Students Hit or Miss the Pavement

The Student Labor Action Movement wages a futile campaign

By Patrick T. Brennan

Recently, the long dormant Student Labor Action Movement has revived on campus, in response to the expected layoffs due to the decline in Harvard’s endowment. Some of SLAM’s points, surprisingly, are rather reasonable: Harvard should consider going beyond the administrative wage freezes and enact small pay cuts. But the administration, though it is more worthwhile to hold onto than the “top talent” that bailed-out banks have lost to foreign banks like Deustche Bank, is probably not going anywhere. Few universities would hire any administrators that leave Harvard, and few administrators would leave Harvard because of minor pay cuts. It seems fairly unlikely that people like Tom Dingman, after decades at Harvard, will leave secure jobs over a drop in salary. Therefore, such options should be explored before layoffs. However, I support this proposition only because I really like clean bathrooms.

But the issue at hand is not SLAM’s more reasonable tenets, but rather, their more extreme demands: that the University “suspend layoffs and recall all workers, full-time and part-time, who have been fired since October 2008.” While this kind of absolute support for worker’s rights might sound swell on paper, it really doesn’t make any sense. With their typical progressive pablum, SLAM likes to accuse the University of operating on a “a logic of fear.” If anything, SLAM’s “Greed is the new Crimson” rhetoric and ridiculous demands amount to fear mongering. One only needs to look at the signs at a SLAM rally to recognize that they have few useful arguments beyond accusing “greedy” Harvard of hoarding its wealth and acting like one of those evil corporations. No other meaning is provided: With 28 billion dollars, Harvard must still be able to afford unnecessary workers, and when they say they can’t, they’re obviously lying. That’s just so much money!

This overzealous rhetoric is reflected in SLAM’s attempts to associate the financial recklessness of the international crisis with the endowment’s decline. This must be a surprise to the big bad Harvard Management Company, which invested just two percent of the endowment in high-yield bonds, the likely culprits of the crisis. SLAM is the one rousing hysteria. To counteract Harvard’s “logic of fear”, SLAM proposes a “logic of courage and creativity,” which apparently means the logic of stomping in front of the Science Center and shouting creatively irrational slogans.

No organization should hire more employees than it needs, especially not one like Harvard, funded by people who expect their money to go towards education, not Guatemalan remittances. Harvard does not exist to create unnecessary jobs; nor do any other institutions or corporations, with the exception of the federal government and teachers’ unions. Out of the 626 people who have signed SLAM’s petition, not one of them was affiliated with the Business School, i.e. the only place at Harvard where people actually know how to run organizations efficiently. Coincidence? Well, probably.

As an academic institution, Harvard should be laying off workers if it cannot afford them. If they can lay off enough workers so that they unfreeze faculty hiring (and maybe even bring back free coffee in the Barker Center), then they should. As PhDs and post-docs enter the job market while Harvard is not hiring, the University is missing out on the next generation of talented academics. Harvard should lay off as many extraneous workers as it reasonably can, in order to hire more faculty. If Harvard can lay off five janitors so that the Economics Department can bring back junior seminars, or trade two security guards for the next Stephen Greenblatt, then it should. Economic efficiencies are not intrinsically noble, but Harvard does a disservice to its students and faculty if it ignores them in favor of silly demands of idealistic students.

Moreover, while I will not preclude exceptions, the vast majority of those students involved in SLAM are not genuinely interested in the causes they seek to promote. Some Harvard students are determined to devote their lives to fighting social injustice and working in solidarity with the poor, for which they ought to be commended. It still remains rather unfortunate that they take advantage of the fact that they, as “stakeholders” in Harvard, feel like Harvard’s endowment is a tool they can wield in support of any ephemeral social cause. But at least they genuinely care.

The rest are largely concerned with assuaging their own bourgeois guilt, a product of the fact that, if they’re not yet complicit in the sort of absurdities that produced the current financial crisis, they probably want to be. When so many students aspire to jobs that pay far more than any job at Harvard, I try to be understanding: I get it—when you’ve spent your time in college pursuing IOP fellowships and comping Harvard College Consulting Group, it probably is hard to feel like you’ve made any meaningful contribution to Harvard or the world. But signing a poorly reasoned petition and attending a Festival for Worker Justice is a fairly pathetic way to take a stab at it. But unfortunately, Harvard’s cursus honorum of unfettered ambition and resume worship is not easily traveled by true Good Samaritans.

Harvard exists to provide a quality education. The decline in Harvard’s endowment as well as its financial aid obligations mean that it must pare some of its excesses. Thankfully, these excesses apparently do not yet include the wine at the Classics Department luncheons. But in order to fulfill its mission of “the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences,” Harvard must compromise. SLAM’s campaign has provided poor recommendations to the University on how it ought to proceed.