SLAM was interviewed by Bloomberg News yesterday. Click here to check out the article!

The Boston Globe covered Dean Smith's budget forum today, along with SLAM's giant "Greed Is The New Crimson" banner drop. Click here for the article.

Also a big thank you is due to the good folks at The Crimson, who put our intimate luncheon with Pres. Faust yesterday on the front page today. Along with a picture of our banner drop.

Harvard will not solve its budget crisis until it confronts and engages two truths.

1. Workers--every worker, including the lowest paid janitor or library technician--are vital to the "core mission" of educating and intellectual research.

2. Notions of severe inequality govern the current distribution and determination of salaries of Harvard employees. Acceptance of this situation is widespread and rarely articulated, allowing it to persist even in times of crisis.

The first truth is a positive affirmation and must be embraced more fully. The second truth is a description of a negative reality that must be changed to reflect the first truth. What does this mean? In exploring and formulating solutions to the budget shortfalls, workers with lower incomes must be understood as a central part of this University. Equally important, the reduction of the severe wage disparity within the Harvard community must become a live option to address the budget situation.

The FAS meeting yesterday only further indicates that the leadership of Harvard remains in denial about these truths and the paths of action they imply. These paths require Harvard to tread a hard path--the path of courage, creativity, and shared sacrifice.

The other path--that of inequality, hypocrisy, and greed--may seem attractive. But, this path led our university, nation, and global economic system to the current crisis (see Frank Rich's recent, robust critique of the connection between Harvard, Larry Summers, "the bubble culture" of the mid-2000s, and the current financial crisis.)

In this post, I lift up several schools as examples for Harvard to emulate and follow.

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"Greed is the new Crimson. No Layoffs!"

This afternoon, FAS Dean Michael Smith hosted a town hall meeting on FAS finances in Sanders Theater. He opened the event with a PowerPoint presentation on the state of the budget. He said that the budget for Academic Year (AY) 2010-11 will have a starting deficit of $220 million and in order to make up that deficit we must "not just resize but reshape and revitalize" the university.

To do this, the FAS administration says it has already achieved $4 million in cuts and has another $73 million planned. Dean Smith did not describe in any detail where exactly those planned cuts would take place. However, he did say that in assessing the FAS budget, expenses were categorized into three "buckets": (1) expenses that can be made up for by better use of resources, (2) expenses that if cut will have a "challenging or negative effect on some people", and (3) expenses that if cut would have a negative effect on Harvard's educational mission. He said that cuts would then be coming from the first and second buckets.

What was most striking about the meeting was the narrow scope in which the administration seemed to see Harvard's educational mission. Lowell House Master, Professor Diana Eck, asked why house staffs were being cut when they were such a central part of the educational experience at Harvard. An HCL staffer asked why the library system was not being valued as an integral part to the educational mission of Harvard. I asked about the exclusion of service employees (janitors, dining hall workers, security guards) from town hall meetings when they are responsible for the safety, health, and comfort of every student on campus.

Despite our certain differences on how Harvard should move forward, the overall tone of the event reflected the frustration and exclusion that members from all parts of the university feel in addressing the budget crisis. All accept that cuts will need to come from somewhere, but the lack of transparency thus far has raised fear and suspicion throughout the university - pitting workers against one another and department heads competing for cash. One audience member even asked for Dean Smith to clarify rumors that certain insiders were being exempt from the hiring freeze. Additionally, when I asked Dean Smith whether high level administrators would be taking pay cuts like at Stanford, Wash U, and UPenn he said that he is essentially taking a pay cut (since he is not getting his raise this year and the effects of inflation). He then quickly added that would need more than "a few dollars" to make up the deficit.

The irony is rich (pun intended): when an amount of money is coming from his salary it has no real impact, but when a similar amount is used to pay the entire salary of a low-income worker it suddenly becomes so significant that it is holding back the educational mission of the university.

Yesterday at lunch, members of the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) dropped banners in Annenberg (the first-year dining hall), advocating against layoffs. Many remark how this space resembles the Great Hall of Hogwarts. In the spirit of JK Rowling, SLAM urges all students NOT to be Slytherins, by supporting people over profits and equally valuing all members within our community.

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We've been making t-shirts! If you want one, just get us a t-shirt and we will screen print it for you. Email us at slam[at]hcs[dot]harvard[dot]edu to arrange.

Felix Salmon, a financial news commentator with Portfolio.com (a blog on economic issues owned by CondéNash) offers this excellent analysis of why--even after the significant drop in the endowment announced in November 2008--Harvard is still in a very, very good place.

Simply phrased, Harvard's endowment dropped about 22% last year, from $36.9 billion to $28.8 billion. No one denies that this is a major drop. Yet, it remains, by far, the wealthiest university, in the world. In Salmon's words, "The fact of [Harvard's endowment] decline is no reason for panic."

Yet, the world's wealthiest university and the world's second wealthiest non-profit has responded with a mixture of panic, fear, and greed befitting the worst excesses of Wall Street firms, such as AIG and Bear Stearns that played a crucial role in precipitating the current global economic crisis.  read more »

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

W.E.B. Du Bois on his time at Harvard in the 1890's:

"The trusts and monopolies were viewed...as inevitable methods of industry...The attitude of Harvard toward labor was on the whole contemptuous and condemnatory. Strikes like that of the anarchists in Chicago, the railway strikes of 1886; the terrible Homestead strike of 1892 and Coxey's Army of 1894 were pictured as ignorant lawlessness, lurching against conditions largely inevitable. Karl Marx was hardly mentioned and Henry George given but tolerant notice...The intellectual freedom and flowering of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were yielding to the deadening economic pressure which made Harvard rich but reactionary. This defender of wealth and capital..." (Dusk of Dawn, 40).

It's been over a Century since the events described and almost 70 years since these word were written.

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