An email arrived in my Gmail inbox today from the annual giving officer for the University of Virginia class of 2005. It explained in simple terms what has been true for years: despite the fact that UVa is a state school, the vast majority if its operating budget comes from private dollars. When I finished undergrad, state funds made up about eight percent of annual expenditures. So to maintain the high level of excellence at the university, they need my dollars. Normally, I delete such emails without a second thought. But today, a commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education captured perfectly the reason why my alma mater will likely never see a single development dime from me.
In the piece, fourth-year student Honor Jones highlights the inequality that UVa insists upon codifying in brick and mortar. Her point is this: the University of Virginia, which is still a public school, should spend its money on programs that increase economic and educational equality. It should not erect gawdy Jeffersonian buildings as it continues to refuse to pay its direct and contract employees a living wage. It is just as the email from my class annual giving officer said: “While some things from your student days remain the same, others have changed.”
Clicking back through the Cavalier Daily archives for articles covering the living wage sit-in of spring 2006 fills me with anger and despair. In the past, the pages of the CD were full of commentary from well-bred students professing to know the motivations behind low-wage workers who took jobs at UVa and spouting the supply-demand basics they picked up in Econ 101. But Jones’s commentary pushes beyond the willful ignorance of students who refuse to acknowledge that in Charlottesville, where the largest engine of economic activity is the university, a person can work full time and still live in poverty. The Census Bureau’s most recent data for the city is from 2000, but at that time, 12 percent of families were below the federal poverty line.
Jones points out that the school makes other attempts to support low-income families and students as it pursues a $3 billion capital campaign. The AccessUVA program provides need-based grants to students from families with incomes below $40,000 a year, but the program appears stagnant. Efforts to grow the diversity of incoming classes have paid off, only to be met with more enlightened commentary in the CD: “financial aid encourages people who have no business being in college to attend.”
But perhaps the most frustrating fact from Jones’s piece, the strongest indication that some things from my student days remain the same, were the quotes from the UVa administration’s cheerleader for supply-side economics, Leonard Sandridge. At a public meeting of the Commission on the Future of the University, he trotted out this boiler-plate: “we have a responsibility to serve the public,” which is “expecting more from us than we’ve ever seen before.” The quote resonated with something an administrator told living wage organizers in the spring of 2006: social justice is not a mission of the university.
Part of what baffled me about all the arguments between students and with the administration over the living wage was that for opponents, this shocking statement from the administrator was implicit. The school, a bastion of learning and a crucible of opportunity, had no obligation to largely invisible workers.
Intricacies of the living wage debate aside, what I always wanted most from the university administrators was a simple recognition that institutions of higher education should make the world a better place—not just in theory, but in practice. And that is just what Jones asks for: “Public colleges and universities need to work harder at recruiting, enrolling, and retaining low-income students; paying better wages to employees; and supporting employee education. We should foster an inclusive academic debate that goes beyond theory to explore the inequalities right in front of us.”
At a rally during the 2006 sit-in, activist and attorney Mark Lane brilliantly inverted the reactionary stance of the administration: “If social justice is not on the agenda of this university, then this university has no agenda.” I would happily support an institution that declared its intentions to serve and empower the public, and then took concrete action to do so. An email with that declaration from my annual giving officer would really make my day.
