently associated with contemporary liberalism, who think Trump and all that he represents is a shanda, who love the multicultural coalition that is the Democratic Party, and who are nowhere to be seen on that petition.

What makes Robins statement so profound is that he criticizes those at the highest strata of the academy for pretending to be progressives, yet doing or saying nothing to help the cause of these exploited laborers. So, while Harvard, after a constant barrage of harassment by union workers, students and organizers, acquiesced to the demands of those leading the strike, we should not be fooled. If we ever hear another administrator talk about an important issue, we should say, “OK, that is great…but what are you doing about it?”